Tobacco a Poison by T. De Witt Talmage

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 25, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 25.

Tobacco a Poison.

By T. De Witt Talmage

“Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed.” Gen. 1:11.

THE first born of earth were the grass blade and the herb. They preceded the brute-creation and the human family—the grass for animal life, the herb for human service. The cattle took possession of their inheritance, the grass blade; and man took possession of his inheritance, the herb. This herb we have for food in case of hunger, for narcotic in case of insomnia, for anodyne under paroxysm of pain, or for stimulus when the pulses flag under the weight of disease. The caterer takes the herb and serves it up in all delicacies. The physician takes the herb and compounds it for physical recuperation. Millions of the human race take it for ruinous delectation of body and mind. The herb, divinely created and for good purposes, in cases without number is prostituted for evil results.

There is a lawful and unlawful use of the herbaceous kingdom. There sprang up in Yucatan, on this continent, an herb, which has bewitched the world. It crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the fifteenth century, and captured Spain; then it captured Portugal, and then the French ambassadors took it to Paris, and it captured the French Empire. Then Walter Raleigh introduced it into England. The botanists ascribe it to the genus nicotiana; but you all know it as the inspiring, the elevating, the radiating, the nerve-shattering, the dyspepsia-breeding, the health-destroying tobacco.

I shall not be offensively personal while I speak on this subject, because you all use it, or nearly all. Indeed I know from personal experience how it soothes and roseates the world, and kindles sociality, and I know what are its baleful results. I know what it is to be its slave; and, thank God, I know what it is to be its conqueror. I have no expectation that I will persuade the great masses of you to change your habits upon this subject; but I thought I might help you in some advice to your children.

You say: “Didn’t God make tobacco?” Oh, yes. You say: “Isn’t God good?” Oh, yes. You say: “Then God, when he created tobacco, must have created it for some good purpose.” Oh, yes. It is good for a great many things—tobacco is. It is good to kill moths in the wardrobe and tick in sheep, and to strangulate all kinds of vermin, and to fumigate pestiferous places, and like all other poisons, God created it for some particular use. So he did henbane, so nux vomica, so copperas, so belladonna, so all those poisons which he directly created, or had man to extract.

But the same God who made the poisons also created us with common sense to know how to use them, and how not to use them. “Oh!” say some of my friends, “don’t people use it without seeming harm to themselves, and are there not cases of plethora which absolutely need this depletion?” Oh, yes. Skillful and prudent physicians have sometimes prescribed it, just as they sometimes prescribe arsenic; and they prescribe it well. There can be no doubt about its being poison. There was a case reported in which a little child lay upon its mother’s lap and a drop from her pipe fell on the child’s lip, and it went into convulsions and into death.—T. De Witt Talmage, D. D.