Tobacco Bondage, and Freedom.
“If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” “And the truth shall make you free.” John 8:36, 32. But are tobacco smokers and chewers free?—Alas, there are but very few forms of bondage so galling as that of the tobacco consumer. How many of them often make the sad confession, “I would give up the habit if I could”! Is this gospel freedom? Is this liberty from enslaving habits?—Verily not. An old man, who had borne an irreproachable character up to the age of seventy-two, was lately brought before one of the tribunals of Paris for stealing a piece of lead worth eight cents. He admitted that he was wholly without means, and for the first time in his life knew not where to find a single sous; but it was not hunger that drove him to steal. After considerable questioning on the part of the judge as to what could be stronger than hunger, he confessed it was tobacco for his pipe. “Tobacco, monsieur judge!” said he, growing violent. “I have the misery to be a hopeless smoker! I smoke at waking; I smoke while eating; I can not sleep without smoking till the pipe falls from my mouth. Tobacco costs me six cents a day. When I have none, I am frantic. I can not work, nor sleep, nor eat. I go from place to place raging like a mad dog. The day I stole the lead, I had been without tobacco twelve hours. I searched the day through for an acquaintance of whom I could beg a pipeful. I could not, and resorted to crime as a less evil than I was enduring. The need was stronger than I.” Said a young man, “I believe my pipe does me harm; I feel it is injuring me; but were I certain that it would curtail my life by fifteen years, I could not give it up.” How distressing to hear such a statement from a free-born son of Britain! “I am a slave to tobacco,” says a lawyer, “and I will give a hundred dollars to be told how to get rid of it without killing me.” “I have resolved to be free a thousand times,” says another, “but I am still a slave, a hopeless slave.” A deacon on his death-bed made the following painful statement: “I thank God that, as my last sickness has now come, I shall get rid of my hankerings for tobacco.” The Rev. George Trask writes:— “I have known men to dream and rage about tobacco as madmen, when deprived of it. I have known men so enslaved that use it they would in parlors, in churches, in temperance meetings, in defiance of all remonstrance, in defiance of all decency. And one lodge of the Sons of Temperance(?), as I certainly know, passed a resolution that they would not lay aside their tobacco even during the hour they were convened for temperance purposes. I have known a temperance lecturer of great distinction positively refuse to lecture until he had been furnished with a pipe of tobacco to screw his nerves up to the point of eloquence. I know an excellent clergyman who assured me that he had sometimes wept like a child when putting a quid of tobacco in his mouth, under a sense of his degradation and bondage to this filthy habit. I saw a man who told me that tobacco was the dearest thing he had on earth, dearer than wife, child, church, or state.”—Rev. Albert Sims.