IS TOBACCO USING SIN?

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Nov 7, 1892

IS TOBACCO USING SIN?

"DRINKING liquor is sin, but smoking is not." A Christian worker made this assertion one day in conversation about narcotics and stimulants.

Some years ago Dr. Woods, a celebrated physician in the United States, said: "The active or poisonous principle of tobacco is one of the most virulent poisons known, and a drop of it in a state of concentrated solution is sufficient to destroy a dog, and birds perish as they approach a tub containing it."

Wandering over to France and searching into records of wisdom, we find M. Joly, in addressing the Academy of Science, gives this terrible warning: "The increase of lunacy keeps pace with the increase in the revenue of tobacco, and the immoderate use of the pipe produces a weakness of the brain and the spinal marrow, which causes madness."

Coming home to Canada we listen with marked attention to Mrs. Elizabeth Bradley, of England, as she gives her evidence before the Ontario Prison Reform Commissioners in Hamilton: "My own conviction is that the use of tobacco has a terribly demoralizing effect, far more so than is generally understood. Some young ladies were engaged in rescuing the daughters of professional men, and there came under their attention the daughter of a clergyman that was in connection with our work in London, England. There seemed here to be such a positive tendency to vice that we thought there was some other cause than the apparent temptation to which she was subjected. On inquiring we found that there had been great degeneracy in her ancestry. Her grandfather and father had been inveterate smokers. We set physicians to study this. My own conviction is that girls and boys who have come from a stock of this kind have a predilection to sensual vice. They are weak in that direction, and the result is a terrible increase in vice of this kind."

I knew one woman who taught her children to despise smokers and sellers of tobacco. They, in turn, by God's blessing, converted their father to her views. He began preaching to his class in Sabbath school, and one boy said laughingly to another, "Why, our minister smokes; papa has to order the very best brand of tobacco for him."

The words were reported to the teacher, and he went to the minister and laid the matter before him. I am glad to say that that minister decided to give up the habit, although his wife was much opposed to his doing so. She said that his pipe soothed him so much and was such a comfort to her husband, she hated to see him give it up.

Can we still consider it no sin to smoke when we remember how selfish men and boys become who use tobacco, and also the extravagance it incurs, and, lastly, worst of all, ever remember that the use of one narcotic often leads to the use of others? "Tobacco prepares the way for alcohol, alcohol for opium."

Mothers, watch your little boys; examine their mouths and see to it that on their way to and from school they are not learning to smoke by picking up the stumps of cigars they find on the sidewalks. I know of children who are now smokers from this practice. —Woman's Journal, Ottawa, Canada.