But tobacco has a moral history which has never yet been written; nor do I flatter myself that I am competent to write it, but I will do what I can to make a beginning.
Religion, for its full development, demands all our mental powers. We have already seen that this drug impairs them. It accordingly must follow, that, in proportion to their derangement, will be the defect of their action; so that, in this sense, it may be said with truth, that the person that uses tobacco, cannot be as good a Christian as he could be without it.
The ceaseless action of this stimulant upon the nerves, not only excites but irritates them. From this arises the fretfulness and peevishness of many persons, which they set down to the credit of nervous irritability; as though this, like some hereditary disease, owed its origin to some cause beyond their control. It is true, the peevishness and irritability of such persons arise from nervous affections; but that affection is not, as the coroners sometimes say of the death, the cause of which they are called to determine, "By the visitation of God;" the affliction of these people is not "by the visitation of God," but it arises from the gratification of their own vitiated appetites, it is the result of their own self-poisoning.
Of this there is a certain degree of consciousness with most persons who use the "weed;" hence all, or nearly all of them have some malady which can only be cured by it, some ailment which it most astonishingly relieves, while the true reason, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases in a thousand is, the person loves its effects. The disease is the pretense, the appetite is the fact. The disease is the excuse for the appetite or the habit, and is used to lull the moral sense. You seldom meet a person addicted to the habit of tobacco, who does not find it necessary to excuse him or herself for it. To my mind, this is a clear indication that such persons feel that they are doing something wrong. What is that wrong? It is not slander, theft, arson or murder; it does not appear so much a wrong against society, and yet, in the estimation of such persons, an excuse is needed. But the inquiry still presses us, why? Why, because there is something within which is constantly whispering, you are wrong. With such a man, in his meditations on the subject of his duty to himself, his neighbors, and his God, his tobacco will somehow always get between him and his best views on these subjects, while his happiness is greatly diminished by the vivid impression that his indulgence is wrong. He goes to his closet and prays for help to deny himself and take up every cross, and he has a vision of tobacco. He kneels at the altar to pray for some poor penitent, he exhorts the trembling sinner to renounce everything, to yield all for religion, to give up property, children, wife, and even his own life; he tells him that religion is better than all, that for it he should count everything as "dung and dross that he might win Christ"—he opens his mouth to pray for his poor stricken brother, when conscience, seeing that he is taken in his own argument, as in secret, cries to his soul, in a voice that startles him, "where is your TOBACCO?" And this sense of self-indulgence constantly cripples the powers of the Christian. It disarms him at the "throne of grace"—it destroys his confidence before God. When asking for purity of heart, or any other blessing from God, his confidence is lessened by what he feels of the weight of this outward pollution. When pleading for mental and moral discipline, he is at once confounded by the inquiry: "If you have not the moral courage to meet and vanquish a needless self-indulgence, a mere claim upon your appetite, how can you expect to succeed in matters claiming the highest efforts of the mind?—matters which sometimes demand resolutions, equal to the sacrifice of a right eye, or a right hand?" In this way, the victim of this drug is met at every step: his darling habit has first weakened him, making him nearly powerless, and then it stands over him like Bunyan’s "Giant Despair," a huge tormentor. He is affected with debility, irritability, excitability, and a great host of inabilities, with all these consequences. He may have the sympathy of his friends—they may commiserate his case, they call him unfortunate, they say something about a "mysterious Providence"—but after all, he is half maddened by the impression, distinct as any conscience ever made, and from which he finds it impossible to rid himself, that, instead of such kindness and commiseration, he deserves their reproach. For, what they term a misfortune is the result of his own deliberate, voluntary act, done in the face of light, and of clear and biting convictions—tobacco, darling tobacco, has done it all! He feels just as any man under the circumstances must feel—degraded and mean before man and his Maker. He loathes himself, and is without self-respect or self-confidence.
Let him abandon the habit for a little time, and he feels worse and worse; and as in the case with the poor drunkard, so with the victim of tobacco, he feels an almost irresistible drawing toward the tyrant which has so long held him captive. In a word, he has the delirium tremens, and feels that his only relief from the torturing vision of his brain, will be to sell himself, soul and body, to this imperious appetite. Under such an influence, what person can enjoy religion as well with as without it?—Selected.