DID CHRIST ARGUE FOR TOBACCO?
By Uriah Smith
PETER speaks of some who wrest the Scripture to their own destruction; and if the following is not a case of this kind, it would be difficult to find one at the present day. A professed Sabbath-keeper persists in the use of tobacco, and endeavors to justify himself in his course by these words of our Saviour: "Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth the man." Matt. xv, 11. Does the individual understand what he is doing by thus using this language? Does he really suppose that Christ was here laying down a principle calculated to justify men in the indulgence of any unnatural, filthy, and hurtful appetite they might see fit to contract? If not, if this was not the design of the language, then no one has a right to use it for such a purpose; but if any one should contend that this was its design, and it can be shown elsewhere in the Scriptures that these things are sin, then he makes Christ emphatically the minister of sin, and exposes himself to the denunciation of the apostle against such a course. But let us try the above claim a little further. If it can be urged in defense of tobacco, it can be also in reference to any other thing that goeth in at the mouth. Try it then in the case of rum, brandy, and all other intoxicating drinks, by which men make themselves sots and drunkards. These things go in at the mouth;30consequently on the above-named principle, do not defile the man; therefore drunkenness is no sin, and there is no wrong in being a drunkard. While no one would probably go so far as to argue in this manner, it may be well to mention here the express declaration of scripture which says that neither "thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God." 1 Cor. vi, 10. It is an acknowledged principle that the greater offense must include all the less of the same kind; and when the Bible forbids drunkenness with intoxicating drinks as a sin, it forbids everything which partakes in the smallest degree of the same nature. Now can the advocates of tobacco tell us in what respect the appetite for tobacco differs from that for rum or brandy? They are both of them unnatural and acquired; both the articles are stimulating, and not only useless, but positively injurious. If one is expressly forbidden, the other is no less so. To use then the language of the Saviour in defense of the one or the other is glaringly to wrest and pervert it. What then is the meaning of the Saviour's words? If they can not be taken in this sense, what were they designed to teach? The context will show. The circumstance which called them forth was the accusation of the Jews against the disciples because they ate with unwashed hands. The Jews, from a tradition of the elders, were scrupulously particular in this respect. Before eating they would wash their hands, just as they would filter their wine to strain out a gnat, lest they should swallow a particle of something that was forbidden in their law as unclean. Christ tells them that they need not be thus scrupulous; for it is not that which goeth into the mouth as food that defiles the man. The language may be legitimately used as an argument against the previously existing distinction of meats which was to perish when the middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile was swept away; but to use it in defense of the gratification of a perverted appetite, to make the Saviour, the great teacher of righteousness and pattern of purity, stand up and plead for the practise among men, of fleshly and sinful lusts, if not the sin of blasphemy itself, can be nothing less than bordering thereon. U. S.