Tobacco | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 9, 1866

Tobacco.

THE following excerpt is from the trenchant pen of the author of "Home Thrusts," D. F. Newton. It is right to the point, and every word true. It is selected for the benefit of certain Seventh-day Adventists, who will persist in defiling themselves, and grieving the church, with the effluvia of that disgusting narcotic—tobacco. O God, when will Israel become holy.

G. W. A.

What an evil! what a nuisance! what a plague! what a leprosy it is to have a smoking man or woman about the house or in the house. It's smoke in the morning, smoke at noon, smoke at night, smoke rising up, lying down, going out, coming in—it's smoke, smoke, all the time! Everything is smoked up. The kitchen is smoked up, the parlors, the bedrooms, the cellars, the garrets, the out-houses, the wardrobe—every particle of costume and furniture is more or less impregnated by this abominable Indian weed. God's pure air is poisoned and stenchified. Every family and every member in the family is compelled to inhale

the poisonous effluvia to gratify this accursed lust of the flesh. Tobacco penetrates every nook and corner. It's one of the most powerful, baneful, penetrating narcotics that ever visited God's earth. Then look at the most dingy, dumpish, stupid sottishness of the smoker, with his rotten, gummed-up pipe or cigar in his mouth, night and day, puffing his very soul out, regardless of consequences, to gratify an unnatural, depraved appetite, offending the whole community. Behold the man, his mouth, his lips, his teeth, his whole contour—his sallow, dumpish, baconized appearance! And oh! oh! what a breath, what a breath! Tell it not; write it not. Run! run for your life! Friend, smoking friend, have mercy, do. If you have no mercy on yourself, if you are determined to smoke your own life out, sear your conscience harder than the nether millstone, and go down to the grave a sot, do have pity on your neighbors. Paul said he would not even eat meat while the world stood, if it caused his brother to offend. Not so with tobacco smokers:

With impudence they oft presume To vex all persons in the room, Who can't endure tobacco fume, And they must bear this wretched doom.

Do not excuse yourself by saying that some great and good men use tobacco. The great and good men who do so are in danger of sinking into very little and very wicked men before they die.

Tobacco and rum! What twin brothers; what mighty agents of Satan. What a large share of American people they are destroying. I love my children; and because I love them, I had rather bury them than see them defile themselves with rum or tobacco.

As Paul said to Timothy, so say I to you, "Keep thyself pure." Be clean in your person, and be clean in your heart. But, depend upon it, you can be neither if you use tobacco.

It costs more than education or religion, the army or navy. It costs England and America a sum sufficient to support 50,000 ministers with salaries of $1000 per year; or more than 100,000 missionaries. The students in one college pay more than six thousand dollars for cigars every year. It tends to idleness, poverty, strong drink, and the whole family of vices. It tends to debility, dyspepsia, palsy, cancers, insanity, delirium tremens, and sudden deaths. It weaves a winding sheet around 20,000 in our land every year.