You say to me, "Did God not create tobacco?" Yes. You say to me, "Is not God good?" Yes. Well, then, you say, "If God is good and he created tobacco, He must have created it for some good purpose." Yes, your logic is complete. But God created the common sense at the same time, by which we are to know how to use a poison and how not to use it. God created that just as He created henbane and nux vomica and copperas and belladonna and all other poisons, whether directly created by Himself or extracted by man.
That it is a poison no man of common sense will deny. A case was reported where a little child lay upon its mother's lap and one drop fell from a pipe to the child's lip, and it went into convulsions and into death. But you say, "Haven't people lived on in complete use of it to old age?" Oh, yes; just as I have seen inebriates seventy years old. In Boston, years ago, there was a meeting in which there were several centenarians, and they were giving their experience, and one centenarian said that he had lived over a hundred years, and that he ascribed it to the fact that he had refrained from the use of intoxicating liquors. Right after him another centenarian said he had lived over a hundred years, and he ascribed it to the fact that for the last fifty years he had hardly seen a sober moment. It is an amazing thing how many outrages men may commit upon their physical system and yet live on. In the case of the man of the jug he lived on because his body was pickled. In the case of the man of the pipe, he lived on because his body turned into smoked liver!
But are there no truths to be uttered in regard to this great evil? What is the advice to be given to the multitude of young people who hear me this day? What is the advice you are going to give to your children?
First of all, we must advise them to abstain from the use of tobacco because all the medical fraternity of the United States and Great Britain agree in ascribing to this habit terrific unhealth. The men whose life-time work is the study of the science of health say so, and shall I set up my opinion against theirs? Dr. Agnew, Dr. Olcott, Dr. Barnes, Dr. Rush, Dr. Mott, Dr. Harvey, Dr. Hosack—all the doctors, allopathic, homeopathic, hydropathic, eclectic, denounce the habit as a matter of unhealth. A distinguished physician declared he considered the use of tobacco caused seventy different styles of disease, and he says: "Of all the cases of cancer in the mouth that have come under my observation, almost in every case it has been ascribed to tobacco."
The united testimony of all physicians is that it depresses the nervous system, that it takes away twenty-five per cent. of the physical vigor of this generation, and that it goes on as the years multiply and, damaging this generation with accumulated curse, it strikes other centuries. And if it is so deleterious to the body, how much more destructive to the mind. An eminent physician, who was the superintendent of the insane asylum at Northampton, Massachusetts, says: "Fully one half the patients we get in our asylum have lost their intellect through the use of tobacco." If it is such a bad thing to injure the body, what a bad thing, what a worse thing it is to injure the mind, and any man of common sense knows that tobacco attacks the nervous system, and everybody knows that the nervous system attacks the mind.
Besides that, all reformers will tell you that the use of tobacco creates an unnatural thirst, and it is the cause of drunkenness in America to-day more than anything else. In all cases where you find men taking strong drink you find they use tobacco. There are men who use tobacco who do not take strong drink, but all who use strong drink use tobacco, and that shows beyond controversy there is an affinity between the two products. There are reformers here to-day who will testify to you it is impossible for a man to reform from taking strong drink until he quits tobacco. In many of the cases where men have been reformed from strong drink and have gone back to their cups, they have testified that they first touched tobacco and then they surrendered to intoxicants.
I say in the presence of this assemblage to-day, in which there are many physicians—and they know that what I say is true on the subject—that the pathway to the drunkard's grave and the drunkard's hell is strewn thick with tobacco-leaves. What has been the testimony on this subject? Is this a mere statement of a preacher whose business it is to talk morals, or is the testimony of the world just as emphatic? What did Benjamin Franklin say? "I never saw a well man in the exercise of common sense who would say that tobacco did him any good." What did Thomas Jefferson say? Certainly he is good authority. He says in regard to the culture of tobacco, "It is a culture productive of infinite wretchdness." What did Horace Greeley say of it? "It is a profane stench." What did Daniel Webster say of it? "If those men must smoke, let them take the horse-shed!" One reason why the habit goes on from destruction to destruction is that so many ministers of the gospel take it. They smoke themselves into bronchitis, and then the dear people have to send them to Europe to get them restored from exhausting religious services! They smoke until the nervous system is shattered. They smoke themselves to death. I could mention the names of five distinguished clergymen who died of cancer of the mouth, and the doctor said, in every case, it was the result of tobacco. The tombstone of many a minister of religion has been covered all over with handsome eulogy, when, if the true epitaph had been written, it would have said: "Here lies a man killed by too much cavendish!" They smoke until the world is blue, and their theology is blue, and everything is blue. How can a man stand in the pulpit and preach on the subject of temperance when he is indulging such a habit as that? I have seen a cuspadore in a pulpit into which the holy man dropped his cud before he got up to read about "blessed are the pure in heart," and to read about the rolling of sin as a sweet morsel under the tongue, and to read about the unclean animals in Leviticus that chewed the cud.
About sixty-five years ago a student at Andover Theological Seminary graduated into the ministry. He had an eloquence and a magnetism which sent him to the front. Nothing could stand before him. But in a few months he was put in an insane asylum, and the physician said tobacco was the cause of the disaster. It was the custom in those days to give a portion of tobacco to every patient in the asylum. Nearly twenty years passed along, and that man was walking the floor of his cell in the asylum, when his reason returned, and he saw the situation, and he took the tobacco from his mouth and threw it against the iron gate of the place in which he was confined, and he said: "What brought me here? What keeps me here? Tobacco! tobacco! God forgive me, God help me, and I will never use it again." He was fully restored to reason, came forth, preached the Gospel of Christ for some ten years, and then went into everlasting blessedness.
There are ministers of religion now in this country who are dying by inches, and they do not know what is the matter with them. They are being killed by tobacco. They are despoiling their influence through tobacco. They are malodorous with tobacco. I could give one paragraph of history, and that would be my own experience. It took ten cigars to make one sermon, and I got very nervous, and I awakened one day to see what an outrage I was committing upon my health by the use of tobacco. I was about to change settlement, and a generous tobacconist of Philadelphia told me if I would come to Philadelphia and be his pastor he would give me all the cigars I wanted for nothing all the rest of my life. I halted. I said to myself, "If I smoke more than I ought to now in these war times, and when my salary is small, what would I do if I had gratuitous and unlimited supply?" Then and there, twenty-four years ago, I quit once and forever. It made a new man of me. Much of the time the world looked blue before that, because I was looking through tobacco smoke. Ever since the world has been full of sunshine, and though I have done as much work as any one of my age, God has blessed me, it seems to me, with the best health that a man ever had.
I say that no minister of religion can afford to smoke. Put in my hand all the money expended by Christian men in Brooklyn for tobacco, and I will support three orphan asylums as well and as grandly as the three great orphan asylums already established. Put into my hand the money spent by the Christians of America for tobacco, and I will clothe, shelter, and feed all the suffering poor of the continent. The American Church gives a million dollars a year for the salvation of the heathen, and American Christians smoke five million dollars' worth of tobacco.