“Let the earth bring
forth grass, the herb yielding
seed.” GEN.
i: 11.
The two first born of our earth were
the grass-blade and the herb. They preceded the
brute creation and the human family the
grass for the animal creation, the herb for human
service. The cattle came and took possession
of their inheritance, the grass-blade; man came and
took possession of his inheritance, the herb.
We have the herb for food as in case of hunger, for
narcotic as in case of insomnia, for anodyne as in
case of paroxysm, for stimulant as when the pulses
flag under the weight of disease. The caterer
comes and takes the herb and presents it in all styles
of delicacy. The physician comes and takes the
herb and compounds it for physical recuperation.
Millions of people come and take the herb for ruinous
physical and intellectual delectation. The herb,
which was divinely created, and for good purposes,
has often been degraded for bad results. There
is a useful and a baneful employment of the herbaceous
kingdom.
There sprung up in Yucatan of this
continent an herb that has bewitched the world.
In the fifteenth century it crossed the Atlantic Ocean
and captured Spain. Afterward it captured Portugal.
Then the French embassadors took it to Paris, and
it captured the French Empire. Then Walter Raleigh
took it to London, and it captured Great Britain.
Nicotiana, ascribed to that genus by the botanists,
but we all know it is the exhilarating, elevating,
emparadising, nerve-shattering, dyspepsia-breeding,
health-destroying tobacco. I shall not in my
remarks be offensively personal, because you all use
it, or nearly all! I know by experience how it
soothes and roseates the world, and kindles sociality,
and I also know some of its baleful results.
I was its slave, and by the grace of God I have become
its conqueror. Tens of thousands of people have
been asking the question during the past two months,
asking it with great pathos and great earnestness:
“Does the use of tobacco produce cancerous and
other troubles?” I shall not answer the question
in regard to any particular case, but shall deal with
the subject in a more general way.
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.
I stand here to-day in the presence
of a vast multitude of young people who are forming
their habits. Between seventeen and twenty-five
years of age a great many young men get on them habits
in the use of tobacco that they never get over.
Let me say to all my young friends, you can not afford
to smoke, you can not afford to chew. You either
take very good tobacco, or you take very cheap tobacco.
If it is cheap, I will tell you why it is cheap.
It is made of burdock, and lampblack, and sawdust,
and colt’s-foot, and plantain leaves, and fuller’s
earth, and salt, and alum, and lime, and a little tobacco,
and you can not afford to put such a mess as that in
your mouth. But if you use expensive tobacco,
do you not think it would be better for you to take
that amount of money which you are now expending for
this herb, and which you will expend during the course
of your life if you keep the habit up, and with it
buy a splendid farm and make the afternoon and the
evening of your life comfortable?
There are young men whose life is
going out inch by inch from cigarettes. Now,
do you not think it would be well for you to listen
to the testimony of a merchant of New York, who said
this: “In early life I smoked six cigars
a day at six and a half cents each. They averaged
that. I thought to myself one day, I’ll
just put aside all I consume in cigars and all I would
consume if I keep on in the habit, and I’ll
see what it will come to by compound interest.”
And he gives this tremendous statistic: “Last
July completed thirty-nine years since, by the grace
of God, I was emancipated from the filthy habit, and
the saving amounted to the enormous sum of $29,102.03
by compound interest. We lived in the city, but
the children, who had learned something of the enjoyment
of country life from their annual visits to their
grandparents, longed for a home among the green fields.
I found a very pleasant place in the country for sale.
The cigar money came into requisition, and I found
it amounted to a sufficient sum to purchase the place,
and it is mine. Now, boys, you take your choice.
Smoking without a home, or a home without smoking.”
This is common sense as well as religion.
I must say a word to my friends who
smoke the best tobacco, and who could stop at any
time. What is your Christian influence in this
respect? What is your influence upon young men?
Do you not think it would be better for you to exercise
a little self-denial! People wondered why George
Briggs, Governor of Massachusetts, wore a cravat but
no collar. “Oh,” they said, “it
is an absurd eccentricity.” This was the
history of the cravat without any collar: For
many years before he had been talking with an inebriate,
trying to persuade him to give up the habit of drinking
and he said to the inebriate, “Your habit is
entirely unnecessary.” “Ah!”
replied the inebriate, “we do a great many things
that are not necessary. It isn’t necessary
that you should have that collar.” “Well,”
said Mr. Briggs, “I’ll never wear a collar
again if you will stop drinking.” “Agreed,”
said the other. They joined hands in a pledge
that they kept for twenty years kept until
death. That is magnificent. That is Gospel,
practical Gospel, worthy of George Briggs, worthy
of you. Self-denial for others. Subtraction
from our advantage that there may be an addition to
somebody else’s advantage.
But what I have said has been chiefly
appropriate for men. Now my subject widens and
shall be appropriate for both sexes. In all ages
of the world there has been a search for some herb
or flower that would stimulate lethargy and compose
grief. Among the ancient Greeks and Egyptians
they found something they called nepenthe, and the
Theban women knew how to compound it. If a person
should chew a few of those leaves his grief would
be immediately whelmed with hilarity. Nepenthe
passed out from the consideration of the world and
then came hasheesh, which is from the Indian hemp.
It is manufactured from the flowers at the top.
The workman with leathern apparel walks through the
field and the exudation of the plants adheres to the
leathern garments, and then the man comes out and
scrapes off this exudation, and it is mixed with aromatics
and becomes an intoxicant that has brutalized whole
nations. Its first effect is sight, spectacle
glorious and grand beyond all description, but afterward
it pulls down body, mind, and soul into anguish.
I knew one of the most brilliant men
of our time. His appearance in a newspaper column,
or a book, or a magazine was an enchantment. In
the course of a half hour he could produce more wit
and more valuable information than any man I ever
heard talk. But he chewed hasheesh. He first
took it out of curiosity to see whether the power said
to be attached really existed. He took it.
He got under the power of it. He tried to break
loose. He put his hand in the cockatrice’s
den to see whether it would bite, and he found out
to his own undoing. His friends gathered around
and tried to save him, but he could not be saved.
The father, a minister of the Gospel, prayed with him
and counseled him, and out of a comparatively small
salary employed the first medical advice of New York,
Philadelphia, Edinburgh, Paris, London, and Berlin,
for he was his only son. No help came. First
his body gave way in pangs and convulsions of suffering.
Then his mind gave way and he became a raving maniac.
Then his soul went out blaspheming God into a starless
eternity. He died at thirty years of age.
Behold the work of accursed hasheesh.
But I must put my emphasis upon the
use of opium. It is made from the white poppy.
It is not a new discovery. Three hundred years
before Christ we read of it; but it was not until
the seventh century that it took up its march of death,
and, passing out of the curative and the medicinal,
through smoking and mastication it has become the curse
of nations. In 1861 there were imported into
this country one hundred and seven thousand pounds
of opium. In 1880, nineteen years after, there
were imported five hundred and thirty thousand pounds
of opium. In 1876 there were in this country
two hundred and twenty-five thousand opium-consumers.
Now, it is estimated there are in the United States
to-day six hundred thousand victims of opium.
It is appalling.
We do not know why some families do
not get on. There is something mysterious about
them. The opium habit is so stealthy, it is so
deceitful, and it is so deathful, you can cure a hundred
men of strong drink where you can cure one opium-eater.
I have knelt down in this very church
by those who were elegant in apparel, and elegant
in appearance, and from the depths of their souls
and from the depths of my soul, we cried out for God’s
rescue. Somehow it did not come. In many
a household only the physician and pastor know it the
physician called in for physical relief, the pastor
called in for spiritual relief, and they both fail.
The physician confesses his defeat, the minister of
religion confesses his defeat, for somehow God does
not seem to hear a prayer offered for an opium-eater.
His grace is infinite, and I have been told there are
cases of reformation. I never saw one. I
say this not to wound the feelings of any who may
feel this awful grip, but to utter a potent warning
that you stand back from that gate of hell. Oh,
man, oh, woman, tampering with this great evil, have
you fallen back on this as a permanent resource because
of some physical distress or mental anguish?
Better stop. The ecstasies do not pay for the
horrors. The Paradise is followed too soon by
the Pandemonium. Morphia, a blessing of God for
the relief of sudden pang and of acute dementia, misappropriated
and never intended for permanent use.
It is not merely the barbaric fanatics
that are taken down by it. Did you ever read
De Quincey’s “Confessions of an Opium-Eater?”
He says that during the first ten years the habit
handed to him all the keys of Paradise, but it would
take something as mighty as De Quincey’s pen
to describe the consequent horrors. There is nothing
that I have ever read about the tortures of the damned
that seemed more horrible than those which De Quincey
says he suffered. Samuel Taylor Coleridge first
conquered the world with his exquisite pen, and then
was conquered by opium. The most brilliant, the
most eloquent lawyer of the nineteenth century went
down under its power, and there is a vast multitude
of men and women but more women than men who
are going into the dungeon of that awful incarceration.
The worst thing about it is, it takes
advantage of one’s weakness. De Quincey
says: “I got to be an opium-eater on account
of my rheumatism.” Coleridge says:
“I got to be an opium-eater on account of my
sleeplessness.” For what are you taking
it? For God’s sake do not take it long.
The wealthiest, the grandest families going down under
its power. Twenty-five thousand victims of opium
in Chicago. Twenty-five thousand victims of opium
in St. Louis, and, according to that average, seventy-five
thousand victims of opium in New York and Brooklyn.
The clerk of a drug store says:
“I can tell them when they come in; there is
something about their complexion, something about their
manner, something about the look of their eyes that
shows they are victims.” Some in the struggle
to get away from it try chloral. Whole tons of
chloral manufactured in Germany every year. Baron
Liebig says he knows one chemist in Germany who manufactures
a half ton of chloral every week. Beware of hydrate
of chloral. It is coming on with mighty tread
to curse these cities. But I am chiefly under
this head speaking of the morphine. The devil
of morphia is going to be in this country, in my opinion,
mightier than the devil of alcohol. By the power
of the Christian pulpit, by the power of the Christianized
printing-press, by the power of the Lord God Almighty,
all these evils are going to be extirpated all,
all, and you have a work in regard to that, and I
have a work. But what we do we had better do right
away. The clock ticks now, and we hear it; after
awhile the clock will tick and we will not hear it.
I sat at a country fireside, and I
saw the fire kindle and blaze, and go out. I
sat long enough at that fireside to get a good many
practical reflections, and I said: “That
is like human life, that fire on the hearth.”
We put on the fagots and they blaze up, and out,
and on, and the whole room is filled with the light,
gay of sparkle, gay of flash, gay of crackle.
Emblem of boyhood. Now the fire intensifies.
Now the flame reddens into coals. Now the heat
is becoming more and more intense, and the more it
is stirred the redder is the coal. Now with one
sweep of flame it cleaves the way, and all the hearth
glows with the intensity. Emblem of full manhood.
Now the coals begin to whiten. Now the heat lessens.
Now the flickering shadows die along the wall.
Now the fagots fall apart. Now the household
hover over the expiring embers. Now the last
breath of smoke is lost in the chimney. The fire
is out. Shovel up the white remains. Ashes!
Ashes!