The tobacco curse: with weighty reasons why Christians should abstain from it / by Silas Henn.

  • Henn, Silas.
Date:
[1880?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The tobacco curse: with weighty reasons why Christians should abstain from it / by Silas Henn. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    5/32 (page 5)
    down the custom of smoking. So we are told that the officers were given power in some of the towns to take into custody any lad not sixteen years old, who was found upon the streets indulging himself in the use of tobacco. The penalty for this indulgence was to be fine and imprisonment. Smoking is a violation of nature’s laws, and therefore must be prejudicial to health. The human system resists it when it is first taken into it; the common instincts are against it. Food and drink are taken to naturally, because these are designed by God to sustain life; but this is not so with the narcotic weed. It is distasteful and sickening, and, to use a common expression, persons have to learn to smoke; they have to master it, and when they have mastered it and formed the habit, then by degrees it masters them and they become slaves to it. Thus to violate the laws of our being is sin. It is wrong morally, because it is in direct opposition to nature’s laws. The nausea realized at first in endeavouring to form the smoking habit, is evidence that the habit is abnormal. There is nothing contrary to nature in eating a piece of bread, or an apple, or some figs or dates or grapes, or in drinking a glass of milk or water. These things, if there is health, do not produce nausea. Then why does the narcotic weed when it is first taken ? The only true answer is because it is not in harmony with nature; it is contrary to the natural appetites and instincts. And sad as it may seem, ministers as well as others,— ministers who have greater opportunities of reading and study, and learning the ill effects of tobacco on the human system,—suffer in their health and shorten their lives by the use of the filthy weed. Bishop Simpson says, “ For persons of nervous organizations, as ministers usually are, it is an unmixed evil. It gives temporary tension, to produce ultimate relaxation. Not a few cases I have known of the most talented and promising young men, who have