"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!