id="pgepubid00006">CHAPTER 2.

TOBACCO FROM A MORAL STAND-POINT.

Go to our jails and penitentiaries and you will find their inmates, almost to a man, tobacco-eaters and alcohol drinkers. As the chameleon takes its color from the object it is attached to, so does the mind of man, from the body it is attached to. No wonder, then, that a brain poisoned, will suggest poisoned thoughts, criminal thoughts and acts. O that preachers might know this, or, knowing it, might act on it in their efforts to regenerate man's moral nature. Let them commence at the root of evil to remove it. Evil, like a Cancer, while the root remains the canker grows worse. Mind and body is united in every effort, if the main spring is weakened so is the stroke. "A bitter fountain can not send forth a pleasant stream."

When we undertake to reform a man the first thing is to see that the brain is healthy; not poisoned and diseased. For an unhealthy organ can not perform healthy functions. You might as well try to improve the sense of smell with the nose stuffed full of snuff, as to try to improve the moral sense while it is poisoned with the essence of snuff. Try to change a man's heart that is palpitating with poison and lusting for more! If you wish to be a successful soul doctor, you must commence at the seat of all moral diseases; a poisoned and disordered mind. Take the poison out of him first, and keep it out for at least thirty days, until the brain can begin to have its natural healthy action, and then he will arise and walk in dry places seeking rest.

We affirm, and shall prove in the course of our lecture, that tobacco obtudes and destroys the moral as well as every other sense of the human intellect. Proof. When you see a habitual tobacco user in the company of his friends you will see him either squirting his poison fluid over his friend's hearth, house, floor, and stove, and breathing his loathsome poisonous breath into the face of his friend, or pouring his poison smoke into the eyes, nose, and lungs of all present. When all present are coughing strangling and almost out of breath; they say please don't smoke any more in the house. Then comes the oft' repeated "Excuse me I did not think." Can a moral man so far intrude upon the health, happiness and peace, even of a race of cannibals? "I did not think," is an acknowledgment that his thinking faculties are not in order. That is what we know.

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Now, it is no use to tell me that a man who can't think, what he is doing in small moral and social points of good breeding, with which he is every day familiar. How much less qualified is he for deep moral and intellectual reasoning which he is entirely unacquainted with?

Furthermore. If he does think, his refined and gentle humane feelings are so benumbed as to cause him not to care, it shows his spiritual nature is too much deadened to teach the spirit of a pure and undefiled religion which teach kindness love and attention to all men.

A poisoned body, especially when chronic, deadens the nerves and clogs the intellect, darkens the mind, smokes and blackens the soul to such an extent he can neither teach or understand as a man ought to do by nature.

What think you of a preacher of Christ with a cud in his mouth squirting poison at the souls he is trying to save? Is the thing possible? Talk of distilling the essence of Christianity through a poison worm of tobacco! O, thou tobacco-eating hypocrite! Can a body that is defiled with poison and polluted with the sin of self-abuse be a fit dwelling place for the Holy Ghost? How can a man who stinks like a rank tobacco-pipe, call himself a fit