TOBACCO by L. D. Santee

The Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · November 27, 1879

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 54, No. 22

TOBACCO

By L. D. Santee

Two years ago, one chilly November morning I was standing in a store, when a little girl apparently about twelve years of age, entered. She wore a thin calico dress, and was barefoot. Her teeth chattered with the cold so that she could hardly speak. Laying a quarter on the counter, she managed to articulate, “Father sent me for twenty-five cents’ worth of tobacco.” After receiving it, she went out, the cold northwest wind making it almost impossible for her to close the door.

When she was gone the storekeeper said to me, regretfully, “I do hate to let that man have tobacco, but if I refused him he would send farther. In the past year I’ve sold him between forty and fifty dollars’ worth, and his children will have to go without shoes this winter.” That man has been for years a member of the church. He daily asks God’s blessing upon their scanty board, professing to be a servant of Heaven, while all the time he is the veriest slave to that hard master, appetite.

Shame on the minister who is afraid to cry out against this leprosy of the nineteenth century! Our railway companies have provided smoking cars, saying to the world, These are for the unclean. When we think of the prayers ascending from lips that a child would dread to kiss, we are reminded of the rebuke of an infidel to a tobacco-chewing minister, “For God’s sake, give us cleanliness, and you may keep the religion.”

It will be said that the case to which I have referred is an extreme one. Perhaps this is true, but the same evil exists, only in a lesser form, in ten thousand other homes. Let us that are watchmen cry as did Paul from the Roman prison, “Do thyself no harm.” Let us sound it forth as an axiom in our faith: “He that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as He is pure.” L. D. SANTEE.