p. 147 | THAT FILTHY HABIT by F. J. Dye

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Tuesday, March 10, 1885.

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 62, No. 10. Whole No. 1605.

THAT FILTHY HABIT.

By F. J. Dye

BY F. J. DYE.

Trying to see how much better I feel when I don't smoke; and I feel one hundred—hundred—per cent better since I stopped smoking. So remarked a gentleman to a friend at the railway office. And according to his statement, he must have been a great sufferer, either physically or mentally, while indulging in the smoking. We do not wonder at his feelings. It would seem that a system whose very core is saturated with deadly nicotine could experience other than feelings of relief at the discontinuance of a practice so detrimental to health and mental soundness.

Do not many others who are now slavishly giving themselves to this injurious and degrading experience similar results by making a trial of the above experiment? And what a blessing to the race, could all the devotees of the weed be brought to realize what an untold amount of pain and suffering they are uselessly inflicting upon themselves and others by the disgusting and soul-destroying tobacco habit! But the consciences of such persons are generally blunted and hardened, and their moral sensibilities stunted by the stupefying drug, as to render their consciences almost hopeless.

Why will human beings, endowed with intelligence and reasoning powers so much superior to those of the brute creation, degrade themselves? Even reveling in polluting and poisoning the very atmosphere in which they move, and sickening with their foul breath every rational person who approaches them. To what depths of depravity will men descend? Young men and boys of tender age are taught to acquire the manly (!) art. What pains to simply become despicable and loathsome.

The expensiveness of the evil,—$350,000,000 smoked up, thrown away,—nay a thousand times worse than thrown away. It is no exaggeration to say that there is more property annually destroyed and more distress in our large cities, resulting from the burning of tobacco and cigars and occasioned by the destructive conflagrations, accounts of which the newspapers are so ready to notice. But the tobacco conflagration attracts no attention from them, not even a passing notice.

Tobacco is the vilest of the vile; the habit of smoking the most senseless and unreasonable of habits that can be imagined. It is one of the evils that has devoured the earth, and “defiled the inhabitants thereof.” We can only look forward to, and long for, the time not far in the future, when this fallen world shall be purified from every defilement. Every vestige of the evil will then be removed. “Jerusalem shall be rejoicing, and her people a joy,” and “there shall in no wise enter into it anything that defileth.” Rev. 21:27.

Minneapolis, Minn.