"Born of the Spirit;" or, Gems from the Book of LifeOsborne, Zenas
Religion
"Born of the Spirit;" or, Gems from the Book of Life
Osborne, Zenas
Free Methodist Church of North America; Osborne, Zenas
In 1861 we used 109,000 pounds. In 1887 not far from 1,000,000
pounds. At the present--1888--we have, beyond doubt, more than
1,000,000 opium consumers. That is appalling! Don’t think that those
are merely barbaric Asiatics.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, after conquering the world, was conquered
by opium. There are thousands, more women than men, who are being
bound body, mind and soul by this terrific drug. There is a great
mystery about some families. You don’t know why they don’t get along.
The opium habit is stealthy, deceitful, deathful. You can cure one
hundred drunkards where you can cure one opium eater.
Have you just begun to use it for the assuagement of physical
distress? I beg of you stop! The pleasures at the start will not pay
for the horrors at the end.
MORPHIA is a blessing from God for the relief of pain, but it was
never intended to be prolonged for years.
Statistics show that there are opium eaters in this country exceeding
a million. With some hydrate of chloral is taking the place of opium.
BARON LIEBIG knows that one chemist in Germany makes half a ton of
hydrate of chloral a week. There are multitudes taken down with this
drug. _Look out for hydrate of chloral!_ You never heard a sermon
against opium, but it seems to me there ought to be ten thousand
pulpits turned into a quickening flame, thundering Zion’s warning
against this black narcotic.
You all know what botanists describe as NICOTIANA. You know it
as the inspiring, elevating, emparadising, nerve-shattering,
dyspepsia-breeding, health-destroying tobacco. I shall not be
offensively personal on this subject, for you nearly all use it. You
say that God made it, and it is good. Yes, it is good to kill moths,
to kill ticks on sheep, to strangle all kinds of vermin, to fumigate
pestiferous places. You say God created it for some particular use.
Yes, so He did henbane, and nux vomica, and copperas, and belladona,
and all those poisons.
You say men live to be old who use it. Yes, in the sense that the man
lasted well who was pickled. Smokers are turned into smoked livers.
You should advise your children to abstain from it, because the whole
medical fraternity of the United States and Great Britain pronounced
it the cause of wide-spread ill-health. Drs. Agnew, Hamilton,
Woodward--the whole medical fraternity, Allopathic, Homeopathic,
Hydropathic and Eclectic denounce it. The use of tobacco tends to
drunkenness. It creates unnatural thirst. The way that leads down to
a drunkard’s grave and a drunkard’s hell is strewn thick with tobacco
leaves. _That man is not thoroughly converted who has not only got
his heart clean, but got his mouth clean also._
BEN. FRANKLIN said he never saw a well man in the exercise of common
sense who would say that tobacco did him any good.
THOMAS JEFFERSON argued against the culture of tobacco.
HORACE GREELEY said: “It is a burning stench.”
DANIEL WEBSTER said: “Let those men who smoke go to the horse shed.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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