New Tabernacle SermonsTalmage, T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt)
Religion
New Tabernacle Sermons
Talmage, T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt)
Presbyterian Church -- Sermons; Sermons, American
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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