ight or nine wear as an appendage to their dress a
small silken pocket to hold tobacco and a pipe." Nor can the expense and
widespread use of tobacco be defended on the ground that it is a luxury,
for the abstainer from tobacco counts it the greater luxury not to use
it. The only explanation for its use is, that it is a habit which binds
one hand and foot, and from which no person with ordinary will power in
his own strength can free himself.

Tobacco blunts the moral nature. It is not certain how long tobacco
has been used as a narcotic. Some authorities hold that the smoking of
tobacco was an ancient custom among the Chinese. But if this is true, we
know that it did not spread among the neighboring nations. When Columbus
came to America he found the natives of the West Indies and the American
Indian smoking the weed. With the Indian its use has always had a
religious and legal significance. Early in the sixteenth century tobacco
was introduced into England, later into Spain, and still later, in 1560,
into Italy. Used for its medicinal properties at first, soon it came
to be used as a luxury. The popes of Italy saw its harm and thundered
against it. The priests and sultans of Turkey declared smoking a crime.
One sultan made it punishable with death. The pipes of smokers were
thrust through their noses in Turkey, and in Russia the noses of smokers
were cut off in the earlier part of the seventeenth century. "King James
I of England issued a counterblast to tobacco, in which he described its
use as a 'custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful
to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fumes
thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is
bottomless.'" As one contrasts this sentiment with the practice of the
present sovereign of England, his breath is almost taken away in his
great fall from the sublime to the ridiculous!

While we do not believe a moderate use of tobacco for a mature person is
necessarily a sin, yet we do believe that it does blunt the moral sense,
and soon leads to spiritual weakness and indifference, which are sins.
To love God with all one's heart, mind, soul, and strength, and
one's neighbor as himself, means not only a denial of that which is
questionable in morals, but a practice of that which is positively good.
However noble or worthy in character may be some who use tobacco, yet by
common consent it is a "tool of the devil." Every de