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 den of gamblers, every low-down