Basic HTML Version
Chapter 2—Tobacco’s Polluting, Demoralizing
Influence
We Meet It Everywhere
—Wherever we go, we encounter the
tobacco devotee, enfeebling both mind and body by his darling
indulgence. Have men a right to deprive their Maker and the world
of the service which is their due? ...
It is a disgusting habit, defiling to the user, and very annoying
to others. We rarely pass through a crowd but men will puff their
poisoned breath in our faces. It is unpleasant, if not dangerous, to
remain in a railway car or in a room where the atmosphere is impreg-
nated with the fumes of liquor and tobacco.—
Christian Temperance
and Bible Hygiene, 33, 34
.
It Curses and Kills
—Women and children suffer from having
to breathe the atmosphere that has been polluted by the pipe, the
cigar, or the foul breath of the tobacco user. Those who live in
this atmosphere will always be ailing.—
Testimonies for the Church
5:440
.
The infant lungs suffer, and become diseased by inhaling the
atmosphere of a room poisoned by the tobacco user’s tainted breath.
Many infants are poisoned beyond remedy by sleeping in beds with
their tobacco-using fathers. By inhaling the poisonous tobacco
effluvia, which is thrown from the lungs and pores of the skin, the
[59]
system of the infant is filled with poison. While it acts upon some
infants as a slow poison, and affects the brain, heart, liver, and lungs,
and they waste away and fade gradually, upon others, it has a more
direct influence, causing spasms, fits, paralysis, and sudden death.
The bereaved parents mourn the loss of their loved ones, and
wonder at the mysterious providence of God which has so cruelly
afflicted them, when Providence designed not the death of these
infants. They died martyrs to filthy lust for tobacco. Every exhalation
of the lungs of the tobacco slave, poisons the air about him.—
The
Health Reformer, January, 1872
.
57