clergymen who died of
cancer of the mouth, and the doctor said, in every case, it was the
result of tobacco. The tombstone of many a minister of religion has
been covered all over with handsome eulogy, when, if the true epitaph
had been written, it would have said: "Here lies a man killed by too
much cavendish!" They smoke until the world is blue, and their
theology is blue, and everything is blue. How can a man stand in the
pulpit and preach on the subject of temperance when he is indulging
such a habit as that? I have seen a cuspadore in a pulpit into which
the holy man dropped his cud before he got up to read about "blessed
are the pure in heart," and to read about the rolling of sin as a
sweet morsel under the tongue, and to read about the unclean animals
in Leviticus that chewed the cud.

About sixty-five years ago a student at Andover Theological Seminary
graduated into the ministry. He had an eloquence and a magnetism which
sent him to the front. Nothing could stand before him. But in a few
months he was put in an insane asylum, and the physician said tobacco
was the cause of the disaster. It was the custom in those days to give
a portion of tobacco to every patient in the asylum. Nearly twenty
years passed along, and that man was walking the floor of his cell in
the asylum, when his reason returned, and he saw the situation, and he
took the tobacco from his mouth and threw it against the iron gate of
the place in which he was confined, and he said: "What brought me
here? What keeps me here? Tobacco! tobacco! God forgive me, God help
me, and I will never use it again." He was fully restored to reason,
came forth, preached the Gospel of Christ for some ten years, and then
went into everlasting blessedness.

There are ministers of religion now in this country who are dying by
inches, and they do not know what is the matter with them. They are
being killed by tobacco. They are despoiling their influence through
tobacco. They are malodorous with tobacco. I could give one paragraph
of history, and that would be my own experience. It took ten cigars to
make one sermon, and I got very nervous, and I awakened one day to see
what an outrage I was committing upon my health by the use of tobacco.
I was about to change settlement, and a generous tobacconist of
Philadelphia told me if I would come to Philadelphia and be his pastor
he would give me all the cigars I wanted for nothing all the rest of
my life. I halted. I sai