Tobacco and the Clergy
OVER 115 years ago, medical doctor John Cowan wrote a book entitled The Use of Tobacco vs. Purity, Chastity and Sound Health. In view of what has been learned about the harmful effects of tobacco in recent years, his observations on its use by clergymen were farsighted and are relevant for anyone seeking to serve God today. In chapter 4, dealing with the moral effect of tobacco use, Dr. Cowan remarked:
“If the use of tobacco is physically wrong—as has been clearly shown—it must of a necessity be morally wrong; for it is a physiological law that ‘whatever depraves or irritates the body, thereby depraves the nervous system, and through it the brain, and thereby the mind.’ A man’s mind—his thoughts, his expressions, his deeds, are influenced by the way he uses or abuses his physical nature. Tobacco is, in its very name and associations, filthy, and—taking no heed of the harm it does—how can clean, pure, just, moral feelings and actions originate or be developed in the mind. As well suppose—if such a thing could be supposed—that Christ, while living His exemplary life on earth—teaching and preaching purity, chastity, love and charity—smoked, snuffed and chewed. Does not the very thought sound sacrilegious? And yet ministers—followers, preachers, and expounders of His laws and doctrines—foul their bodies and taint their souls with the filthy, poisonous weed. Can such men, or their followers, lead Christ-like lives—high, moral lives? I think not.
“Try, if you can, to entertain the idea of a gluttonous eater, a winebibber, or a tobacco-user, in connection with holiness of heart? There is something unnatural, revolting, repulsive in the association. Just as the bodily appetites and the outward senses are depraved, does the inner man, the moral nature, become gross. The pure spirit will not, cannot, dwell in a filthy tenement. There is a natural correspondence between material and spiritual things, so that the qualities of one denote the character of the other. A professor of religion and slave of tobacco . . . He may acknowledge, in all candor and sincerity, that tobacco-using is a pernicious custom, morally wrong; yet he may find an impulse within, a law of his members, artificially produced, prompting him with insatiate cravings to continue the practice, and this artificial law may be stronger than his natural reason and conscience combined. Is not tobacco-using a palpable violation of one of God’s laws implanted in our organization? Is not an infraction of any one of God’s laws a transgression and a sin? And if a man habitually lives in the violation of one of God’s laws, will not the transition be easy and natural to a violation of other laws? And lastly, how can any man stand up as a moral teacher, who, in his own conduct, commends to his fellow-creatures a life of continual transgression against the laws of his being?”