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 said to myself, “If I smoke more than I ought to now in these war times, and when my salary is small, what would I do if I had gratuitous and unlimited supply?” Then and there, twenty-four years ago, I quit once and forever.  It made a new man of me.  Much of the time the world looked blue before that, because I was looking through tobacco smoke.  Ever since the world has been full of sunshine, and though I have done as much work as any one of my age, God has blessed me, it seems to me, with the best health that a man ever had.

I say that no minister of religion can afford to smoke.  Put in my hand all the money expended by Christian men in Brooklyn for tobacco, and I will support three orphan asylums as well and as grandly as the three great orphan asylums already established.  Put into my hand the money spent by the Christians of America for tobacco, and I will clothe, shelter, and feed all the suffering poor of the continent.  The American Church gives a million dollars a year for the salvation of the heathen, and American Christians smoke five million dollars’ worth of tobacco.