The Story of our Health Message

Liquor and Tobacco Used

Although the grandfather was a devout Christian and a class leader in the Methodist Church, he did not realize the harmfulness of the milder intoxicants; and every fall he, like his neighbors, rolled into the cellar several barrels of hard cider. It was customary to serve this drink freely to company and to the laborers in the field. Ministers in many popular churches were free to use tobacco and to drink alcoholic beverages without criticism. SHM 24.3

Medicines were used freely to relieve the various maladies that resulted from the pernicious habits of living. On one occasion, when the Loughborough family moved, there was carted to the dump heap an accumulation of two bushel baskets of empty bottles that had contained sarsaparilla, syrups, medical discoveries, and painkillers. Pills were considered indispensable for daily regulation. SHM 24.4

At the age of eighteen, when young Loughborough was just beginning to preach, he was advised to use tobacco as a remedy for a lung difficulty which followed a slight hemorrhage. He accepted this advice as good counsel and formed the habit of smoking cigars. About two years later there passed before his mind the contrast between the filthiness of the tobacco habit and the clean lives and purity of those who would dwell in the New Jerusalem. A deep and vivid impression that there would enter into that city nothing that should defile led him then and there to throw a partly smoked cigar into the river and to abandon forever the use of tobacco. SHM 24.5

In later years, as the health reform movement made progress among Seventh-day Adventists, a number of the ministers bore testimony to the benefits they had received through adopting its principles. In so doing they naturally looked back to the “hole of the pit” whence they had been digged, and they could clearly see that their former weakness and suffering were due to their lack of knowledge of the laws of life. Among those who bore such testimony was Elder J. N. Andrews, best known, perhaps, as the author of the scholarly work entitled The History of the Sabbath, as well as being the first missionary of the Seventh-day Adventist Church to carry the message overseas. SHM 25.1