THE habitual use of any kind of stimulant is only an injury. The sole effect of a stimulant upon man or beast is to get force out of him without putting it into him; while the effect of food is to get force out of him by first putting it into him. As expressed by another, the effect of a stimulant is not exactly to rob Peter to pay Paul; it is to rob Peter to pay Peter himself. It should not be necessary to argue with men to convince them that the human system has no need of the habitual use of any such thing. To show that a certain thing is a stimulant, ought to be enough to cause any rational being to refuse the habitual use of it. The great trouble, however, is that so many men allow habit to rule their reason.MEDM August 1904, page 236.1

Coffee is a stimulant, and therefore should not be used. This is the property upon which, for many, its value depends. Says an eminent authority:—MEDM August 1904, page 236.2

“Coffee is solely valuable for its stimulating effect upon the nervous and vascular system. It produces a feeling of buoyancy and exhilaration comparable to a certain stage of alcoholic intoxication.”—Encyclopedia Britannica.MEDM August 1904, page 236.3

In view of this, how anybody can either preach or practice true temperance and yet use coffee is more than we can understand. It simply can not be done. The tendency of that which produces a feeling “comparable to a certain stage of alcoholic intoxication,” can only be toward the use of alcoholic intoxicants themselves. We can neither teach nor practice temperance while using or consenting that it is right to use any stimulant, much less a stimulant the effect of which is so closely allied to that of alcohol as is the effect of coffee.MEDM August 1904, page 236.4

And millions of people will go on day after day, and year after year, brewing this poison and drinking it, and giving it to the little children! And yet they will say, “Oh, coffee does not hurt me!”MEDM August 1904, page 237.1

But poison hurts everybody that takes it. When we meet people who use tea, and coffee, and pork, and tobacco, etc., and who say that these things do not hurt them, and that they have good health, we are reminded of a circumstance that occurred once where a gentleman was lecturing on the principles of health and temperance. In the course of his remarks one evening he had stated that a person could not enjoy a proper degree of health without frequent bathing—at least once a week in winter and twice a week in summer. When he had dismissed the audience, an old woman of nearly seventy went to him and told him that he had said one thing that she did not believe at all. He asked her what it way. She said: “You said a person couldn’t have good health without bathing often. Now look at me; here I am, and I have just as good health as anybody in this town, and I haven’t had a bath for fifty years.” Poor woman, she had never been clean enough to know what it is to be dirty. She had never been clean enough to know how a person feels when he is clean; nor had she lived healthfully enough to know what it is to have good health. It is much the same way with the people who use all these things, and yet insist that they have good health, and that these things “don’t hurt” them.MEDM August 1904, page 237.2

Tea paralyzes; coffee poisons; pork debases; and tobacco paralyzes, poisons, and debases; flesh foods have stimulating properties, and also make the blood sluggish; and yet there are multitudes who use them all, and will say, “These things don’t hurt me. I have good health.” But the truth is they have not lived healthfully enough to know what good health is. They have never been free enough from injury to know what it is not to be hurt.MEDM August 1904, page 237.3

The sum of what I have said is that nobody should use tea, or coffee, or alcohol, or tobacco, or opium, or hashish. They all belong together, and no person can tell where the influence of any one of them stops, and that of the next begins. “Every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible.” “Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.”MEDM August 1904, page 237.4

A. T. JONES.

July 1904

September 1904