The Older Ones Set the Example—How often do we see boys not more than eight years old using tobacco! If you speak to them about it, they say, “My father uses it, and if it does him good, it will me.” They point to the minister or the Sunday school superintendent, and say, “If such good men as they use it, surely I can.” How can we expect anything else of the children, with their inherited tendencies, while the older ones set them such an example?—Christian Temperance and Bible Hygiene, 18.
(Te 68.1)
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Popularity of the Tobacco Habit—So powerful is the habit when once formed, that the use of tobacco becomes popular. An example of sin is set before youth, whose minds should be disabused of all thought that the use of the narcotic is not harmful. They are not told of its injurious effects on the physical, mental, and moral powers....
(Te 68.2)
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If a follower of Christ allows himself to be led astray by the influence of others, and conforms to the fashionable dissipation of the world, he is under Satan’s sway, and his sin is even greater than is the sin of avowed unbelievers,—the ungodly,—because he is standing under false colors. His life is inconsistent; professedly a Christian, in practice he is yielding to unnatural, sinful propensities that war against the purification and elevation necessary for spiritual superiority....
(Te 68.3)
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Becoming conformed to the habit, in practice they are in fellowship with the world. All such who claim to be Christians, have no right to assume this name; for a Christian is one who is Christlike. When the judgment sits and all are judged according to the deeds done in the body, they will learn that they have misrepresented Christ in practical life, and have not made themselves a savor of life unto life, but a savor of death unto death. In fellowship with them will be a numerous company who have conformed to lustful practices; but numbers will neither excuse their iniquity, nor lessen their condemnation for destroying the brain nerve power and the physical health. All will be judged personally. They will stand before God to hear their sentence.—Manuscript 123, 1901.
(Te 68.4)
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