In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture by Alister McGrath

Author:Alister McGrath [McGrath, Alister]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385722162
Google: XDE6ngEACAAJ
Amazon: 0385722168
Barnesnoble: 0385722168
Goodreads: 23011
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2001-04-09T21:00:00+00:00

IN THE MEANTIME: JAMES I, 1604–11

Having sorted out the religious controversies of England to his own satisfaction in January 1604, James turned his attention to other matters he regarded as being of importance. He produced a vigorous critique of one of the habits of the day that he regarded as distasteful, unhealthy, and malodorous. James's A Counterblast to Tobacco drew particular attention to the problems caused by the smell of the demon weed. In a fascinating aside, James suggested that tobacco smoke “would serve for a precious relic, both for the superstitious priests and the insolent Puritans, to cast out devils withal.” The comment perhaps allows us to understand something of James's religious policy in England, which can be seen as steering a middle way between the extremes of Catholicism and Puritanism, using tobacco smoke as an illustration.

James brought to his critique of tobacco the same love of detail and rhetoric he had already mastered for his religious and political discourses. The treatise is fascinating for many reasons, not least of which is that it indicates James's willingness to critique a habit that some of his successors—most notably, Edward VII—found beguiling. Yet it also opens a window into the popular culture of the era, when the smoking of tobacco was justified on two medical grounds. James sets these out as follows:

First, it is thought by you a sure aphorism in the administration of medicine that the brains of all men being naturally cold and wet, all dry and hot things should be good for them of which nature this stinking suffumigation is, and therefore of good use to them….

The second argument grounded on a show of reason is that this filthy smoke, as well through the heat and strength thereof, as by a natural force and quality, is able and fit to purge both the head and stomach of rheums and distillations as experience teaches by the spitting and avoiding phlegm immediately after the taking of it.

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