DRUNKENNESS
By T. DeWitt Talmage
"Noah planted a vineyard; and he drank of the wine and
was drunken." Genesis ix, 20, 21
This Noah did the best thing and the worst thing for the
world. He built an ark against that deluge of water, but introduced a
deluge against which the human race has ever since been trying to build an
ark-the deluge of drunkenness. In my text we hear his staggering
steps. Shem and Japheth tried to cover up the disgrace, but there he is,
drunk on wine at a time in the history of the world, when, to say the least,
there was no lack of water. Inebriation, having entered the world, has
not retreated. Abigail, the fair and heroic wife, who saved the flocks of
Nabal, her husband, from confiscation by invaders, goes home at night and finds
him so intoxicated, she cannot tell him the story of his narrow escape.
Uriah came to see David, and David got him drunk and paved the way for the
despoliation of a household. Even the church bishops needed to be charged
to be sober and not given to too much wine, and so familiar were people of
Bible times with the staggering and falling motion of the inebriate that,
Isaiah, when he comes to describe the final dislocation of worlds, says;"
The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard."
A WORLD WIDE TEMPTATION
Ever since apples and grapes and wheat grew, the world has
been tempted to unhealthful stimulants. But the intoxicants of the olden
time were an innocent beverage, a harmless orangeade, a quiet syrup, a peaceful
soda water as compared with the liquids of modern inebriation, into which a
madness and a fury, and a gloom, and a fire, and a suicide, and a retribution
have mixed and mingled. Fermentation was always known, but it was not
until a thousand years after Christ that distillation was invented. While
we must confess that some of the ancient arts have been lost, the Christian era
is superior to all others in the bad eminence of whisky and rum and gin.
The modern drunk is a hundredfold worse than the ancient drunk. Noah in
his intoxication became imbecile, but the victims of modern day alcoholism have
to struggle with whole menageries of wild beasts, and jungles of hissing
serpents, and perditions of blaspheming demons.
An archfiend arrived in our world and he builds an invisible
caldron of temptation. He built that caldron strong and stout for
all ages and all nations. First he squeezed into the caldron the juices
of the forbidden fruit of Paradise. Then he gathered for it a distillation from
the harvest fields and orchards from the hemispheres. Then he poured into
this caldron capsicum, and copperas and logwood and deadly nightshade and
assault and battery and vitriol and opium and rum and murder and sulphuric acid
and theft and potash and cochineal and red carrots and poverty and Death and
hops. But it was a dry compound and it must be moistened, and it must be
liquefied, and so the archfiend pours into that caldron the tears of centuries
of orphanage and widowhood, and he poured in the blood of twenty thousand
assassinations. And then the arch fiend took a shovel that he had brought
up from the furnaces beneath, and he put that shovel into that great caldron
and began t stir, and the caldron began to heave, and rock and boil and sputter
and hiss and smoke, and the nations gathered around it with cups and tankards
and demijohns and kegs, and there was enough for all, and the arch fiend cried:
“ Aha! Champion fiend am I! Who has done more than I have for coffins and
graveyards and prisons and insane asylums and the populating of the lost world?
And when this caldron is emptied I’ll fill it again and I’ll stir it again, and
it will smoke again, and that smoke will join another smoke, the smoke of
torment that ascended forever and ever. I drove fifty ships on the rocks
of Newfoundland, and the Skeeries and the Goodwins. I have ruined more
senators than gathered this winter in the national councils. I have
ruined more lords than are now gathered in the house of peers. The cup
out of which I ordinarily drink is a bleached human skull, and the upholstery
of my palace is so rich a crimson, because it is dyed in human gore, and the
mosaic of my floors is made up of the bones of children dashed to death by
drunken parents, and my favorite music—sweeter than Te Deum or triumphal
march—my favorite music is the cry of daughters turned out at midnight on the
street because father has come home from the carousal, and the seven-hundred
voice shriek of the sinking steamer, because the captain was not himself when
he put the ship on the wrong course. Champion fiend am I! I have
kindled more fires, I have wrung out more agonies, I have stretched out more
midnight shadows, I have opened more Golgotha’s, I have rolled more
Juggernauts, I have damned more souls than any other emissary of diabolism.
Champion fiend am I!”
THE NATION’S GREATEST EVIL
Drunkenness is the greatest evil of this nation, and it
takes no logical process to prove to the audience that a drunken nation cannot
long be a free nation. I call your attention to the fact, that
drunkenness is not subsiding; certainly that it is not at a standstill,
but that it is on an onward march, and it is a double quick. There is
more rum swallowed in this country, and of a worse kind, than was ever
swallowed since the first distillery began its work of death. Where there
was one drunken home there are ten drunken homes. Where there was one
drunkard’s grave there are ten drunkard’s graves. It is on the increase.
Talk about crooked whiskey—by which men mean the whisky that does not pay the
tax to the government—I tell you all strong drink is crooked. Crooked
Otard, crooked Cognac, crooked schnapps, crooked beers, crooked wine, crooked
whisky—because it makes a man’s path crooked, and his life crooked, and his
death crooked, and his eternity crooked.
If I could gather all the armies of the dead drunkards and
have them come to resurrection, and then add to that host, all the armies of
living drunkards, five and ten abreast, and then if I could have you mount a
horse and ride along that line for review, you could ride that horse until he
dropped from exhaustion, and you would mount another horse and ride until he
fell from exhaustion and you would take another and another, and you would ride
along hour after hour, and day after day. Great host, in regiments, in
brigades. Great armies of them. And then if you had voice
stentorian enough to make them all hear, and you could give the command,”
Forward, march!” their first tramp would make the earth tremble. I do not
care which way you look in the community today, the evil is increasing.
Is drunkenness a state or national evil? Does it
belong to the north, or does it belong to the south? Does it belong to
the east, or does it belong to the west? Ah! There is not an
American river into which its tears have not fallen and into which its suicides
have not plunged. What ruined that southern plantation? —every field a
fortune, the proprietor and his family once the most affluent supporters of
summer watering places. What threw that New England farm into decay and
turned the roseate cheeks that bloomed at the foot of the Green Mountains into
the pallor of despair? What has smitten every street of every village,
town and city of this continent with a moral pestilence? Strong drink.
MAINE AND GEORGIA
To prove that this is a national evil I call up two states
in opposite directions—Maine and Georgia. Let them testify in regard to
this. State of Maine says,” It is so great an evil up here we have
anathematized it as a state.” State of Georgia says,” It is so great an
evil down here that ninety counties of this state have made the sale of
intoxicating drink a criminality.” So the word comes up from all parts of
the land. Either drunkenness will be destroyed in this country or
the American government will be destroyed. Drunkenness and free
institutions are coming into a terrible death grapple.
HEREDITARY APPETITE
I call attention to the facts that there are thousand of
people born with a thirst for strong drinks—a fact too often ignored.
Along some ancestral lines there runs the river of temptation. There are
children whose swaddling clothes are torn of the shroud of death. Many a
father has made a will of this sort: “ In the name of God, amen. I bequeath to
my children my houses and lands and estates; share and share shall they
alike. Hereto I affix my hand and seal in the presence of
witnesses.” And yet perhaps the very man has made another will that the
people have never read, and that has not been proved in the courts. That
will put in writing would read something like this: “In the name of disease and
appetite and death, amen. I bequeath to my children my evil habits, my
tankards shall be theirs, my wine cup shall be theirs, my destroyed destruction
shall be theirs. Share and share alike shall they in the infamy.
Hereto I affix my hand and seal in the presence of all the applauding harpies
of hell.
From the multitude of those who have the evil habit born
with them this army is being augmented. And I am sorry to say that a
great many of the drug stores are abetting this evil, and alcohol is sold under
the name of bitters. It is bitters for this and bitters for that and
bitters for some other thing, and good men deceived, not knowing that there is
any thralldom of alcoholism coming from that source, are going down, and some
day a man sits with a bottle of black bitters on his table, and the cork flies
out, and after it flies a fiend and clutches the man by his throat and says:
“Aha! I have been after you for ten years. I have got you
now. Down with you! down with you!” Bitters! Ah! Yes. They
make a man’s family bitter, and his home bitter, and his disposition bitter,
and his death bitter, and his hell bitter. Bitters! A vast army,
all the time increasing.
It seems to me it is about time for the 17, 000, 000
professors of religion in America to take sides. It is going to be an out
in out battle with drunkenness and sobriety, between heaven and hell, between
God and the devil. Take sides before there is any further national
decadence take sides before your sons are sacrificed and the new home of your
daughter goes down under alcoholism of an imbruted husband. Take sides
while your voice, your pen, your prayer, your vote may have influence in
arresting the despoliation of this nation. If the 17,000,000 professors
of religion should take sides on this subject it would not be very long before
the destiny of this nation would be decided in the right direction.
THE GREAT ENEMY OF LABOR
Gather up the money that the working classes have spent for
rum during the last thirty years, and I will build for every working man a
house, and lay out for him a garden, and clothe his sons in broad cloth and his
daughters in silks, and stand at his front door a prancing span of sorrels or
bays, and secure him a policy of life insurance so that the present home may be
well maintained after he his dead. The most persistent, most overpowering
enemy of the working classes is intoxicating liquor. It is the anarchist
of the centuries, and has boycotted and is now boycotting the body and mind and
soul of American labor. It annually swindles industry out of a large
percentage of its earnings. It holds out its blasting solicitations to
the mechanic or operative on his way to work, and at the noon spell, and on his
way home at eventide. On Saturday when the wages are paid, it snatches a
large part of the money that might come to the family and sacrifices it among
the saloonkeepers. Stand the saloons of this country side by side, and it
is carefully estimated that they would reach from New York to Chicago.
This evil is pouring its vitriolic and damnable liquors down
the throats of hundreds of thousands of laborers, and while the ordinary
strikes are ruinous both to employers and employees, I proclaim a universal
strike against strong drink, which strike, if kept up, will be the relief of
the working classes and the salvation of the nation. I will undertake to
say that there is not a healthy laborer in the United States who, within the
next twenty years, if he will refuse all intoxicating beverages and be saving,
may not become a capitalist on a small scale.
CANNOT SOMETHING BE DONE?
Oh, how many are waiting to see if something cannot be done
for the stopping of intemperance! Thousands of drunkards waiting who
cannot go ten minutes in any direction without having the temptation glaring
before their eyes or appealing to their nostrils, they fighting against it with
enfeebled will and diseased appetite, conquering, then surrendering, conquering
again and surrendering again, and crying: “How long, O Lord! How long before
these infamous solicitations shall be gone?” And how many mothers are
waiting to see if this national curse cannot lift? Oh, is that the boy
who has the honest breath who comes home with breath vitiated or disguised?
What a change! How quickly those habits of early coming home have been
exchanged for the rattling of the night key in the door long after the last
watchman has gone by and tried to see that every thing was closed up for the
night!
THE WAYWARD BOY
Oh! What a change for that young man, who we had hoped
would do something in merchandise or in artisanship or in a profession that
would do honor to the family name, long after mother’s wrinkled hands are
folded from the last toil! All that exchanged for startled look when the
doorbell rings, lest something has happened; and the wish that the scarlet
fever twenty years ago had been fatal, for then he would have gone directly to
the bosom of his Savior. But alas! Poor old soul, she has lived to
experience what Solomon said,” A foolish son is a heaviness to his mother.”
Oh! What funeral it will be when that boy is brought
home dead! And how mother will sit there and say,
“ Is this my boy that I used to fondle, and that I walked
the floor with in the nights when he was sick? Is this the boy that I
held to the baptismal font for baptism? Is this the boy for whom I toiled
until the blood burst from the tips of my fingers, that he might have a good
start and a good home? Lord, why hast thou let me live to see this?
Can it be that these swollen hands are the ones that used to wander over my
face when rocking him to sleep? Can it be that this swollen brow is that
I once so rapturously kissed? Poor boy! How tired he does look. I
wonder who struck him that blow across the temples? I wonder if he
uttered a dying prayer? Wake up my son; don’t you hear me? Wake
up! Oh! He can’t hear me! Dead! Dead! Dead!
Oh, Absalom, my son, my son, would God that I had died for thee, oh, Absalom,
my son, my son!”
WAITING WIVES
I am not much of a mathematician and I cannot estimate it,
but is there anyone here quick enough at figures to estimate how many mothers
there are waiting for something to be done? Ay, there are many wives
waiting for domestic rescue. He promised something different from that
when after the long acquaintance and the careful scrutiny of character, the
hand and the heart were offered and accepted. What a hell on earth a
woman lives in who has a drunken husband! O death, how lovely thou art to
her, and how soft and warm thy skeleton hand! The sepulcher at midnight
in winter is a king’s drawing room compared with that woman’s home. It is
not so much the blow on the head that hurts as the blow on the heart:
The rum fiend came to the door of that beautiful home, and
opened the door and said:” I curse this dwelling with an unrelenting
curse. I curse that father into a maniac; I curse that mother into a
pauper. I curse those sons into vagabonds. I curse those daughters
into profligacy. Cursed be bread tray and cradle. Cursed be couch
and chair, and family Bible with record of marriages and births and
deaths. Curse upon curse.” Oh, how many wives are there waiting to
see if something cannot be done to shake these frosts of the second death off
the orange blossoms! Yea, God is waiting, the God who works through human
instrumentalities, waiting to see, whether this nation is going to overthrow
this evil, and if it refuse to do so, God will wipe out the nation as he did
Phoenicia and as he did Rome, as he did Thebes, as he did Babylon.
Ay, he is waiting to see what the church of God will
do. If the church does not do its work, then he will wipe it out as he
did the church of Ephesus, the church of Thyatira, church of Sardis.
The Protestant and Roman- Catholic churches today stand side by side, with an
impotent look, gazing on this evil, which costs this country more than a
billion dollars a year to take care of the 800,000 paupers, and the 315,000
criminals, and the 30,000 idiots, and to bury the 75,000 drunkards.
Protagoras boasted that out of the sixty years of his life forty years he had
spent in ruining youths; but this evil may make the more infamous boast that
all its life it has been ruining the bodies, mind and souls of the human race.
THE POLITICIANS ARE DOING NOTHING
Put on your spectacles and take a candle and examine the
platforms of the two leading political parties of this country, and see what
they are doing for the arrest of this evil, and for the overthrow of this
abomination. Resolutions—oh! Yes, resolutions about
Mormonism! It is safe to attack that organized nastiness two thousand
miles away. But not one word about drunkenness, which would rot this
nation from scalp to heel. Resolutions about protection against foreign
industries, but not one word about protection of family and church and nation
against the scalding, blastings, all consuming, damning tariff of strong drink
put upon every financial, individual, spiritual, moral, national interest.
THE POWER OF THE CHURCH
I look in another direction. The Church of God is the
grandest and most glorious institution on earth. What has it in solid
phalanx accomplished for the overthrow of drunkenness? Have its forces
ever been marshaled? No, not on this direction. Not long ago a
great ecclesiastical court assembled in New York, and resolutions arraigning
strong drink were offered, and clergymen with strong drink on their tables and
strong drink in their cellars defeated the resolutions by threatening
speeches. They could not bear to give up their own lusts.
I tell this audience what many of you may never have thought
of, that today—not in the millennium, but today—the church holds the balance of
power in America; and if Christian people—the men and women who profess to
love the Lord Jesus Christ and to love purity and to be the sworn enemies of
all uncleanness and debauchery and sin—if all such would march side by side and
shoulder to shoulder, this evil would soon be overthrown. Think of three
hundred thousand churches and Sunday schools in Christendom marching shoulder
to shoulder! How very short a time it would take them to put down this
evil, if all the churches of God, transatlantic and cisatlantic, were armed on
this subject!
Young men of America, pass over into the army of teetotalism.
Whisky, good to preserve corpses, ought never to turn you into a corpse.
Tens of thousands of young men have been dragged out of respectability,
and out of purity, and out of good character, and into darkness by this
infernal stuff called strong drink. Do not touch it! Do not touch
it!
A SAD STORY ABOUT “ JOE”
In the front door of our church in Brooklyn, a few summers
ago, this scene occurred: Sabbath morning a young man was entering for
divine worship. A friend passing along the street said, “Joe, come along
with me; I am going down to Coney Island and we’ll have a gay
Sunday.”, “ No,” replied Joe; “ I have started to go here to
church, and I am going to attend service here.” “ Oh, Joe,” his
friend said, “ you can go to church any time! The day is bright, and
we’ll go to Coney Island, and we’ll have a splendid time.” The temptation
was too strong, and the twain went to the beach, spent the day in drunkenness
and riot. The evening train started up from Brighton. The young men
were on it. Joe, in his intoxication, when the train was in full speed,
tried to pass around from one seat from another and fell and was crushed.
Under the lantern as Joe lay bleeding his life away on the grass, he said to
his comrade: “ John, that was a bad very bad business, You taking me away from
church; it was a very bad business. You ought not to have done that,
John. I want you to tell the boys tomorrow when you see them that rum and
Sabbath breaking did this for me. And John, while you are telling them, I
will be in hell, and it will be your fault.” Is it not time for me to
pull out from the great organ of God’s word, with many banks of keys, the
tremolo stop? “ Look not upon the wine when it is red, when it moveth
itself aright in the cup, for at last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth
like an adder.
THIS EVIL WILL BE ARRESTED
But this evil will be arrested. Blucher came up just
before night and saved the day at Waterloo. At 4 o’clock, in the
afternoon it looked very badly for the English. Generals Ponsonby and
Pickton fallen. Sabers broken, flags surrendered, Scots Grays
annihilated. Only forty-two men left out of the German brigade. The
English army falling back and falling back. Napoleon rubbed his hands
together and said:
“ Aha! Aha! We’ll teach that Englishman a
lesson. Ninety chances out of a hundred are in our favor.
Magnificent! Magnificent!” Even sent messages to Paris that he had won the day.
But before sundown Blucher came up, and he who had been the
conqueror of Austerlitz became the victim of Waterloo. The name which had
shaken all Europe and filled even America with apprehension, that name went
down, and Napoleon, muddy and hatless, and crazed with his disasters, was found
feeling for the stirrup of a horse, that he might mount and resume the conflict.
Well, my friends, alcoholism is imperial, and it is a
conqueror, and there are good people who say the night of national overthrow is
coming, and that it is almost night. But before sundown the Conqueror of
earth and heaven will ride in on a white horse, and alcoholism, which has had
its Austerlitz of triumph, shall have its Waterloo of defeat. Alcoholism
having lost its crown, the grizzly and cruel breaker of human hearts, crazed
with the disaster, will be found telling in vain for the stirrup on which to
remount its foaming charger. “ So, O Lord, Let thine enemies perish.”