The Drunkard’92s Woe
2Ki_10:9 : ’93Who slew all these?’94
I see a long row of baskets coming up toward the palace of King Jehu. I am somewhat inquisitive to find out what is in the baskets. I look in, and I find the gory heads of seventy slain princes. As the baskets arrive at the gate of the palace, the heads are thrown into two heaps, one on each side the gate. In the morning the king comes out, and he looks upon the bleeding, ghastly heads of the massacred princes. Looking on each side the gate, he cries out, with a ringing emphasis: ’93Who slew all these?’94
We have, my friends, lived to see a more fearful massacre. There is no use of my taking your time in trying to give you statistics about the devastation and ruin and the death which strong drink has wrought in this country. Statistics do not seem to mean anything. We are so hardened under these statistics that the fact that fifty thousand more men are slain, or fifty thousand less men are slain, seems to make no positive impression on the public mind. Suffice it to say that intemperance has slain an innumerable company of princes’97the children of God’92s royal family; and at the gate of every neighborhood there are two heaps of the slain; and at the door of the household there are two heaps of the slain; and at the door of the legislative hall there are two heaps of the slain; and at the door of the university there are two heaps of the slain; and at the gate of this nation there are two heaps of the slain. When I look upon the desolation I am almost frantic with the scene, while I cry out: ’93Who slew all these?’94 I can answer that question in half a minute. The ministers of Christ, who have given no warning, the courts of law that have offered the licensure, the women who give strong drink on New Year’92s Day, the fathers and mothers who have rum on the sideboard, the hundreds of thousands of Christian men and women in the land who are stolid in their indifference on this subject’97they slew all these!
I propose in this discourse to tell you what I think are the sorrows and the doom of the drunkard, so that you, to whom I speak, may not come to the torment. Some one says: ’93You had better let those subjects alone.’94 Why, my brethren, we would be glad to let them alone if they would let us alone; but when I have in my pocket now four requests, saying: ’93Pray for my husband,’94 ’93Pray for my son,’94 ’93Pray for my brother,’94 ’93Pray for my friend, who is the captive of strong drink,’94 I reply, we are ready to let that question alone when it is willing to let us alone; but when it stands blocking up the way to heaven, and keeping multitudes away from Christ, I dare not be silent, lest the Lord require their blood at my hands.
I think the subject has been kept back by the merriment people make over those slain by strong drink. I used to be very merry over these things, having a keen sense of the ludicrous. There was something very grotesque in the gait of a drunkard. It is not so now, for I saw in one of the streets of Philadelphia a sight that changed the whole subject to me. There was a young man being led home. He was very much intoxicated’97he was raving with intoxication. Two young men were leading him along. The boys hooted in the street, men laughed, women sneered, but I happened to be very near the door where he went in’97it was the door of his father’92s house. I saw him go upstairs. I heard him shouting, hooting, and blaspheming. He had lost his hat, and the merriment increased with the mob until he came up to the door, and as the door was opened his mother came out. When I heard her cry, that took all the comedy away from the scene. Since that time, when I see a man walking through the street reeling, the comedy is all gone, and it is a tragedy of tears and groans and heartbreaks. Never make any fun around me about the grotesqueness of a drunkard! Alas for his home!
I indict this monster, not only as a murderer, but as a robber. It is the most persistent, most overpowering enemy of the working classes. It is the anarchist of the centuries, and has boycotted and is now boycotting the body and mind and soul of American labor. It is to it a worse foe than monopoly and worse than the worst of the trusts. 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 saloon-keepers. Within eight hundred yards of Sands Street Methodist Church, Brooklyn, it has fifty-four saloons, and the same ratio holds in many other cities. Stand the saloons of this country side by side, and it is carefully estimated they would reach from New York to Chicago. Forward march, says the rum power, and take possession of the American nation!
The rum business is pouring its vitriolic and damnable liquids down the throats of hundreds of thousands of laborers, and while the ordinary strikes are ruinous both to employers and employees, I advocate a strike universal against strong drink, which, if kept up, will be the relief of the working classes and the salvation of the nation. To prove the need of such a strike, you have only to consider the mischief that strong drink is doing.
In the first place, the inebriate suffers from the loss of a good name. God has so arranged it that no man loses his reputation except by his own act. The world may assault a man, and all the powers of darkness may assault him’97they cannot capture him so long as his heart is pure and his life is pure. All the powers of earth and hell cannot take that Gibraltar. If a man is right, all the bombardment of the world for five, ten, twenty, forty years will only strengthen him in his position. So that all you have to do is to keep yourself right. Never mind the world. Let it say what it will. It can do you no damage. But as soon as it is whispered ’93he drinks,’94 and it can be proved, he begins to go down. What clerk can get a position with such a reputation? What store wants him? What Church of God wants him for a member? What dying man wants him for an executor? ’93He drinks!’94 I stand before hundreds of young men who have their reputation as their only capital. Your father gave you a good education, or as good an education as he could afford to give you. He started you in city life. He could furnish you no means, but he has surrounded you with Christian influences and a good memory of the past. Now, young man, under God you are with your own right arm to achieve your fortune, and as your reputation is your only capital, do not bring upon it suspicion by going in and out of liquor establishments, or by an odor of your breath, or by any glare of your eye, or by any unnatural flush on your cheeks. You lose your reputation and you lose your capital.
The inebriate suffers also in the fact that he loses his self-respect, and when you destroy a man’92s self-respect there is not much left of him. Then a man will do things he would not do otherwise, he will say things he would not say otherwise. The fact is that man cannot stop, or he would stop now. He is bound hand and foot by the Philistines, and they have shorn his locks and put his eyes out, and made him grind in the mill of a great horror. After he is three-fourths gone in this slavery, the first thing he will be anxious to impress you with is that he can stop at any time he wants to. His family become alarmed in regard to him, and they say: ’93Now, do stop this; after a while, it will get the mastery of you.’94 ’93Oh! no,’94 he says, ’93I can stop at any time; I can stop now; I can stop to-morrow.’94 His most confidential friends say: ’93Why, I’92m afraid you are losing your balance with that habit; you are going a little further than you can afford to go; you had better stop.’94 ’93Oh! no,’94 he says, ’93I can stop at any time; I can stop now.’94 He goes on further and further. He cannot stop. I will prove it. He loves himself, and he knows nevertheless that strong drink is depleting him in body, mind and soul. He knows he is going down; that he has less self-control, less equipoise of temper than he used to. Why does he not stop? Because he cannot stop. I will prove it by going still further. He loves his wife and children. He sees that his habits are bringing disgrace upon his home. The probabilities are they will ruin his wife and disgrace his children. He sees all this, and he loves them. Why does he not stop? He cannot stop.
I had a very dear friend, generous to a fault. He had given thousands and tens of thousands of dollars to Bible societies, tract societies, missionary societies, asylums for the poor, the halt, the lame, the blind, the imbecile. I do not believe for twenty years anybody asked him for a dollar or fifty dollars, or a hundred dollars for charity but he gave it. I never heard of anybody asking him for help but he gave it. But he was under the power of strong drink, and he went on down, down, down. His family implored him, saying: ’93You are going too far in that habit; you had better stop.’94 He replied: ’93I can stop any time; I am my own master; I can stop.’94 He went on down, down. His friends advised and cautioned him. He said: ’93Don’92t be afraid of me; I am my own master; I can stop now; I know what I am doing.’94 He went on down until he had the delirium tremens. On down until he had the delirium tremens twice. After the second time the doctor said: ’93If you ever have an attack like this again you will die; you had better stop.’94 He said: ’93I can stop any time; I can stop now.’94 He went on down. He is dead. What slew him? Rum! Rum! Among the last things he said was that he could stop any time. He could not stop.
O my young friends! I want to tell you that there is a point in inebriation beyond which if a man go he cannot stop. But sometimes a man will be more frank than that. A victim of strong drink said to a reformer: ’93It is impossible for me to stop; I realize it. But if you should tell me I couldn’92t have a drink until to-morrow night unless I had all my fingers cut off, I would say: ’91Bring the hatchet and cut them off.’92’93 I had a very dear friend in Philadelphia whose nephew came to him and was talking about his trouble and confessed it. He confessed he could not stop. My friend said: ’93You must stop.’94 He said: ’93I can’92t stop. If there stood a cannon, and it was loaded, and there was a glass of wine on the mouth of the cannon, and I knew you would fire it off if I approached, I would start to get that glass of wine. I must have it. I can’92t get rid of this habit. I can’92t get away from it.’94 Oh! it is awful for a man to wake up and feel that he is a captive. I hear him soliloquizing, saying: ’93I might have stopped three months ago, but I can’92t stop now. Dead, but not buried. I am a walking corpse. I am an apparition of what I once was. I am a caged immortal and my soul beats against the wires of my cage on this side and beats against the wires of my cage on the other side, until there is blood on the wires, and blood on the soul, but I can’92t get out. Destroyed without remedy!’94
Again: the man suffers from the loss of usefulness. Do you know some of the men who have fallen into the ditch were once in the front rank in churches and in the front rank in reformatory institutions? Do you know they once knelt at the family altar, and once carried the chalice of the holy communion on sacramental days? Do you know they once stood in the pulpit and preached the Gospel of the Son of God? We will not forget the scene witnessed some years ago in my Brooklyn church when a man rose in the midst of the audience, stepped into the aisle, and walked up and down. Everybody saw that he was intoxicated. The ushers led him out, and his poor wife took his hat and overcoat and followed him to the door. Who was he? He had once been a mighty minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a sister denomination, had often preached in this very city. What slew him? Strong drink. Oh! what must be the feeling of a man who has destroyed his capacity for usefulness? Do not be angry with that man. Do not lose your patience with him. Do not wonder if he says strange things and gets irritated easily in the family. He has the Pyrenees, and the Andes, and the Alps on him. Do not try to persuade him that there is no future punishment. Do not go into any argument to prove to him that there is no hell. He knows there is. He is there now!
But he suffers also in the loss of physical health. The older people in this audience can remember Doctor Sewell going through this country electrifying great audiences by demonstrating to them the effect of strong drink upon the human stomach. I am told he had eight or ten diagrams which he presented to the people, showing the different stages in the progress of the disease, and I am told tens of thousands of people turned back from that ulcerous sketch and swore eternal abstinence from all intoxicants. God only knows what the drunkard suffers. Pain files on every nerve, and travels every muscle, and gnaws on every bone, and stings with every poison, and pulls with every torture. What reptiles crawl over his shivering limbs. What specters stand by his midnight pillows! What groans tear the air! Talk of the rack, talk of the funeral pyre, talk of the Juggernaut’97he suffers them all at once.
See the attendants stand back from that ward in the hospital where the inebriates are dying. They cannot stand it. The keepers come through it and say: ’93Hush up now, stop making this noise. Be still! You are disturbing all the other patients. Keep still now!’94 Then the keepers pass on, and after they get past then the poor creatures wring their hands, and say: ’93O God! Help, help! Give me rum; give me rum! O God! Help! Take the devils off of me. O God! O God!’94 And they shriek, and they blaspheme, and they cry for help, and then they ask the keepers to slay them, saying: ’93Stab me; strangle me; smother me. O God! Help, help! Rum! Give me rum. O God! Help!’94 They tear out their hair by the handful, and they bite their nails into the quick. This is no fancy picture. It is transpiring in a hospital at this moment. It went on last night while you slept; and more than that, that is the death some of you will die unless you stop! I see it coming. God help you to stop before you go so far that you cannot stop.
But it plagues a man also in the loss of home. I do not care how much he loves his wife and children, if this habit gets the mastery over him, he will do the most outrageous things. If need be, in order to get strong drink he would sell them all into everlasting captivity. There are hundreds and thousands of homes that have been utterly blasted of it. I am speaking of no abstraction. Is there anything so disastrous to a man for this life and for the life to come? Do you tell me that a man can be happy when he knows he is breaking his wife’92s heart and clothing his children with rags? There are little children in the streets today, barefooted, unkempt, uncombed; want written on every patch of their faded dress, and on every wrinkle of their prematurely old countenance, who would have been in the house of God this morning as well clad as you had it not been that strong drink drove their parents down into penury and then down into the grave. O Rum, Rum! thou despoiler of homes, thou foe of God, thou recruiting officer of the pit, I hate thee!
But my subject takes a deeper tone when it tells you that the inebriate suffers the loss of the soul. The Bible intimates that if we go into the future world unforgiven the appetites and passions which were regnant here will torment us there. I suppose when the inebriate wakes up in the lost world, there will be an infinite thirst clawing upon him. In this world he could get strong drink. However poor he was in this world, he could beg or he could steal five cents to get a drink that would for a little while slake his thirst; but in eternity where will the rum come from? Dives wanted one drop of water, but could not get it. Where will the inebriate get the draught he so much requires, so much demands. No one to brew it. No one to mix it. No one to pour it. No one to fetch it. Millions of worlds now for the dregs that were thrown on the sawdusted floor of the restaurant. Millions of worlds now for the rind flung out from the punchbowl of an earthly banquet. Dives called for water. The inebriate calls for rum.
If a fiend from the lost world should come up on a mission to a grogshop, and having finished the mission in the grogshop, should come back, taking on the tip of his wing one drop of alcoholic beverage, what excitement it would make all through the world of the lost; and if that one drop of alcoholic beverage should drop from the wing of the fiend upon the tongue of the inebriate, how he would spring up and cry: ’93That’92s it; that’92s it! Rum! Rum! That’92s it!’94 And all the caverns of the lost would echo with the cry, ’93Give it to me. Rum! Rum!’94 Ah! my friends, the inebriate’92s sorrow in the next world will not be the absence of God or holiness or light; it will be the absence of rum. ’93Look not upon the wine when it is red, when it moveth itself aright in the cup; for at the last it biteth like a serpent, and it stingeth like an adder.’94
When I see this plague in the land, and when I see this destroying angel sweeping across our great cities, I am sometimes indignant, and sometimes humiliated. When a man asks me: ’93What are you in favor of for the subjugation of this evil?’94 I answer, ’93I am ready for anything that is reasonable.’94 You ask me ’93Are you in favor of Sons of Temperance?’94 Yes. ’93Are you in favor of Good Samaritans?’94 Yes. ’93Are you in favor of Good Templars?’94 Yes. ’93Are you in favor of a prohibitory law?’94 Yes. ’93Are you in favor of the pledge?’94 Yes. Combine all the influences, O Christian reformers and philanthropists. Combine them all for the extirpation of this evil.
Thirty women in one of the Western States banded together, and with an especial ordination from God they went forth to the work and shut up all the grog shops of a large village. Thirty women, with their song and with their prayer; and if one thousand or two thousand Christian men and women with an especial ordination from God should go forth feeling the responsibility of their work and discharging their mission, they could in this city shut up all the grogshops. Put an end to this mighty vice of strong drink and redeem our beloved city.
But I must not dwell on generalities; I must come to specifics. Are you astray? If there is any sermon I dislike it is a sermon on generalities. I want personalities. Are you astray? Have you gone so far you think you cannot get back? Did I say a few moments ago that a man might go to a point in inebriation where he could not stop? Yes, I said it, and I reiterate it; but I want you also to understand that while the man himself, of his own strength, cannot stop, God can stop any man. You have only to lay hold of the strong arm of the Lord God Almighty. He can stop you. Many summers ago I went over to New York one Sabbath evening’97our church not yet being open for the autumnal services’97I went into a room in the Fourth Ward, New York, where a religious service was being held for reformed drunkards, and I heard a revelation that night that I had never heard before’97fifteen or twenty men standing up and giving testimony such as I had never heard given. They not only testified that their hearts had been changed by the grace of God, but that the grace of God had extinguished their thirst. They went on to say that they had reformed at different times before, but immediately fallen, because they were doing the whole work in their own strength: ’93But as soon as we gave our hearts to God,’94 they said, ’93and the love of the Lord Jesus Christ came into our soul, the thirst was all gone. We have no more disposition for strong drink.’94
It was a new revelation to me, and I have proclaimed it again and again in the hearing of those who have far gone astray; and I stand here today to tell you that the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ cannot only save your soul, but save your body. I look off today upon the desolation. Some of you are so far on in this habit, although there may be no outward indications of it’97you never have staggered along the street’97the vast majority of people do not know that you stimulate; but God knows, and you know; and by human calculations there is not one chance out of five thousand that you will ever be stopped. Beware! There are some of you who are my warm personal friends, to whom I must say that unless you quit this evil habit, within ten years, as to your body you will lie down in a drunkard’92s grave, and as to your immortal soul, you will lie down in a drunkard’92s hell! It is a hard thing to say, but it is true, and I utter the warning lest I have your blood upon my soul. Beware! As today you open the door of your wine closet, let the decanter flash that word upon your soul, ’93Beware!’94 As you pour out the beverage let the foam at the top spell out the word, ’93Beware!’94 In the great day of God’92s judgment, when a hundred million drunkards shall come up to get their doom, I want you to testify that this day in love of your soul and in fear of God, I gave you warning in regard to that influence which has already been felt in your home, blowing out some of its lights’97premonition of the blackness of darkness forever.
Oh! if you could only hear Intemperance with drunkards’92 bones drumming on the top of the wine cask the Dead March of immortal souls, you would go home and kneel down and pray God that rather than your children should ever become the victims of this evil habit, you might carry them out to Greenwood and put them down in the last slumber, waiting for the flowers of spring to come over the grave’97sweet prophecies of the resurrection. God hath a balm for such a wound, but what flower of comfort ever grew on the blasted heath of a drunkard’92s sepulcher?
Autor: T. De Witt Talmage