376. Winter and How to Meet It

Winter and How to Meet It

Mat_24:20 : ’93Pray ye that your flight be not in the winter.’94

The inhabitants of the old city of Jerusalem were here told that they would have to fly for their lives. Such flight would be painful, even in the flush of spring-time, but superlatively distressing if in cold weather; therefore they were told to pray that their flight be not in the winter.

We have had a few shrill, sharp blasts already, the advance guard of whole regiments of storms and tempests. No one here need be told that we are in the opening of another winter. There is something in the winter season that not only tests our physical endurance, but, especially in the city, tries our moral character. It is the winter months that ruin morally and forever many of our young men. We sit in the house on a winter’92s night, and hear the storm raging on the outside, and imagine the helpless craft driven on the coast; but, if our ears were only good enough, we could on any winter night hear the crash of a hundred moral shipwrecks. Many who came last September to town by the first of March will have been blasted. It only takes one winter to ruin a young man. When the long winter evenings have come many of our young men will improve them in forming a more intimate acquaintance with books, contracting higher social friendships, and strengthening and ennobling characters. But not so with all. I will show you before I get through that at this season of the year temptations are especially ram-pant, and my counsel is, look out how and where you spend your winter nights!

I remark, first, that there is no season of the year in which vicious allurements are so active. In warm weather places of dissipation win their tamest triumphs. People do not feel like going, in the hot nights of summer, among the blazing gaslights, or breathing the fetid air of assemblages. The receipts of most grogshops in a December night are three times what they are in any night in July or August. I doubt not there are larger audiences in the casinos in winter than in the summer weather. Iniquity plies a more profitable trade. December, January and February are harvest months for the devil. The play-bills of the low entertainments then are more charming, the acting is more enticing, the enthusiasm of the spectators more contagious. Many a young man who manages to keep right the rest of the year capsizes now. When he came to town in the autumn his eye was bright, his cheek rosy, his step elastic; but before spring, as you pass him you will say to your friend: ’93What is the matter with that young man?’94 The fact is, that one winter of dissipation has done the work of ruin.

It is the season for parties, and if they are of the right kind our social nature is improved and our spirits are cheered up. But many of them are not of the right kind, and our young people, night after night, are kept in the whirl of unhealthy excitement, until their strength fails, their spirits are broken down, and their taste for ordinary life corrupted; and by the time the spring weather comes they are in the doctor’92s hands or sleeping in the cemetery. The certificate of their death is made out; and the physician, out of regard for the family, calls the disease by some Latin name, when the truth is that they died of too many parties. Away with these wine-drinking convivialities! How dare you, the father of a household, trifle with the appetites of our young people? Perhaps out of regard for the minister, or some other weak temperance man, you have the decanter in a side-room, where, after refreshments, only a select few are invited; and you come back with a glare in your eye and a stench in your breath which prove that you have been out serving the devil. The excuse which Christian men often give for this is, that it is necessary, after such late eating, by some sort of stimulant to help digestion. My plain opinion is that, if a man have no more control over his appetite than to stuff himself until his digestive organs refuse to do their office, he ought not to call himself a man, but rather to class himself among the beasts that perish. I take the words of the Lord Almighty, and cry: ’93Woe to him that putteth the bottle to his neighbor’92s lips!’94

Young man, take it as the counsel of a friend when I bid you be cautious where you spend your winter evenings. Thank God that you have enjoyed so many glad winter days in which your childhood was made cheerful by the faces of fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, some of whom, alas! will never again wish you a ’93Happy New Year’94 or ’93A Merry Christmas.’94 Let no one tempt you out of your sobriety. I have seen respectable young men of the best families drunk on New Year’92s Day. The excuse they gave for the inebriation was that the ladies insisted on their taking it. There have been instances where the delicate hand of woman has kindled a young man’92s taste for strong drink, and the woman after many years, when the attractions of that holiday scene were all forgotten has crouched, in her rags and her desolation and her woe, under the uplifted hand of the drunken monster who, on that New Year’92s morning so long ago, took the glass from her hand. Soon the woman stands on the abutment of the bridge on a moonlit night, wondering if down under the water there is not some quiet place for a broken heart. She takes one wild leap’97and all is over!

Oh, mingle not with the harmless beverage of your festive scene this poison of adders! Mix not with the white sugar of the cup the snow of this awful leprosy! Mar not the clatter of cutlery at the holiday feast with the clink of a madman’92s chain! Stop and look into the window of that pawnbroker’92s shop. Elegant furs. Elegant watches. Elegant scarfs. Elegant flutes. People stand with a pleased look gazing at these things; but I look with a shudder, as though I had seen into a window of hell. Whose elegant watch was that? It was a drunkard’92s. Whose furs? They belonged to a drunkard’92s wife. Whose flute? Whose shoes? Whose scarf? They belonged to a drunkard’92s child. If I could I would take the three brazen balls hanging at the doorway and clang them together until they tolled the awful knell of the drunkard’92s soul. The pawnbroker’92s shop is only one eddy of the great stream of social drunkenness.

Stand back, young man! Take not the first step in the path that leads there. Let not the flame of strong drink ever scorch your tongue. You may tamper with these things and escape, but your influence will be wrong. Can you not make a sacrifice for the good of others? When the good ship London went down, the captain was told that there was a way of escape in one of the lifeboats. He said: ’93No, I will go down with the passengers.’94 All the world acknowledged that heroism. Can you not deny yourself insignificant indulgences for the good of others? Be not allured by the fact that you drink only the moderate beverages. You take only ale, and a man has to drink a large amount of it to become intoxicated. Yes; but there’92s not in all the city today an inebriate who did not begin with light drinks. ’93XXX’94’97what does that mark mean? ’93XXX’94 on the beer barrels; ’93XXX’94 on the brewer’92s dray; ’93XXX’94 on the door of the gin shop; ’93XXX’94 on the side of the bottle. Not being able to find any one who could tell me what this mark means, I have had to guess that the whole thing was an allegory: ’93XXX’94’97that is, thirty heartbreaks, thirty agonies, thirty desolated homes, thirty chances for a drunkard’92s grave, thirty ways to perdition. ’93XXX!’94 If I were to write a story, the first chapter would be ’93XXX,’94 the last the pawnbroker’92s shop. Be watchful! In the winter season all the allurements to dissipation will be especially busy. Let not your flight to hell be in the winter.

I also remark that the winter evenings, through their very length, allow great swing for indulgences. Few young men would have the inclination to go to their rooms at seven o’92clock and sit until eleven reading Motley’92s Dutch Republic or John Foster’92s Essays. The young men who have been confined to the store all day want fresh air and sightseeing, and they must go somewhere. The most of them have of a winter’92s evening three or four hours of leisure. After the evening repast the young man puts on his hat and coat and goes out. ’93Come in here,’94 cries one form of allurement. ’93Come in here,’94 cries another. ’93Go,’94 says Satan; ’93you ought to see for yourself.’94 ’93Why don’92t you go?’94 says a comrade; ’93it is a shame for a young man to be as green as you are. By this time you ought to have seen everything.’94

Especially is temptation strong when business is dull. I have noticed that men spend more money when they have little to spend. The tremendous question to be settled by our great populace, day by day, is how to get a livelihood. Many of our young men just starting for themselves are very much discouraged. They had hoped before this to have set up a household of their own. But their gains have been slow, their discouragements many. The young man can hardly take care of himself. How can he take care of another? And, to the curse of modern society, before a young man is able to set up a home of his own, he is expected to have enough to support in idleness somebody else, when God intended that they should begin together and jointly earn a livelihood. Thus many of our young men are utterly discouraged and utterly unfitted to resist temptation. The time when the pirate bore down upon the ship was when its sails were down and it was making no headway. People wish they had more time to think. The trouble is, in dull times, that people have too much time to think. Give to many of our commercial men the four hours of these winter nights, with nothing to divert them, and before spring they will have lodgings in an insane asylum.

I remark, further, that the winter is especially trying to the moral character of our young men, because some of their homes in winter are especially unattractive. In summer they can sit on the steps or have a bouquet in the vase on the mantel, and the evenings are so short that soon after gaslight they feel like retiring. Parents do not take enough pains to make these long winter nights attractive. It is strange that old people know so little about young people. To hear some of these parents talk, you would think they had never themselves been young and had been born with spectacles on. Oh! it is trying for young people to sit in the house from seven to eleven o’92clock at night and to hear parents groan at their ailments and the nothingness of the world. The nothingness of the world! How dare you talk such blasphemy. It took God six days to make this world, and he has allowed it six thousand years to hang upon his holy heart, and the world has shone on you and caressed you for these fifty or seventy years, and yet you dare talk of the nothingness of the world! I do not believe in the whole universe there is a world equal to it, except it be heaven. You cannot expect your children to stay in the house in these long winter evenings, to hear you denounce this star-lighted, sun-warmed, shower-baptized, flower-strewn, angel-watched, God-inhabited planet. Many of you have the means’97why do you not buy them a violin or a picture? Or have your daughter educated in music, until she can help to make home attractive? There are thousands of ways of lighting up the domestic circle. It requires no large income, no big house, no rich wardrobe, no chased silver, no gorgeous upholstery, but a parental heart awake to its duty. Have a doleful home and your children will not stay in it, though you block up the door with Bibles, and tie fast to them a million catechisms. I said to a man: ’93This is a beautiful tree in front of your house.’94 He answered, with a whine: ’93Yes, but it will fade.’94 I said to him: ’93You have a beautiful garden.’94 He replied: ’93Yes, but it will perish.’94 I found out afterward that his son was a vagabond, and I was not surprised at it. You cannot groan men into decency, but you can groan them out of it.

’93Pray ye that your flight be not in the winter.’94 Arm yourself against the especial temptations of this season. Poets and painters have represented Satan as horned and hoofed. If I were a poet I should describe him with manners polished to the last perfection; hair flowing in graceful curls; eye a little bloodshot, but floating in bewitching languor; hands soft and diamonded; step light and artistic; voice mellow as a flute; boot elegantly shaped; conversation facile, carefully toned, and Frenchy; breath perfumed until it would seem that nothing had ever touched his lips save balm and myrrh. But his heart I would encase with the scales of a monster, then fill with pride, with beastliness of desire, with recklessness, with hypocrisy, with death. Then I would have him touched with some rod of disenchantment until his two eyes would become the cold orbs of the adder; and on his lip would come the foam of raging intoxication; and to his feet the spring of the panther; and his soft hand would become the clammy hand of a wasted skeleton; while suddenly from his heart would burst in crackling and all-devouring fury the unquenchable flame; and in the affected lisp of his tongue would come the hiss of the worm that never dies. But, until disenchanted, nothing but myrrh and balm and ringlet and diamond and flute-like voice and conversation aromatic, facile, and Frenchy.

It is beautiful to see a young man living a life of purity, standing upright where thousands of other young men fall! You will move in honorable circles all your days, and some old friend of your father will meet you and say: ’93My son, how glad I am to see you look so well. Just like your father, for all the world. I thought you would turn out well when I used to hold you on my knee.’94 But here is a young man who takes the other route. The voices of sin charm him away. He reads bad books, lives in vicious circles, loses the glow from his cheek, the sparkle from his eye, and the purity from his soul. The good shun him. Down he goes, little by little. They who knew him when he came to town, while yet lingering on his head was a pure mother’92s blessing, and on his lip the dew of a pure sister’92s kiss, now pass him and say: ’93What an awful wreck!’94 His eyes bleared with frequent carousals, his cheek bruised in the grogshop fight, his lip swollen with evil indulgences. Look out what you say to him; for a trifle he will take your life. Lower down and lower down; until, outcast of God and man, he lies in the almshouse a blotch of loathsomeness. Sometimes he calls out for God, and then for more drink. Now he prays, now curses, now laughs as fiends laugh, then bites his nails to the quick, then runs both hands through the shock of hair that hangs about his head like the mane of a wild beast, then shivers with unutterable terror until the cot shakes; then, with uplifted fist, fights back the devils or clutches the serpents that seem winding him in their coil; then asks for water, which is instantly consumed by his cracked lips. Going his round some morning, the surgeon finds him dead. Straighten the limbs. You need not try to comb out or shove back the matted locks. Wrap him in a sheet. Put him in a box. Two men will carry it down to the wagon at the door. With chalk write on the top of the box the name of the destroyed. Do you know who it is? That is you, O man, if, yielding to the temptations to a dissipated life, you go out and perish. ’93There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof is death.’94

Devote these December, January and February evenings to high pursuits, innocent amusements, intelligent socialties, and Christian attainments. Do not waste this winter. We shall soon have seen the last snow-shower, and have passed up into the companionship of him whose raiment is exceeding white as snow’97as no fuller on earth can whiten it. To the right-hearted the winter nights of earth will soon end in the June morning of heaven. The River of God from under the throne never freezes over. The foliage of Life’92s fair tree is never frost-bitten. The festivals and hilarities and family gatherings of Christmas times on earth will give way to the larger reunions and the brighter lights and the gladder scenes and the sweeter garlands and the richer feastings of the great holiday of heaven.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage