AGAINST INTEMPERANCE. PROVERBS 23: 29-35. "Who hath woe? who hath sorrow? who hath contentions?" etc. Our A TERRIBLE meaning lies hidden in the very common word, intemperance - the cutting off from time. other word, intoxication, denotes an arrow dipped in poison. Common language thus shadows the awful vice. The drunkard cuts off his life by poison. Suicides do not always choose the same method of ending life; there are slow poisons and poisons that work quickly; but each kills. It is useless to plead ignorance of the effects. The working of poison is sure as the day of judgment: the science of chemistry is unalterable. The wise man saw the poison in the wine that was red; knew that the color in the cup did not destroy its venom; understood the rank deception in its moving itself aright. Notwithstanding all its beautiful color and motion, the wise man had discovered the results : "At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder." The deadly evil makes no selection of its victims; it is as harmful to the monarch on the throne as to the most ignorant slave in the cabin. Outward environment makes no difference in the working of the poison upon the vitals. The sure chemical process craves its destructive fuel. The inflamed system burns in irrepressible appetite for the cause of its ruin. The disease that knows no moderation in its increase allows no moderate appetite. A saloonist of thirty years' business, upon being asked why he never used intoxicants, replied in the frankness of his nature: "I have been in this business for thirty years, and have never yet seen the man who was strong enough to resist its power." Alexander conquered the world, and alcohol conquered him. Scotland gave its homage to Burns, yet the gifted genius went down in the ruin of the terrible curse. In more ways than one the great Mozart composed his own requiem, hastening the fateful day, finishing the pathetic music just before death came, until, borne to the burial place in a blinding storm of snow, his body found a pauper's grave. Genius eclipsed by the unerring law ! "Poor Goldsmith" was a wreck of one to whom God had given consummate abilities. No sermon can equal the example of a single human life going down its steep course, yet the frequent examples of such slow suicides do not warn men as they should. It seems human nature to defy danger. Men like to walk where the deep chasm by their feet makes the head dizzy. They face dangers for the pleasure in such bold defiance. The curse makes one resemble him "that lieth down in the midst of the sea, or as he that lieth upon the top of a mast." Strange that the sight of such imbruted men has no greater effect! It might be presumed that one drunkard would serve as a warning against the vice in every community; yet the multiplied warnings pass unheeded. The maudlin language raises a laugh at its silliness. The stumbling gait declares the last visible vestige of reason gone; the bleared eye betokens the departure of intelligence; the form is that of a wreck. Disgusting as is such a sight, because the image of God is sunk so low, yet the lesson is untaught upon the many. Intemperance, as implied in the text, indicates the tendency of human nature. Why will men enter upon paths of ruin? The doctrine of depravity needs no dem onstration as a fact. The biblical teachings are wrought out in everyday life and conduct. There is no book so exalts man as does the Bible. It gives him the authority over all created things. It declares him made in the image of God. Yet even such a heritage has not kept him from becoming prodigal of his gifts. The sad undertone through every book of Scripture is of sin. It blurs the peace and life of Eden; it builds high its tower of Babel; it turns away the chosen people from their trust in God; it kills the prophets; it crucifies Christ; it opposes the work of the apostles and servants of Christ. From the first page to the last, the history of the race is the history of sin in its inevitable conflict with righteousness. What is true in general history is true of the individual, except as divine grace intervenes. We notice the tendency under the sin of intemperance. I. The moral degradation. There seems almost an impossibility in the suggestion of any sane man's deliberately dethroning his reason, yet this is what uncounted multitudes are doing. Brilliant intellects have succumbed to the power of poison until their actions are those of babbling idiots, "uttering perverse things." A Christian civilization shrinks from the horrors of the opium habit; hears with dismay the recital of the effects of the terrible master; gazes with pity upon the victim whose will seems broken beyond power of recall; and yet the drink habit is equally debasing. The wise man pictures the scene as when one "lieth down in the midst of the sea, or as he that lieth upon the top of a mast." All this is common knowledge, and the deliberate choice of the man leading to such a condition would brand him as insane were it not so common a fact. It is the destruction of everything manly and noble in human nature. It places man on a level with the beasts. can tyrannize over reason until manhood goes. Four out Rum of every five murderers commit their awful work under the frenzy that rules where reason has left its throne. Intemperance is thus a problem of morals. It dates back to the human choice that is made. Just as the suicide can see in the potion of the glass the certainty of the death it can bring, so the drunkard, even in the earlier stages, can understand the possibilities in the cup that inebriates. It is easy to suggest that the possibility may not become a probability of crime, but the overturning or weakening of reason is an almost insane risk. There has been too much pity spent upon those who will not restrain their appetites. It is because of the involved sin that the apostle declares, "No drunkard shall inherit the kingdom of God." II. The physical degradation. Volumes have been written to illustrate the influence of mind upon matter, but the theme is never exhausted. The silent thoughts cannot always be hidden. Corruption in the heart works out its marks upon the face and in the manners. No cloak can conceal the iniquity of the hidden choices. is a sure index of the motives that rule within. The body But while this is true of motives, it is doubly evident where the choices purposely defile the body that is made to be the temple of the Holy Ghost. Leading practitioners in the schools of medicine are aroused to the disastrous effects produced upon the living frame in which we dwell here. It was Lord Bacon who observed: "Not one man in a thousand dies a natural death, and most diseases have their rise from intemperance." Probably only since the rise of temperance as a principle has the assertion of the great thinker been disproved. Modern civilization, arrogating to itself the title of Christian, taxes itself heavily in the building of insane asylums as retreats for the large percentage of those who began life with unclouded brains but have brought themselves into the mad house at last. Added to such histories must be taken the effects of heredity. A distinguished German authority has given the scientific degradation resultant upon the generations succeeding the victim of the drink habit. The characteristics of the first generation are moral depravity and alcoholic excess; those of the second or succeeding generation, the drink mania, attacks of insanity, and general paralysis; in the third generation science expects hypochondria, melancholy, and tendencies to murder; while the characteristics of the fourth generation are imbecility, idiocy, and extinction of family. What is such a catalogue of evils but a scientific exposition of the scriptural teaching that the iniquities of the fathers shall be visited upon the children unto the third or fourth generation? Upon the victim of the habit there may come the terrible delirium that Pliny called the "sleep agitated by furies"; while the children, innocent of the sin, sink under the burden of the iniquity into a worse than pauper's grave. The words of the wise man are acknowledged by men of all time: "Who hath woe? who hath sorrow? who hath contentions? who hath babbling? who hath wounds without cause? who hath redness of eyes? They that tarry long at the wine; they that go to seek mixed wine." Modern civilization has not modified in the slightest degree the unerring picture drawn by the writers of thousands of years ago. III. The social degradation. Intemperance as an evil concerns more than the individual or his family; it reaches out into the state. Above all else man is a social being. His interests are closely wrapped up either in the public weal or woe, and their interests are just as surely wrapped up in him. The natural outcome of the deadening process is epitomized in the assertion of the proverb concerning the strange women who become the companions of such as he. Society must bear the daily sight of his unkept |