Religious and educational aspects of temperance / by various authors.

Date:
[1874?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Religious and educational aspects of temperance / by various authors. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    would probably find many very grievous cases which would lead you to doubt the advisability of the process of moderate drinking ; in fact, I am certain that if this great meeting were polled and asked whetherthey knew of any one man or woman whom drink: had ruined, the answer would be that there was not one, or scarcely one, house in which there was not one dead. (Cheers.) Certainly I myself have known many who have been ruined in this way. They began without any thought of excess whatever. I dare scarcely summon either from the living or from the dead these ghosts and shadows of what once they vTere in order that they may warn us from this peril by the waving of their wasted hands ; still I may distantly and dimly describe one or two cases only which I have known in my own rank of life. I think of one young gallant officer, brave as a lion, liberal as the light of day—a man whose name was once not unknown in his country’s service, whose career was suddenly cut short, and who died a disgraced and ruined man. 1 think of the case of another—a young University student of brilliant attainments, of unusual promise, who suddenly sank from the same cause to destitution ; who used to write begging letters most abject in tone, and yet written in Latin so choice and so eloquent that few could have surpassed it, and who died disowned by his family in the ward of a London hospital of delirium tremens. I think of a lawyer, whose practice once bade fair to be magnificent, indulging in such “pleasures,” sinking into dubious practices, losing his place and influence in society, and dying a dis- ncnoured man. I think of another—a clergyman, very eloquent and widely known, whose presence was everywhere desired, who died miserably with a mysterious blight upon his name from the same cause. And I could go on giving many more cases which have come under my own immediate knowledge. There is very near my own parish a common lodging-house, where, if you entered, you might be met by people who would address you in French, or German or Italian, or even Latin, or Greek—men who were men of rank and position, men of culture, captains in the army, teachers in the university, but who, by i his cause, have sunk down to the degraded rabble of guilty sufferers. Well, now, what is the moral of these facts ? Surely it is that alcohol, whether you call it a poison or not, has something very peculiar in its nature: that there is about it a sweetness and seductiveness, a sort of serpentile spell of attraction, which gradually draws men on while they do not know it, and which at last they find themselves unable to resist. They begin by admiring the “ orient liquor in the crystal glass” of the enchanter, and they go on drinking their wine day by day, and at last the hour of misfortune comes when they are tried by toil or disappoint- ment, when they are tried by sorrow or bereavement, and perhaps on that account alone they drink too much ; and although they began life as gay, and proud, and as happy as any of us, they are now sitting amid the entanglement of terrible temptation—amid the very ruins of their former state. Coleridge says : “ Evil habit first draws, then drags, and then drives.” Or, as an eminent French writer expresses it, “ We are insensibly led to yield without resistance to slight temptations which we despise, and gradually we find ourselves in a perilous situation or even falling into an abyss, and then we cry out to God, ‘ Why hast Thou made