C.—PERVERSION.
The poison-habit, as we might call the craving for the stimulus of unnatural diet, is the oldest vice, and in some of its forms has been practiced by almost every nation known to history or tradition. Thousands of years before Lot got drunk on home-made wine, the ancestors of the Brahmans fuddled with soma-juice; Zoroaster enacts laws against habitual intoxication; the art of turning grape-juice from a blessing into a curse seems to have been known to the nations of Iran, to the Parsees, and to the [[64]]first agricultural colonists of the lower Nile. Nunus, the Arabian Noah, is said to have planted vineyards on the banks of the Orontes; the worship of Bacchus was introduced into Asia Minor several centuries before the birth of Homer. The origin of the opium habit antedates the earliest records of Chinese history; for immemorial ages the Tartars have been addicted to the use of Koumis (fermented mare’s milk), the Germanic nations to beer, the natives of Siam to tea and sago-wine. Intoxication and the excessive use of animal food were prevalent vices, especially in the larger cities, of pagan Greece and Rome.
Yet the ancients sinned with their eyes half open. Their recognition of dietetic abuses was expressed in the word frugality, which literally meant subsistence on tree fruits—or, at least, vegetable products—in distinction from the habitual use of flesh-food. The advantages of temperate habits were never directly denied; the law of Pythagoras enjoins total abstinence from wine and flesh, and the name of a “Pythagorean” became almost a synonym of “philosopher.” In all but the most depraved centuries of Imperial Rome, wine was forbidden to children and women. The festival of the Bona Dea commemorated the fate of a Roman matron who had yielded to the temptation of intoxicating drink, and was slain by the hand of her stern husband. Lycurgus recommends the plan of letting the pupils of the military training-schools witness the bestial conduct of a drunken Helot, in order to inspire them with an abhorrence of intoxication. The bias of public opinion [[65]]always respected the emulation of patriarchal frugality and frowned upon the excesses of licentious patricians.
But the triumph of an anti-physical religion removed those safeguards. Mistrust in the competence of our natural instincts formed the keystone of the Galilean dogma. The importance of physical welfare was systematically depreciated. The health-laws of the Mosaic code were abrogated. The messiah of Antinaturalism sanctioned the use of alcoholic drinks by his personal example—nay, by the association of that practice with the rites of a religious sacrament. The habit of purchasing mental exaltation—even of a fever-dream—at the expense of the body, agreed perfectly with the tendencies of a Nature-despising fanaticism, and during the long night of the Middle Ages monks and priests vied in an unprecedented excess of alcoholic riots. Nearly every one of the thick-sown convents from Greece to Portugal had a vineyard and a wine cellar of its own. The monastery of Weltenburg on the upper Danube operated the largest brewery of the German empire. For centuries spiritual tyranny and spirituous license went hand in hand, and as the church increased in wealth, gluttony was added to the unnatural habits of the priesthood, and only the abject poverty of the lower classes prevented intemperance from becoming a universal vice. As it was, the followers of the Nature-despising messiah lost no opportunity to drown their better instincts in alcohol. They could plead the precedence of their moral exemplars, and vied in sowing the seeds of bodily diseases [[66]]which their system of ethics welcomed as conducive to the welfare of a world-renouncing soul.
Among the slaves of the Scotch kirk-tyrants the long-continued suppression of all healthier pastimes contributed its share to the increase of intemperance. On the day when the laboring classes found their only chance of leisure, outdoor sports were strictly prohibited. Dancing was considered a heinous, and on the Sabbath almost an unpardonable, sin. The tennis-halls were closed from Saturday night to Monday morning. Bathing was sinful. Mountain excursions, strolls along the beach, or in the open fields, were not permitted on the day of the Lord. Dietetic excesses, however, escaped control, and thus became the general outlet for the cruelly suppressed craving for a diversion from the deadly monotony of drudgery and church-penance. For “Nature will have her revenge, and when the most ordinary and harmless recreations are forbidden as sinful, is apt to seek compensation in indulgences which no moralist would be willing to condone, … and the strictest observance of all those minute and oppressive Sabbatarian regulations was found compatible with consecrating the day of rest to a quiet but unlimited assimilation of the liquid which inebriates but does not cheer” (Saturday Review, July 19, 1879). “Everyone,” says Lecky, “who considers the world as it really exists, must have convinced himself that in great towns public amusements of an exciting order are absolutely necessary, and that to suppress them is simply to plunge an immense portion of the population into the lowest depths of vice.” [[67]]
Clerical despotism is still a potent ally of intemperance. In hundreds of British and North American cities the dearth of better pastimes drives our workingmen to the pot-house. They drink to get drunk, as the only available means of escaping tedium and the consciousness of their misery. Nature craves recreation, and the suppression of that instinct has avenged itself by its perversion.