Jamie, however, soon found to his cost that he had commenced a very great and a very sore work. The spirit-sellers, four of whom were at a single cross-roads in his neighborhood, he expected to be against him, and drunkards he expected would be against him too; but he soon found that his chief opponents lay in quite another quarter. Sensible people soon began to see that spirit-sellers are drones on the community, doing no good, but much harm: and, besides, one of them having first allowed a temperance meeting to be held in his barn, conscientiously shut up his spirit-shop, and joined the Temperance Society, being convinced that spirit-selling is poison-selling, and that each spirit-shop might justly have on its sign-board, “Beggars made here.” Of the drunkards, some indeed did call him hard names, and impute to him base motives; but from among even these, lost as they seemed to be to all hope, he was, by God’s grace, enabled to reclaim some, as brands snatched from the burning, while others of them said to him, in the bitterness of their reflecting moments, Go on, Jamie, your work is God’s work. Had you commenced but a little sooner, what a blessing might your Society have been to us; but alas, it is all over with us now!
What at first surprised Jamie much was, that the fathers or husbands of these very drunkards were his most bitter opponents. He went to them with a glad heart, expecting that they would hear with delight of a plan by which drunkards, in great numbers, have been reclaimed, and by which the temperate can be effectually secured against temptation; but his heart sunk when he found, not that they received him coldly, for to such receptions he was accustomed, but that they, as well as others who boast much of being “temperate enough already,” lost all temper at the very sound of temperance.
Some of these neighbors of Jamie were regular in attendance on public worship, orthodox and strict, which gave them an influence in the neighborhood. Jamie, therefore, was anxious to enlist them on the side of temperance. Yet he could not but know, and very seriously consider, that whether, in market or fair, these same men either bought or sold, there could be no such thing as a dry bargain; that at churns, and wakes, and funerals, and marriages, and such like, they always pushed round the bottle cheerily; that they held it churlish to refuse either to give or take a treat; that at their evening tea-parties it was not uncommon for six or eight gallons of spirituous liquor to be consumed by a few neighbors, men and women, in a single night; that in every house which their minister visited, the bottle was put to his mouth; and that as the natural consequence of all this and far more, not only was the crime of drunkenness, whether in minister or private layman, treated with much false charity, and called by many soft names, but drunkenness was spreading its ravages through many families, and bringing down many heads in sorrow to the grave.
Jamie was indeed charitable, but he was unable to persuade himself that, amid such universal drinking, all the objections to his Temperance Society arose merely from ignorance, or prejudice, or conscience; and therefore, when people were telling him, as they often did, that they cared not a rush about spirituous liquor, “they could either drink it or let it alone,” he used sometimes to reply, “Oh, I know well enough that you can drink it; what I want to know is, whether you can let it alone:” and at other times he would tell them Dean Swift’s story of the three men who called for whiskey in a spirit-shop: I want a glass, said the first, for I’m very hot; I want a glass, said the second, for I’m very cold; let me have a glass, said the third, because I like it!
As Jamie’s opponents were no match for him in argument, they tried the plans usually resorted to when the wisdom and the spirit by which truth speaks cannot be resisted. For a while they tried ridicule. That, however, neither satisfied their own consciences nor frightened Jamie, for Jamie could stand a laugh, what many a man can’t do who has stood grape-shot. Then they circulated reports about his having got drunk on different occasions, and having been caught drinking in secret; and some believed them, being of the same mind with the distiller, who asserted it to be mere humbug that any man could live without whiskey, and that wherever the croaking cold water society men did not drink in the daytime, they made up for it by drinking at night. These evil reports, however, fell dead after a little, and nobody was vile enough to take them up again; and though attempts were made to circulate the lie, that Jamie had grown weak and sickly since he gave up drinking, yet every body who looked him in the face saw, that though he had neither a purple nose nor whiskey blossoms on his chin, yet he was stronger and healthier than ever; and that he could say, what every member of the Temperance Society, whether temperate or intemperate formerly, can say with truth, after abstaining for a single month from distilled spirits, that in every sense of the word he is better for the change.
Foiled thus in all their attempts, the opponents of Jamie and of temperance rallied strong for one last charge; and as it was against Jamie’s weak side—who has not a weak side—they already chuckled in triumph. Jamie had thrown away his glass for ever, but his pipe stuck firm between his teeth still. The time was, when he was strong and well without tobacco, and when the taste of tobacco was disgusting and sickening to him; but respectable people were smoking, and chewing, and snuffing around him, and when he went to the wake, the funeral, or the evening gathering, “Why,” thought he, “should I be singular, and not take a whiff like the rest?” He chose smoking, probably, because he considered it to be the most genteel way of being dirty and disgusting; and, according to the general law of habits, being most inveterate where the article used was at first most nauseous, he soon became so confirmed a smoker that one-half of what he smoked would have kept him decently clothed.
The lovers of strong drink, therefore, thought that they had Jamie on the hip completely, when they told him that his only reason for giving up whiskey was, that he could not afford to buy both it and tobacco; and promised, though with no sincerity, that they would quit drinking if he would quit smoking.
The reproach stuck like a burr to Jamie’s conscience. He asked himself again and again, Is my use of tobacco a stumbling-block in the way of any? Does it do injury to the great cause which has all my heart? He read, he thought, and read and thought again; and the more he read and thought, the more was he convinced that the habitual use of tobacco in any of its forms is useless; is wasteful of time and money; is dirty; is offensive to others, and a breach of Christian charity; is a bad example to the simple and young; is a temptation to drunkenness, and injurious to health. He resolved to renounce it, and flung the old black pipe from him to lift it again no more. Thus Jamie was conqueror still; and his victory was one which Alexander, the conqueror of the world, could not gain. Jamie gained a victory over himself, and he that ruleth over his own spirit is better than he that taketh a city; but Alexander, who wept because he had not other worlds besides his own to subdue, died as a fool dieth, and sleeps in a drunkard’s grave.
Jamie learned an important lesson in his victory, which will be of use to him as long as he lives. Whatever bad habit, he says, has got hold upon you, break it of at once. Would you pull your child out of the fire cautiously and gradually; or would you out with him at once? So let it be with every thing wrong. Don’t prepare for ceasing from sin to-morrow, or next year, but cease from it now. Do so yourself; go right up to your neighbor without fear, and in love tell him to do the same, having this assurance on your mind continually, that what ought to be done, can be done.