And look, too, at its waste of human happiness.
Yes, look—look for yourselves. The woes of drunkenness mock all description. Some tell of the happiness of drinking. O, if there is a wretched being on earth, it is the drunkard. His property wasted, his character gone, his body loathsome, his passions wild, his appetite craving the poison that kills him, his hopes of immortality blasted for ever; it is all
“Me miserable,
Which way I fly is hell, myself am hell.”
And his family. I can never look at it but with feelings of deepest anguish.
“Domestic happiness, thou only bliss
Of paradise that hast escaped the fall,”
thou art shipwrecked here. Sorrow, woe, wounds, poverty, babblings, and contention, have entered in and dwell here. Yet we have 300,000 such families in the land; and if each family consists of four individuals, more than a million persons are here made wretched by this curse of curses.
And his death. O, to die in our houses, amid our friends, and with the consolations of religion, strips not death of its character as the king of terrors. But to die as the drunkard dies, an outcast from society, in some hovel or almshouse, on a bed of straw, or in some ditch, or pond, or frozen in a storm; to die of the brain-fever, conscience upbraiding, hell opening, and foul spirits passing quick before his vision to seize him before his time—this, this is woe; this is the triumph of sin and Satan. Yet, in the last ten years, 300,000 have died in our land the death of the drunkard; rushing, where?—“Drunkards shall not inherit the kingdom of God”—rushing into hell, where their worm dieth not, and their fire can never be quenched. And if the demon is suffered to continue his ravages, 300,000 more of our existing population will, in the same way, rush into eternal burnings.
And his funeral. Have you ever been at a drunkard’s funeral? I do not ask, did you look at his corpse? It was cadaverous before he died. But did you look at his father as he bent over the grave and exclaimed in agony, “O, my son, my son, would to God I had died for thee, my son.” Did you look at his widow, pale with grief, and at his ragged, hunger-bitten children at her side, and see them turn away to share the world’s cold pity, or, perhaps, rejected and forlorn, follow the same path to death and hell?
Such are the ravages of the demon we hunt. Its footsteps are marked with blood. We glory in our liberties, and every fourth of July our bells ring a merry peal, as if we were the happiest people on earth. But O, our country, our country! She has a worm at her vitals, making fast a wreck of her physical energies, her intellect, and her moral principle; augmenting her pauperism and her crime; nullifying her elections—for a drunkard is not fit for an elector—and preparing her for subjection to the most merciless tyranny that ever scourged any nation under heaven. We talk of our religion, and weep over the delusions of the false prophet and the horrors of Juggernaut; but a more deceitful prophet is in our churches than Mahomet, and a more bloody idol than Juggernaut rolls through our land, crushing beneath its wheels our sons and our daughters. Woe, woe, woe to Zion. Satan is in Eden. And if no check is put to the ravages of the demon, our benevolent institutions must die, our sanctuaries be forsaken, our beautiful fields be wastes, and the church will read the history of her offspring in the third of Romans: Their throat is an open sepulchre; their mouth is full of cursing and bitterness; their feet are swift to shed blood—all, blasting our bright hope of the speedy approach of millennial glory.