I threw that challenge down once, and a man said to me the next day, “I wasn’t at your meeting last night, but I understand you made the astounding statement that no man had been in the liquor business twenty years who hadn’t the curse in his own family.”
“Yes,” I said, “I did.”
“It isn’t true,” he said, “and I want you to take it back. My father was a rumseller, and I am a rumseller, and the curse has never come into my father’s family or into mine.”
I said, “What! two generations selling that infernal stuff, and the curse has never come into the family! I will investigate it, and if I find I am wrong I will make the retraction just as publicly as I did the statement.”
There were two prominent citizens of the town in the room, on whose faces I noticed a peculiar expression as the man was talking. After he left, one of them said:
“Do you know, Mr. Moody, that man’s own brother was a drunkard and committed suicide a few weeks ago and left a widow with seven children; they are under his roof now! He was a terrible drunkard himself until the shock of his brother’s suicide cured him.”
I don’t know how you can account for it unless he thought his brother wasn’t a relative. Perhaps he was a sort of a Cainite, saying, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
When I was a pastor of a church in Chicago we were trying to get hold of the working-men. They used to say:
“Come down to the factory at dinner-time and we will give you a chance to speak.”
I would ask them, “Why won’t you come to the church?”