Chapter 13

In the fifth place, I advise and forewarn these men _as their personal friend_. If you distil ardent spirits, or furnish the materials, you must use them yourselves and allow of their use in your families; otherwise your inconsistency, not to say dishonesty, would subject you to universal contempt. Now, to have your children familiar with the sling, the toddy, and the flip, as they grow up! Is here no danger that the temptation will prove too strong for them? _Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned? Can one go upon hot coals, and his feet not be burned?_ And what compensation for the intemperance of a wife, or a child, would be the highest profits of an orchard, a field of rye, or a distillery? Oh, to be a drunkard is to destroy the soul as well as the body: and _what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?_ And are you yourselves in no danger of intemperance, plied as you are by so many allurements? Look around you and see how many strong men, how many of the wise, the moral, the amiable, and the apparently pious, have fallen before the fascinations of this prince of serpents. And are you safe who stand even within the reach of his forky tongue, and lay the bait for his victims, and lure them into his jaws by tasting of it yourselves? Oh, the history of distillers and temperate drinkers, in their last days, furnishes an awful warning for you.

But there is another danger before you, of which, as a faithful friend, I wish to forewarn you. I see a dark storm gathering over your heads. You cannot be ignorant of the mighty movement that is making in our land on the subject of temperance. You must have felt the heavy concussion, and heard the rolling thunder. The religious, the moral, the patriotic, the learned, and the wise, as intemperance has been developing its huge and hateful features more and more, have been aroused to effort; they have closed together in a firm phalanx; and as they move on with the standard of _total abstinence_ waving before them, the great, and the good, and the valiant of every name, are swelling their ranks. The cry is waxing louder and louder, "Where are the strong holds of the monster; point out to us the fountains that supply his insatiable thirst, and who it is that feeds them; and who it is that opens the enormous floodgates? and thither we will march, and against such men will we point our heaviest artillery." And to this cry there is an answer more and more distinctly breaking out: "To the distilleries--to the distilleries." My friends, wait not till this storm of public indignation bursts upon you, nor fancy that you can face it. Oh, no; it will be a steady, fiery blast, that will bear you down; and you will find that none but the dregs of the community will be left with you to sustain you. You will be left with the drunkards, to be distinguished from them only as their abettors and supporters; and from you will every virtuous and patriotic man turn away in disgust, as enemies to himself, his children, and his country. Think not that all this is imagination: look up, and you will see the cloud blackening, and the lightning beginning to play, and hear the thunder roaring. But it is not yet too late to escape from the fury of the storm.

Finally, I would entreat these men _as a Christian_. Some of them profess a personal and experimental knowledge of vital Christianity, and are members of the visible church. What, can it be that a real Christian should, at this day, be concerned in the manufacture of ardent spirits for general use? When I think of the light that now illuminates every man's path on this subject so clearly, and think how the horrors of intemperance must flash in his face at every step, I confess I feel disposed indignantly to reply, No; this man cannot be a Christian. But then I recollect David, the adulterer; Peter, the denier of his master, profanely cursing and swearing; and John Newton, a genuine convert to Christianity, yet for a long time violating every dictate of conscience and of right; and I check my hasty judgment, and leave the secret character of the manufacturer of ardent spirits to a higher and more impartial tribunal. But if such a man be really a Christian, that is, if he do really love God supremely and his neighbor as himself, in what a state of awful alienation and stupidity must he be living! Remaining in such a state, that is, while persevering in so unchristian an employment, can he have any evidence himself, or afford any evidence to others, of possessing a Christian character?

I would not apply these remarks in their unqualified severity to every professor of religion who supplies the distillery with materials, or who vends or uses wine or ardent spirits; for we shall find some of this description who really suppose that, instead of being condemned for such conduct in the Bible, they are rather supported by some parts of it: they not only find Christ converting water into wine at a marriage, and Paul directing Timothy to use a little wine for his health, but that, in one case, the Jews had liberty to convert a certain tithe into money, and bring it to Jerusalem and bestow it for what their _soul lusted after, for oxen, or for sheep, or for wine, or strong drink_, and _they were to eat there before the Lord their God, and rejoice, they and their household_. Deut. 14:26. But before any one settles down into a conclusion that this passage warrants the use of wine and ardent spirits, in our age and country, let him consider that there may have been, as there doubtless were, peculiar reasons, under the Levitical dispensation, for permitting the Jews to partake of what their soul desired _before the Lord_, which would not apply to mankind generally; as was the case in respect to several other things. But not to urge this point, I would say, further, that the fact that _Judea was a wine country_, that is, a country where the grape for the manufacture of wine was easily and abundantly raised, puts a different aspect upon this permission. In our country, the apple takes the place of the grape, and our cider is nearer equivalent to the wine of Judea; because there the apple does not flourish, and here, the grape cannot be extensively cultivated. _To use wine in wine countries, therefore, is essentially the same thing as to use cider in cider countries_; and it does not appear that the one, in such cases, is much more productive of intemperance than the other. The fact is, the wines used in countries where they are manufactured, contain but little more then half as much alcohol as most of the wine sold in this country, where, as a very respectable authority states, "for every gallon of pure wine which is sold, there is perhaps a pipe, or fifty times the quantity of that, which is adulterated, and in various manners sophisticated--the whole, without exception, the source of a thousand disorders, and in many instances an active poison, imperfectly disguised."

But after all, I am not obliged, in this place, to prove that God has forbidden the use of wine, though led into this digression from the desire to correct a general misapprehension of the Scriptures on this subject; for the inquiry now relates to ardent spirits. And what shall we say concerning the permission, above pointed out, for the Jews to use _strong drink_? I say, it was merely a permission to use wine; for the strong drink several times mentioned in the Bible was, in fact, _nothing more than a particular kind of wine_, made of dates and various sorts of seeds and roots, and called strong drink, merely to distinguish it from the wine made from grapes. Nor is there any evidence that it was in fact any stronger, in its intoxicating qualities, than common wine. The truth is, _ardent spirits were not known until many centuries after Christ_: not until the art of distillation was discovered, which was not certainly earlier than the dark ages. _Not a word, therefore, is said in the Bible concerning distilled spirits._ All its powerful descriptions of drunkenness, and awful denunciations against it, were founded upon the abuse men made of wine. How much louder its notes of remonstrance and terror would have risen, had distillation thus early taught men how to concentrate the poison, may be imagined by the reader.

After these statements, I trust none of those whom I address will any longer resort to the Bible for proofs of a divine permission to manufacture or use ardent spirits. But do the principles of the Bible _condemn_ such use and manufacture?

What do you think of the golden rule of _doing unto others as we would they should do unto us_? Should you suppose your neighbors were conducting towards you according to this rule, were they unnecessarily to pursue such a business, or to set such an example as would inevitably lead any of your children or friends into confirmed drunkenness? If not, then how can you, consistently with this rule, distil, use, or furnish materials for the manufacture of ardent spirits, when you thereby, directly or indirectly, render intemperate from two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand of your fellow-citizens, and every year also raise up new recruits enough to supply the dreadful ravages which death makes in this army? This you are certainly doing; for were your distilleries to stop, and you to stop drinking, few would become drunkards, from want of the means.

How would you like to have your neighbors one after another break down your fences, and turn their cattle into your corn-fields, cut down your fruit and ornamental trees, set your house or barn on fire, and threaten you with poverty and slavery? If you would not have your neighbor do thus to you, provided he had the power, then how can you, by preparing the food for intemperance, subject the property, the peace, the morality, the religion, and the liberties of your country to those dangers and fearful depredations which you are now inflicting upon her?

How would you like to have your neighbors, directly or indirectly, but unnecessarily, cause the premature death of every fortieth of your children and friends, and of one in three of those above the age of twenty? I know you would not that they should do thus to you, and yet your manufacture of spirits causes the premature death of five hundred of your fellow-citizens every week; in other words, about that number die every week through the intemperance produced by your distilleries.

Again, I ask the men whom I am addressing, how they reconcile their manufacture and sale of spirits with another command of the Bible? _Woe unto him that giveth his neighbor drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunken also, that thou mayest look on their nakedness._ True, this applies most emphatically to the retailer of spirits: but what could the retailer do if there were no distillery; and what could the distiller do if the farmer withheld the materials? All these men are engaged, directly or indirectly, in giving their neighbors drink; and though it may pass through many hands before it reaches all their mouths, yet where must the burden of the guilt rest, if not upon those who stand at the head of the series, and first convert the articles which God has given to nourish and sustain life into active poison for its destruction; and then, for the sake of a paltry pecuniary profit, send it round amongst their neighbors, accompanied with all the plagues that issued from the fabled Pandora's box?

Finally, let me ask these men how the business of preparing ardent spirits for the community appears to them when they think most seriously of another world? In the hours of sober reflection, on the Sabbath, during seasons of devotion, when sickness overtakes you, and death seems near, or you stand by the dying-bed of some one of your family or neighbors; at such seasons can you look back upon this pursuit with pleasure? If conscience then tells you that this business ought to be given up, Oh remember, that conscience is an honest and faithful friend at such times, and that, as this pursuit then appears to you, so will it appear when you come actually to die. Test this business, I beseech you, by bringing it in imagination to the scrutiny of your dying hour. Whether it be lawful or unlawful, certain it is that it sends five hundred drunkards into eternity every week; and you have the express testimony of the Bible, that no drunkard shall inherit the kingdom of God. As the Bible is true, then, are not the manufacturers of ardent spirits in our land the means of sending five hundred souls to hell every week? Tell me, my friends, how will this awful truth appear to you on the bed of death? And how does it appear when you look forward to the final judgment, and realize that you must meet there fifty or an hundred, or five hundred times five hundred drunkards, made such through your instrumentality, for one, or two, or ten years, and must there justify yourselves for this instrumentality, or go away with them into perdition, covered with their blood and followed by their execrations?

Oh, my friends, these are realities; and they are near. Do you begin to doubt whether you are in the path of duty? Listen, I beseech you, to the first whispers of the faithful monitor in your bosom.

By the reasonings of philosophy, by the testimony of physicians, by the expostulations of your bleeding country, by the tears, the rags, and the wretchedness of three hundred thousand drunkards, with their wives and children; by the warnings of personal friendship, and by the sanctions of the divine law, the solemnities of death and the judgment, and the groans of ten thousand drunkards, rising from the pit, I entreat you, abandon at once and for ever this most unrighteous employment, and save yourselves from the eternal agonies of conscience, the execrations of millions, and the wrath of Omnipotence.

ADDRESS TO THE YOUNG MEN OF THE UNITED STATES, ON TEMPERANCE.

BY RT. REV. C. P. M'ILVAINE, D. D.

In addressing the Young Men of the United States in regard to the great enterprise of promoting the universal prevalence of Temperance, we are not aware that any time need be occupied in apology. Our motives cannot be mistaken. The magnitude of the cause, and the importance of that cooperation in its behalf which this address is designed to promote, will vindicate the propriety of its respectful call upon the attention of those by whom it shall ever be received.

It is presumed that every reader is already aware of the extensive and energetic movements at present advancing in our country in behalf of Temperance. That an unprecedented interest in this work has been recently excited, and is still rapidly strengthening in thousands of districts; that talent, wisdom, experience, learning, and influence are now enlisted in its service, with a measure of zeal and harmony far surpassing what was ever witnessed before in such a cause; that great things have already been accomplished; that much greater are near at hand; and that the whole victory will be eventually won, if the temperate portion of society are not wanting to their solemn duty, must have been seen already by those living along the main channels of public thought and feeling. Elevated, as we now are, upon a high tide of general interest and zeal--a tide which may either go on increasing its flood till it has washed clean the very mountain tops, and drowned intemperance in its last den; or else subside, and leave the land infected with a plague, the more malignant and incurable from the dead remains of a partial inundation--it has become a question of universal application, which those who are now at the outset of their influence in society should especially consider: "What can _we_ do, and what _ought_ we to do in this cause?" For the settlement of this question we invite you to a brief view of the whole ground on which temperance measures are now proceeding.

It cannot be denied that our country is most horribly scourged by intemperance. In the strong language of Scripture, _it groaneth and travaileth in pain, to be delivered from the bondage of this corruption_. Our country is free; _with a great price obtained we this freedom_. We feel as if all the force of Europe could not get it from our embrace. Our shores would shake into the depth of the sea the invader who should presume to seek it. One solitary citizen led away into captivity, scourged, chained by a foreign enemy, would rouse the oldest nerve in the land to indignant complaint, and league the whole nation in loud demand for redress. And yet it cannot be denied that our country is enslaved. Yes, we are groaning under a most desolating bondage. The land is trodden down under its polluting foot. Our families are continually dishonored, ravaged, and bereaved; thousands annually slain, and hundreds of thousands carried away into a loathsome slavery, to be ground to powder under its burdens, or broken upon the wheel of its tortures.

What are the statistics of this traffic? Ask the records of madhouses, and they will answer, that one-third of all their wretched inmates were sent there by Intemperance. Ask the keepers of our prisons, and they will testify that, with scarcely an exception, their horrible population is from the schools of Intemperance. Ask the history of the 200,000 paupers now burdening the hands of public charity, and you will find that two-thirds of them have been the victims, directly or indirectly, of Intemperance. Inquire at the gates of death, and you will learn that no less than 30,000 souls are annually passed for the judgment-bar of God, driven there by Intemperance. How many slaves are at present among us? We ask not of slaves to man, but to Intemperance, in comparison with whose bondage the yoke of the tyrant is freedom. They are estimated at 480,000! And what does the nation pay for the honor and happiness of this whole system of ruin? _Five times as much, every year, as for the annual support of its whole system of government._ These are truths, so often published, so widely sanctioned, so generally received, and so little doubted, that we need not detail the particulars by which they are made out. What, then, is the whole amount of guilt and of woe which they exhibit? Ask Him "unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid." Ask _Eternity_!

The biographer of Napoleon, speaking of the loss sustained by England on the field of Waterloo, says, "Fifteen thousand men killed and wounded, threw half Britain into mourning. It required all the glory and all the solid advantages of that day to reconcile the mind to the high price at which it was purchased." But what mourning would fill _all_ Britain, if every year should behold another Waterloo? But what does every year repeat in our peaceful land? Ours is a carnage not exhibited only once in a single field, but going on continually, in every town and hamlet. Every eye sees its woes, every ear catches its groans. The wounded are too numerous to count. Who is not wounded by the intemperance of this nation? But of the dead we count, year by year, more than double the number that filled half Britain with mourning. Ah, could we behold the many thousands whom our destroyer annually delivers over unto death, collected together upon one field of slaughter, for one funeral, and one deep and wide burial-place; could we behold a full assemblage of all the parents, widows, children, friends, whose hearts have been torn by their death, surrounding that awful grave, and loading the winds with tales of woe, the whole land would cry out at the spectacle. It would require something more than "_all the glory_," and "_all the solid advantages_" of Intemperance, "_to reconcile the mind to the high price at which they were purchased_."

But enough is known of the intemperance of this country to render it undeniable by the most ignorant inhabitant, that a horrible scourge is indeed upon us.

Another assertion is equally unquestionable. _The time has come when a great effort must be made to exterminate this unequalled destroyer._ It was high time this was done when the first drunkard entered eternity to receive the award of Him who has declared that no drunkard shall enter the kingdom of God. The demand for this effort has been growing in the peremptory tone of its call, as "the overflowing scourge" has passed with constantly extending sweep through the land. But a strange apathy has prevailed among us. As if the whole nation had been drinking the cup of delusion, we saw the enemy coming in like a flood, and we lifted up scarcely a straw against him. As if the magicians of Egypt had prevailed over us by their enchantments, we beheld our waters of refreshment turned into blood, and a destroying sword passing through till "there was a great cry" in the land, for there was scarcely "a house where there was not one dead;" and still our hearts were hardened, and we would not let go the great sin for which these plagues were brought upon us. It seems as if some foul demon had taken his seat upon the breast of the nation, and was holding us down with the dead weight of a horrid nightmare, while he laughed at our calamity and mocked at our fear--when our fear came as desolation, and our destruction as a whirlwind.

Shall this state continue? Is not the desolation advancing? Have not facilities of intemperance, temptations to intemperance, examples to sanction intemperance, been fast increasing ever since this plague began? Without some effectual effort, is it not certain they will continue to increase, till intemperate men and their abettors will form the public opinion and consequently the public conscience and the public law of this land--till intemperance shall become, like leviathan of old, "king over all the children of pride," whose breath kindleth coals, and a "flame goeth out of his mouth?" Then what will effort of man avail? "Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook? His heart is as firm as a stone; yea, as hard as a piece of the nether millstone. He drinketh up a river, and hasteth not. When he raiseth up himself, the mighty are afraid."

It is too late to put off any longer the effort for deliverance. It is granted by the common sense, and urged by the common interest; every feeling of humanity and every consideration of religion enforces the belief that the time has come when a great onset is imperiously demanded to drive out intemperance from the land.

This, to be great, _must be universal_. The whole country is enslaved; and the whole country must rise up at once, like an armed man, and determine to be free. Of what lasting avail would it be for one section of territory, here and there, to clear itself, while the surrounding regions should remain under the curse? The temperance reformation has no quarantine to fence out the infected. Geographical boundaries are no barriers against contagion. Rivers and mountains are easily crossed by corrupting example. Ardent spirits, like all other fluids, perpetually seek their level. In vain does the farmer eradicate from his fields the last vestige of the noisome thistle, while the neighboring grounds are given up to its dominion, and every wind scatters the seed where it listeth. The effort against intemperance, to be effective, _must be universal_.

Here, then, are three important points which we may safely assume as entirely unquestionable: that _our country is horribly scourged by intemperance_; that _the time has come when a great effort is demanded for the expulsion of this evil_; and that _no effort can be effectual without being universal_. Hence is deduced, undeniably, the conclusion that it is the duty, and the solemn duty of the people, in every part of this country, to rise up at once, and act vigorously and unitedly in the furtherance of whatever measures are best calculated to promote reformation.

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