Isaiah 5
RileyIsaiah 5:11-12
STRONG DRINK—THE DEVIL’S ALLYIsa_5:11-12I AM to speak to you now of the most monstrous iniquity that defiles the face of the earth and damns the souls of men—DRINK. Slavery was a blot on our civilization, and, rather than suffer such a stain, we washed it out with the warm blood of our bravest men. But the slavery that chained the ebony ankles of the South was mild, as compared with the despotism of Rum; and the cruelest cut that the tyrannical master ever gave to the shoulder of his brother in black was merciful, when compared to the sorrows of the soul that wears the galling chains, and feels the merciless lash, of the liquor habit.Dr. Haygood, in an address before the Evangelical Alliance some years ago, said, suggestively enough, “In dealing with drink, the thing most to be feared is that the mass of the people do not fear it. We are used to it. As soldiers in war look on wounds and death until they grow hard of heart, so the people are so familiar with the plague of drunkenness that they do not realize the ruin it is bringing to everything in our civilization that is good.”My purpose in speaking is twofold: I am solicitous to rouse good men for the long and terrible conflict that must precede American sobriety, and none the less anxious to save weak men from the thraldom toward which every intemperate act is hastening them.But what sentences has Sacred History that surpass this test for vivid statement of truth?
With one stroke of the inspired pen it lights up the hideous features of intemperance, as the lightning’s flash has often brought to view the demon’s face, who sought the darkness for his deeds. Following its suggestions, we claim three things as Scripturally defined.STRONG DRINK ITS SUBJECTMark you, I say, “Commonly,” because I want to be as conservative as is essential to the strictest construction of the truth.
I know there are some men who drink, and keep always to moderate bounds, but such men are the exceptions, and rare at that. A recent speaker on temperance referred to that old preacher who used to introduce the marriage ceremony with these words, “John, matrimony is a blessing to a few, a curse to many, and an uncertainty to us all! John, will you venture?” The most that advocates of moderate drinking could say is, “Our custom is a curse to thousands, never, certainly, a blessing to any, and an uncertainty to us all,” and to touch the first drop is to face a danger; to indulge in occasional drink is to consent to Satan’s advantage, and to defend the practice of tippling is to play into the very hands of the devil himself, and become his slave. The Drink Demon is never satisfied until it has captured and enslaved the soul it solicits.It pursues its would-be subject with a stealthy step. I have read the story of a lioness, whose noiseless approach made possible the destruction of seventeen human lives before she appeared to the eye of one armed man. But the victims that have fallen a prey to the more slyly approaching demon of drink, who can tell?
He approaches many a soul by means of the blood that silently courses every artery and vein of the body! There are among the children of men some sons who have been compelled to accept, as a part of their bitter legacy, a predisposition to strong drink.
The late Dr. Anderson gave a painful illustration of that truth. He related the history of a young man whom he baptized, in an Eastern city, at the age of sixteen. Shortly after his baptism he begged of his pastor the privilege of refusing to touch the wine employed in administering the Lord’s Supper; and gave as a reason his inability to abstain from drink, should one drop ever pass his lips. When Dr. Anderson expressed his surprise that one so young should be the confirmed subject of such a habit, the youth replied, “I have never tasted liquor in my life, but father drinks, and the consuming love of alcohol is in my blood and fires my brain.” Afterward, to save himself from yielding to the temptation to taste it, he quit the bedside of a sick friend in haste, because he smelled the wine that sat on the table at the head of the bed and, when he reached the street, the consuming desire to go to the nearest saloon and drink was so overmastering, that he had to meet it by praying mightily to God, while he ran to the refuge of a mother’s love and the closed door of his own room.But such cases are not common!
The stealth of strong drink more often appears in the plea of moderation—the ensnaring argument that a moderate use of liquor is at once reasonable and safe. By such sophistry, Satan has tolled his millions into Drink’s slaughter-pen.
It is a rare thing that you meet a novice in drink who will admit any sort of danger. He is on his dignity at the bare suggestion that he will one day be a miserable slave of this demon, and gives you to understand that he is no common mortal to capitulate so easy; no dog, to do the deeds of the drunken. All such souls can quit whenever they like, but as Sam Small remarked, “We take notice they never like.” To try it might demonstrate the danger to some. Mr. C. M.
Hawkins of Independence, Missouri, once related in the columns of his paper the story of a young man who had thoughtlessly fallen into the custom of taking a glass of liquor before breakfast every morning. When a friend expressed solicitude about the final consequence, the young man answered, “Oh, there is no danger, it is merely a little luxury.
I can quit any time.” “Prove that you can,” replied his wiser friend. A week later they met, and the pale face of the youth led his adviser to ask if he were ill. “Oh, no, but I am struggling against the fearful and unsuspected hold the habit of that daily drink had upon me. I have held out so far, and hope to conquer it, but your advice came none too soon to save me!”No man knows whether he can quit or not, until he proves it. A week’s total abstinence demonstrates nothing; to be sober for a month, or even a year, is no positive proof. The only relative I have ever lost through drink kept the demon under for two and three years at a stretch often, and yet it conquered him at last, and sent him to the drunkard’s grave. The only sufficient evidence that a man is his own master, is for him to refuse to gratify any and every desire for strong drink.If once the spirit of man is captured by strong drink, it holds him with the iron hand of habit.Its approaches are stealthy and with show of gentleness, but, like the hungry lioness, it fairly roars with the delight of destruction when once its teeth and talons have taken hold.
To see some young man tasting lighter wines with growing relish, forebodes the day when strong drink shall discover her destructive power, and chain him with links less easily broken than those that keep the elephant to his stall. That was an apt illustration of the methods employed by strong drink in ensnaring men, that some one gave concerning the old woman who was gently coaxing her drunken husband home.
A passerby remarked, “All drunkard’s wives are not so gracious as you are, madam!” “Sh-h-h,” she said in a whisper, “I’ve got to call him sweet names to get him home; but wait until he drops inside the threshold. I’ll be there then!” So the drink devil deals with men. It pays them splendid attention, flatters their large-heartedness, and calls them by honeyed names while filling the first glasses. But wait until you are within its power and it will be there then; there to strip you of reason and reduce you to the level of the lowest brute; there to strip you of your money and pauperize your home; there to abuse your body until it will require a week’s nursing to enable you to return to sober duties;there to rob you of the last vestige of manhood and send you into eternity a sin-cursed soul! It is well nigh impossible to get the egotistical tippler to believe that the occasional drinkers of today will be the sots and social outcasts of tomorrow, but, if experience ever demonstrated any truth past the point of sane doubt, it has shown that he who takes a little for his stomach’s sake in youth, when that stomach has no need of it, will be taking more for his stomach’s ache, when his drunken hands fail to provide the necessary bread.Our city is full of men today who can’t sober themselves; men who are enslaved and, whether they wish it or no, will rise before the daybreak to follow strong drink, and will see home no more, until wine has so enflamed them that reason departs and other hands carry them to bed. Up at Bar Harbor some years since, a poor wretch, being tried for drunkenness, expressed more of truth than he intended.
His lawyer, begging the Court for clemency, addressed the Judge as follows, “May it please your honor, I know this man and he is not often in this state!” The poor fellow, roused by the remark from his stupor, replied, “You-u-’re mistaken, mi frien’. I lif in this State.” Let the iron hand of habit fasten strong drink upon a man and he is apt to live in the state of intoxication and beastliness.But to inexorable habit, strong drink adds all possible injury and insult.
It might seem that Satan would be satisfied when a man had offered all his powers of body, mind and soul, a sacrifice to that filthy goat of the centuries, the god Bacchus. But until hell is heaped with lost souls, Satan will never cease to ask of drink votaries, not only their own bodies, intellects and spirits, but also the broken hearts of wives, the hunger and nakedness of children and the hope of Heaven.Like Beckford’s Giour, who, after he had eaten fifty of the most beautiful boys that the Caliph’s Kingdom could afford, continued to thirst for human blood and growl with sullen muttering, “More, more,” so does this demon. Every man given to strong drink is expected to add to his offerings to Bacchus the broken and bleeding heart of his own wife. They say that when Booth killed Lincoln, his infuriated pursuers, having caught him, cut out his heart and brought it back to the Capitol as a trophy of their work. Every saloon in the city engages in the business of sending out drunken husbands to hunt down the women they have sworn to love and cut out their hearts and bring them to the altar erected over the counter to Bacchus, that there the innocent blood may mingle its crimson with the accursed cup.The sight of such suffering, which every drunkard’s wife is subjected to, seems to affect this ally of Satan as the taste of human blood affects the tigress. It only rouses all its murderous instinct to ask for more and the father is sent back into that same home to break her heart, to strip his children of food and clothing and bring their hunger and nakedness.
Mr. Kohansky, an intelligent Pole, who once attended my church in Chicago with considerable regularity, told me once how he had seen a saloonist near him take money from the hands of a child, whose drunken father sent her barefoot and ragged through the snow of midwinter to bring him beer and whiskey.
Satan himself was never more Satanic than such a man. Among all hell’s earthly servants, surely no one so often gets the encore of the pit as he who helps to fasten upon a man a habit that leads him to kill his own wife, by the most tortuous process known to history; and slay his own children with the cruelest hand that ever shed the blood of murdered innocents. God was not stating it too strongly when He said, “Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may follow strong drink”. He only knew, or knows, the measure of that “woe” that comes to the subjects once enslaved by this ally of Satan, whose workshop is the annex to hell.This text suggests the further fact that“STRONG DRINK” EMPLOYS MANY SENSUAL If the wine of the ancients called to its assistance “the harp, and the viol, the tabret, and pipe”, the modern intoxicant knows even better what additional agencies to engage that the passions of men may be most inflamed. An evening spent in seeing the inside of our blind pigs would be a painful, yet a helpful revelation to those Christian and moral men, who do not consent that this institution is the sine qua non of Satanic success.You will find them fitted out with every device that the devil has used effectively in the destruction of men. No wonder saloonists were wont to seek the disgrace of every godly person who visited their places to report what he had seen.
No wonder they consented to that public statement which questioned the propriety of a Gospel minister ever entering their open doors. Their business gave control to the Prohibition amendment, when the public came to know its execrable character.The powers of unchaste painting and music are brought to play upon the sensual natures of men.
Young women have crowded hell-holes in appalling numbers and have given as an excuse for going that they enjoyed the music and dancing; and the passerby knows that music and dancing is the order of their evenings. Inflamed by wine, men are dangerous; but when intoxicated still further by such music, and surrounded by such paintings as decorate such walls, and in touch with lustful, half-drunken women, what else can result than revelries that shame the most sensual scenes of the old Bacchanalian feasts?The sights that greet you, as the paintings of nude women look down from the wall, are such as to impress every moral man, much more a Christian man, with the damnable character of such dens. But when one goes where the last shred of decency is stripped, and the devil dares to do his worst, it deepens anger into an unutterable sorrow, and he returns from the sight, sighing, “How long, oh, Lord, how long?” How long shall manhood continue to be so degraded and Divinity so insulted and despised? How long will a free people, who claim to be half-Christianized and boast their better civilization, remain the insulted subjects of the most loose-lived lords that ever determined a nation’s politics, set a deep, dark, indelible stamp on its social life, and profaned the holiest altars of its religion?Again, the holes of green cloth are coupled with saloons. The demon of strong drink flourishes and fattens on the fortunes and misfortunes of men who gamble. If the proprietors of the place permit a man from the street to win against the employers of the house, in order to bait into boldness the more timid spirits, and he quits ahead, he feels so good he calls in all his friends and treats.
In that case there is little or nothing lost. What the partner in the upper room sacrificed for the sake of greater gain, the partner in the lower room received again.
I was in a barber’s chair in Chicago and my German friend of the tonsorial art said, “I chust hav to laugh me to zee vot vools some mens make of demselves!” “How is that?” I inquired. “Veil, dat man acrost de street vas bettin’ mit the saloon mon, de oder day, and von a dollar! He feel so gut dat he turn round and spend two dollar for viskey. Den he go home and show ‘im pardner vat he von. De pardner, he laughed little and said, ‘Dot is pewter dollar !’ And dot is the vay it goes.”Exactly! I have no question whatever, that if the account had been perfectly kept from the time that the Roman soldiers gambled for the seamless garment of Christ, until now, that for every dollar won by the more fortunate gamesters, two have been returned to the drink-dealer, the full partner of the proprietor of the gambling place.On the other hand, if a man loses, he is sure to drink to drown his trouble and forget the ill-luck of having been such a fool as to give a little fortune to the lean-necked vultures that sit about the wheel night after night, picking greenies as clean as carrion crows leave the dead. I dare say that among all the accessories of the saloon, no one more often drives a man to the desperate act of drinking himself dead-drunk, than the circumstance of having left the wheel or the card table robbed of his week’s wages, if not of his employer’s stolen capital.
Such men must forget and drink is happy to assist them to do so for six hours, after which they awake to a consciousness more bitter by reason of the debauch.But again, strong drink strengthens itself by the closest partnership with strange women. It is not putting it too strongly to say that by far the bigger majority of drink shops are parties to such an alliance.
Their rear rooms are brothels, or else some room overhead. Many of them are filled with bad women, whose first appeal to the young men that approach them is, “Let us have something to drink.” The woman back of the bar, or in the room overhead, or even in a separate house at the side, is the drummer for strong drink. She has the dual incentive of getting a per cent of money paid and of seeing her paramour put more and more within her power by the stupor or excitement thus produced; if not the triple one of adding theft to drinks and adultery. She has also the protection of that lawless place in which to do her work, and the security of the drink-dealer’s bond, if, for any misdemeanor, she should happen to arrest. It is a notable fact, and one that further proves what is self-evident to any observer, that the alliance between adultery and drink is such that, when South Carolina’s dispensary law went into effect, a majority of the brothels were immediately broken up; the fallen women scattered as if their protectors had been slain and their houses destroyed.Think, will you, of the strain to which every sacred relation, domestic, social and religious, is put when a man enters a drinkshop to order a glass of wine, or beer, or whiskey, and falls at once under the combined influence of whiskey adulterated to the poisonous point, and the fascinations of a bad woman, bred in the blandishments of a black art. It is before such powers that wives are forgotten; innocent children banished from memory; the sweet sacredness of a pure home despised, and the soul for which Christ died dives into the sewer of all social filth and loses so much of manhood that angels weep and the harps of Heaven are either silent, or sound a melancholy dirge.Strong drink knows how to employ sensual accessories and the man who takes to it prepares to give his body to uncleanness, his mind to imbecility and his soul to hell. “Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may follow strong drink; that continue until night, till wine inflame them!
And the harp, and the viol, the tabret, and pipe, and wine, are in their feasts”, and now is added the gambler’s wheel and the brothels. It would take the reed of Heaven, with which the angel took the measure of the New Jerusalem, to measure the shores of the drunkard’s distress.
Yes, God was right, it is “woe”! Such woe!But again, our text teaches thatSTRONG DRINK DIVINER AND THE SENSE OF GODThe lovers of wine “regard not the work of the Lord neither consider the operation of His hands” There are two or three reasons why intemperance must always produce that result.The better men who indulge in strong drink are shamed out of their self-respect. The public is more charitable toward its unfortunate members than man is charitable toward himself. It is easier to lose one’s good opinion of oneself than to forfeit the favor of others, and it is far more disastrous to character. At a home in Owensboro, Kentucky, I met a most delightful family, years since. The young man, a law graduate of the University of Virginia, and also of the naval school at Annapolis, did not know the taste of liquor.
In speaking of intemperance, he said, “I have grown up here in the most saloon-cursed city of the South; the famous city of distilleries; but I have abstained from touching intoxicants because, if I took but one drink, I would lose something of my own self-respect, and it is too precious to part with.”Ah, he was right! The man who forfeits that gives up one of the most precious possessions God ever bestowed.
Halliday said, “Whenever we can bring a man to have a proper respect for himself, that moment we have secured him against the commission of any heinous crime.” What the love of virtue is to woman, as her safeguard against sensual suggestions, as her crown of honest pride, as her evidence of sweet divinity within, that self-respect is to man. Don’t hope to hold it against intemperance, for strong drink has stifled and smothered that diviner element from the millions of lives that have indulged it. Dr. Cuyler said truly enough, “To be a sober man costs self-restraint and the scoff of fools. To be a tippler costs a ruined purse, a ruined body and a lost soul. The sensualist pays for his vices a tremendous toll.” But one of the first payments, which the saloon asks of men who wish to be made drunk, is valuable above all treasures of gold.
It is self-respect! Who can afford it?Again, strong drink dissipates those diviner sentiments of affection for one’s own; one’s wife, one’s children, one’s brothers and sisters, one’s friends, one’s home!
To me there is no sadder phase of this sorrowful theme, than that which appears when men’s hearts grow hard through drink; and men’s conscience of right, and customs of affection die and dwindle on the very altar where they blossomed into rarest beauty. I have read from Macauley’s pen, how the inhuman Judge Jeffreys used to find fiendish pleasure in passing judgments of the severest sort. Macauley declares that he seemed never so happy as at sight of human misery. “Thus when he had opportunity of ordering an unlucky adventuress to be whipped at the cart’s tail, he would exclaim, “Hangman, I charge you to pay particular attention to this lady. Scourge her soundly, man! Scourge her ‘till the blood runs down. It is Christmas, a cold time for the Madame to strip!
See that you warm her shoulders thoroughly.’ ”But the bloody Jeffreys was not more brutal than any man or woman is like to become, when once the liquor habit has done its worst. When I look into the swollen eyes of the drunkard’s wife, or on the pale, pinched, half-clad, quarter-fed children that go out against the cold in search of work, I think surely the demon has done its worst.
But recall your newspaper reading, and see how pitiless this monster is; how even the grave is gentle as compared. It was on a 28th of one July that a drunken man over in Michigan, quarreled with his brother and wife, and in his fury, snatched the innocent babe from the father’s arms and dashed out its brains against a fence post. It was another 13th of July that a Chicago drunkard killed four of his own little bairns, with equal brutality. It was on August the 11th at Cleveland, Ohio, that a third subject, in despondent fit, brought on by drink, drove the cruel knife through the temple of his baby girl, and then, to complete the work of death, sent a bullet into the opposite temple. Time would forbid me to speak in detail of the deeds of D— C— of Chicago; of J— W— of Stanhope, New Jersey; of J— H— of Brooklyn; of B— and of C— of Southport, New York; of C— of Chicago; of P— , T— W— , G— F— , D— C— , and many another, whose murders a daily press reported in a few weeks, and yet, every one of them, and how many more we will never know, did their frenzied deeds under the maddening influence of alcohol. I charge drink with daily murders of the most inhuman and revolting sort.
The deeds that drinking men do, discover how strong drink drives from human hearts the last Divine spark and leaves only devils in control.Mr. Flower, of the arena, once related a pathetic incident that his slum work in Boston had brought to light.
It was the care of a little fatherless waif, who sold papers to support his drunken mother. It so happened one day that trade was poor and he took home fewer pennies than usual. The intoxicated mother was enraged when he counted out the copper coins, and seizing him, threatened to throw him out of the tenement window. He pled and fought for his life but she pushed him through the glass and cut his flesh. The sight of blood seemed to affect her as it might a furious beast, and she pushed the harder to break his hold and hurl him to the pavement below. At that moment the neighbors burst the door and she was arrested and lodged in jail.
When she was tried, they called him as a witness, but he refused to utter one word against her, or tell what she had done. A gentleman engaged in slum work sought an interview with him alone, hoping to quiz from him the particulars of the tragedy, but he only answered, “Mister, don’t let ‘em hurt her!
Mama wouldn’t ‘a done it. It is drink that is to blame.” Oh, truly, they that mix wine with their feasts, “regard not the work of the Lord, neither consider the operation of His hands”.It renders men unmindful of God’s power, and skeptical concerning His grace. They strive to forget His power, for they wish to delay judgment on their sins. They question the reality of His grace, because they have served Satan until he has led them to doubt that God is good. If drinking men would but believe in that love! How many poor inebriates have I seen saved by the sense of God’s love. There was Francis Murphy, the eloquent temperance orator. The tender touch of love, which God gave him through the hand of a noble Christian, saved his soul and set him to fight the demon that once dragged him down.
There was Sam Small, Atlanta’s gutter-lawyer, reclaimed by Sam Jones’ Gospel of love! There was the brilliant John G. Wooley, who, when he heard Moody talk of God, said, “If those things are true then I can be reclaimed,” and God redeemed and honored him. Oh, yes, God can save! But He, alone, can break the bonds of drink and drive the demon back!