Sermons from the Latins/Sermon 57
Twenty-Third Sunday After Pentecost.
The Vice of Drunkenness.
" For many walk of whom I have told you often, and tell you weeping, that they are enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, and whose glory is their shame" — Phil. iii. 18, 19.
SYNOPSIS.
Ex. : I. Wisdom and drunkenness. II. Drunkard among creatures. III. Bacchus.
I. Objections: 1. Timidity. 2. Liberty. 3. Necessity.
II. Drink affects : 1. Pocket. 2. Self and family. 3. Neighbors.
III. Appeal to: 1. Total abstainers, 2. Moderate drinkers. 3. Drunkards.
Per. : Woman's help, and tableau for young men.
SERMON.
" Brethren, be wise unto sobriety." These words, my dear Brethren, taken from the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, express the relation between common sense and drunkenness, between a drunkard and a wise man. They tell us that on the steep incline of human perfection and human degeneration wisdom is the highest point, drunkenness the very lowest, as far removed the one from the other as is the brute creation from man, as is the basest vice from the noblest virtue, as is hell from heaven itself. So that the more one approaches to perfect sobriety the wiser he becomes, the nearer he comes to habitual drunkenness the greater his folly. For what position in God's fair creation does the drunkard hold? An angel is a pure creature that enjoys God; a man is a creature that thinks and reasons; a brute is a creature that follows his appetites, but never to excess; a tree is an ornament of the earth and useful to man; but the drunkard, what is he? The drunkard is only a drunkard, with nothing like him in all God's creation. He is not preparing himself for the angels' heaven; instead of reasoning like a man he has buried his rational soul in his flesh, and his very flesh he has sunk lower than the brutes, so as to become a useless, unsightly, dangerous monster. Hence it is that some one has very well said that mankind may be divided into three classes: men, women, and beasts. This accounts, too, for the strange pictures of the wine-god, Bacchus, which the genius of ancient Greece and Rome has handed down to us. They represent him as an unhealthy-looking, bloated youth, bearing aloft the winegoblet, seated on a car drawn by wild beasts, while round about him frantic men and lewd women and monstrous satyrs wrestle and sing and caper in shameful abandon. Oh, those ancient poets well knew that sobriety is wisdom, and the companions of drunkenness, vice, and every kind of folly. This same idea which they tried to picture a later poet attempted to express when he exclaimed: "Oh, thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no other name by which thou mayest be known let us call thee Devil."
Brethren, you will tell me that all this, instead of being a sound argument for total abstinence, is mere high-sounding exaggeration. Is not, you ask, the moderate drinker who never goes to excess a better type of Christian than the timid teetotaler who does pot dare touch liquor lest he become a hopeless drunkard? Certainly the jolly bather who rushes right in and swims away out and confidently dives and floats is more admired than the other who does not dare try it. Yes, but of the two he that is ashore is the safer; the other may get beyond his depth and weaken and sink in a moment before a helping hand can reach him; or his example may entice out others less strong and less experienced than himself, so that he becomes responsible both for their loss and his own. Remember he that loveth danger shall perish in it. No one claims total abstinence is a great virtue — no, it is an absolute necessity for some, a wise precaution for others, a good work for all. Still it is false to say that it is inferior to temperance, for the temperate man likes a drink and takes it; the total abstainer likes a drink and does not take it, and Christ decides which is the better: " If thou wilt be My disciple, deny thyself.,, Well, but you say, I am a free man and to pledge anything that interferes with my taking a drink destroys my liberty. Friend, never take the pledge against your will, but only freely, either for the good of yourself or neighbor or for the greater glory of God. Yet the law vaccinates men against smallpox, restrains criminals from blowing themselves up, and keeps madmen from jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge; and does it destroy their liberty? Then why not restrain the drunkard who is all at once infected with contagious disease, is a criminal and a madman? The voice of the people is the voice of God proclaiming the good of the community to be the highest law, and hence the individual's liberty ends where the rights of others begin. Oh, well, you say, drink is necessary for me. As a medicine sometimes, but as food and drink never. Alcohol is not a food, but a part of all food, just as hydrogen, though a part of water, is a useless substitute for water. The health of total abstainers proves that alcohol as such is not necessary; those shattered wrecks of humanity, drunkards, prove it is a positive injury, and chemists tell us that in a quart of alcohol there is not enough food to support a canary twenty-four hours. Truly does the Scripture say: "Wine is a mere luxury," etc. Alcohol, then, is neither necessary nor useful as a food, but a mere luxury most ruinous in its effects. Now, what are these effects? First, it affects the drunkard himself — his purse. Our people, God help them, earn their money harder than any other people under heaven, and yet, alas! they spend it more freely and more foolishly. The ancient Spartans spent a certain amount in making their helots .or slaves drunk, that their children from seeing them might learn to be thrifty and sober. Alas, history repeats itself in our days, for the English-speaking race have become the helots of the world. They may boast of having girdled the world from pole to pole with a zone of Catholicity, but it is true also they have girdled it from east to west with a zone of drunkenness. And drink costs money. You who spend ten cents a day for liquor, ask your ill-fed, scantily dressed child and it will tell you that it amounts to $3 a month, almost $40 a year; $400 in ten years; $800 in twenty years. Or if you spend a quarter a day, that is $7 a month; $90 a year; $900 in ten years; $1800 in twenty. And all for what? You have heard tell of the man who invested his fortune in fireworks and fired it all off in the air. Well, the drunkard is still more foolish, since he fires the rockets down his own throat. Again, drink undermines his constitution and shatters his nervous system, so that he becomes a blear-eyed, haggard, slovenly wreck. Then by and by comes that horror of horrors — delirium tremens. God bless and save us, friends, that is a thing too terrible even to talk about. But what is the spiritual state of such a one? A soul fetid with innumerable sins of drunkenness and impurity, and without the remedies of sins — without prayer, without a Church, without a God. It was well said that "for the drunkard the grave doth gape thrice wider than for other men." But more terrible are the words of Isaias: "Woe to the drunkard, for hell hath enlarged its soul and opened wide its mouth to receive him."
Secondly, drunkenness affects the drunkard's family. As well might I attempt to enumerate every moan and sigh of the winter wind, and every drop of rain that falls from heaven, as tell you of all the moans and sighs and tears of the drunkard's heartbroken mother, wife, and children. See for yourself; it is under your very eyes. Ask the careworn, sickly child why he cries and he will answer: " Father is drinking again." Go to the wretched hovel he calls a home and ask his wife has she a husband and she will tell you she has two — saving your presence — " One (my man when sober) is real good and kind; the other (my man when drinking) is a perfect brute." And if you care to stay around until the drunken husband comes home — oh! if you have tears to shed prepare to shed them then. For then the vitriol madness mounts to the ruffian's brain, and the filthy bylane rings with the yell of his trampled wife. And so they go on#year in and year out, till even the poor wife in sheer despair takes to drink too. And so they live drunken lives and die drunken deaths, and leave a family with the hereditary taint — heirs to nothing but the besetting sin of their parents.
Lastly, drink affects the drunkard's neighbors. Oh, Bacchus the wine-god does not go unattended, but leads in his train a debauched company as mad and debauched as himself. And neither does the drunkard go down his dishonored way to a more dishonored grave single-handed and alone. When he drinks he drinks in company, and when he spends his children's money he helps to spend the money of other men's children, and the moan of his heartbroken wife finds an echo in many a miserable home. I make it a rule, the drunkard says, always to treat when I meet another man; and when I am alone and take one glass I feel like another man and so I treat myself to a second and so on. Go to the asylums and prisons, and many of the wretched inmates will tell you they are there through drunkenness whose first cause was a drunkard's example. Read the records of the fearful sacrifice of human life in shipwrecks, collisions, fires, and explosions, and you will find that drink was at the bottom of most of them. From the same prolific source flow murders, suicides, and a thousand nameless sins. Alas, have not I seen it all in my own school companions, the dearest friends of my school days! There was one drunkard among them, who after five years at a university has opened a saloon. Of his companions one was tried for his life for malpractice and murder, another is serving a term for forgery, and a third ended his drunken career in a ditch. Truly is drink the ruin of youth, the scourge of manhood, and the dishonor of old age — the devil's way to man and man's way to the devil.
Brethren, in God's name try to avoid this shocking vice. If you are a total abstainer, not from necessity but through choice, continue to persevere, and be sure you are doing a good work for God, your neighbor, and yourself. If you are a moderate drinker, oh beware, beware, for the one cause of drunkenness is drinking, and " he that contemneth small things shall fall by little and little." The drink-habit partakes of the nature of a snake and of a tiger. It may steal on you silently and slowly wind itself around you and crush you in its embrace; or in the day of trouble or sorrow or mental anxiety it may come upon you at a single bound and destroy you in an instant. But if you are a habitual drunkard, oh for the love of God and your own soul abandon your sinful folly while there is yet time. And you, mothers, and wives, and sisters, you can do much by making the home pleasant and attractive that the men may find there a lawful substitute for the unlawful pleasures they seek elsewhere. And you, young men, picture to yourselves and keep ever before your minds that beautiful tableau of a young man surrounded and conversing with religion, sobriety, and chastity, while irreligion, drunkenness, and impurity fly baffled from the scene. Let that be your ideal, to sit self-controlled in the fiery prime of youth, obedient at the feet of law. If you keep that ideal in mind and let it reflect on your life, I promise you you will not only be more healthy, you will not only be more wealthy, but, most of all, you will deservedly be numbered among the truly wise. Then will you follow in the steps of our divine Master and Model, and you will advance with Jesus in wisdom and age and grace with God and men.