Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 August 1890 — THE EVIL BEAST. [ARTICLE]

THE EVIL BEAST.

’HOMES AND FAMILIES RUINED BT INIEMPERANOE. How Shall It Be Pat in Chains?— It Is Not Too Late to Save Those Not Astray—Dr. T aim age's Sermon. Rev, Dr. Talmage preached at Brooklyn last Sunday. Text, Genesis xxxvii, 23. He said: \ Joseph’s brethren dipped their brother’s coat in goat’s blood and then Brought the dabbled garment up to their father, eheating him with the Idea that a ferocious animal had slain 3iim, and thus hiding their infamous /behavior. But there is no deception about that which we hold up to your observation to-day. A monster such us never ranged African thicket or JHindoslan jungle hath tracked this /land, and with bloody maw hath strewn Casses of whole generations; and there are tens of thousands of fathers and ■mothers who could hold up the garment of their slain boy, truthfully exclaiming: “It’s my son’s coat; an evil beast hath devoured him.” There has, tin all ages and climes, been a tendency •to the improper use of stimulants. iNsah, as if disgusted with the prevalence of water in his time, took to Strong drink. By this vice Alexander “the eonquerer was conquered. The Romans at their feasts fell off their Beats with intoxication. Four hundred millions of our race are opium eaters. India, Turkey and China have groaned ■with the desolation, and by it have been quenched such lights as Halley and De Quincey. One hundred mil'liOns are the victims of the betelnut, which has specially blasted the East Indies. Three hundred millions chew hashish, and Persia, Brazil and Africa isuffer tha delirium. Tartars employ murowa; the Mexicans, the agava; the people at Guarapo an intoxicating quality taken from sugar cane, while a great multitude that no man can number are the disciples of alcohol. To It they bow. Under it they are tram- , pled. In its trenches they fall, On its ghastly holacust they burn. Could the muster roll of this great army be called, and they could come up from the dead, what eye could endure the reeking, festering putrefaction and beastliness? What heart could endure the groan of agony P Drunkenness! Does it not jingle the burglar’s key? Does it not whet the assassin’s knife? Does it not cock the highwayman’s pistol? Does it not wave the incendiary’s torch? Has it not sent the physician reeling into the sick room and the minister with his tongue thick into the pulpit? Did not an exquisite poet, from the very top of hie fame, fall a gibbering sot into the of the fairest daughters of New England, and at the very hour the bride was decking herself for the altar; and did he not die of delirium tremens, almost unattended, in a hospital? Tamerlane asked for 160,000 skulls with which to build a pyramid to his own honor. He got the skulls and built the pyramid. But if the bones of all those who have fallen as a prey to dissipation could be piled up it would make a vaster pyramid. Who will gird himself for the journey and try with me to scale this mountain of the dead—going up miles high,on human carcasses to find still other peaks far above, mountain above mountain, white with the bleached bones of drunkards? The Sabbath has been sacrificed to the rum traffic. To many of our people the best day of the week is the worst. Bakers must keep their shops closed on the Sabbath. It is dangerous to have loaves of bread going out on Sunday. The shoe store is closed; severe penalty will attack the man who sells boots on the Sabbath. But down with the window shutters of the grogshops. Our laws shall confer particular honor upon the rum traffickers. All other trades must stand aside for these. Let our citizens who have disgraced themselves by trading in clothing, and hosiery, and hardware, and lumber, and coal, take off their hats to the rum- seller elected to particular honor. It is unsafe for any other class of men to be allowed license for Sunday work. But swing out your signs, O ye traffickers in the peace of families, and in the souls of immortal men! Let the corkß fly, and the beer foam, and the rum go tearing down the self-conßumed throat of the inebriate. God does not see. Does he? Judgment will never come. Will itP I do not know but that God is determined to let drunkenness triumph, and the husbands and sons of thousands of pur best families be destroyed by their vice in order that our people, amazed and indignant, may rise up and demand the extermination of this municipal crime. There is a way of driving down the hoops of a barrel so tight that they break. We have, in this country, at various times tried to regulate this evil by a tax on whisky. You might as well try to regulate the Asiatic cholera or the smallpox by taxation. The men who distil liquors are, for the most part, unscrupulous, and the higher the tax the more inducement to illicit distillation. Oh, the folly of trying to restrain an evil by government tariff! If every gallon of whisky made—if every flask of wine produced should be taxed SI,OOO, it would not be enough to pay for the tears it has wrungf from the eyes of widows and orphans, nor for the blood it has dashed on the Christian Church, nor for the catastrophe of the millions it has destroyed forever. I sketch two houses in this street. The first is bright as home can be. The father conies at nightfall and the children run out to meet him. Luxuriant evening meaL 1 'Gratulation and sympathy and laughter. Music in the parlor. Fine pictures on the wall. Costly books on the stand. Well clad house-

hold. Plenty of everything to make home happy. House the second: Piano sold yesterday by the Sheriff. Wife's furs at pawnbroker’s shop. Clock gone. Daughter’s jewelry sold to get flour.' Carpets gone off the floor. Daughters in faded and patched dresses. Wife sewing for the stores. Little child with an ugly wound on her face, struck in an angry blow. Deep shadow of wretchedness falling in every room. Door bell rings. Little children hide. Daughters turd pale. Wife turns pale. Blundering step in the hall. Door opens. Fietid, brandishing his fist, cries: “Out! out! What are you doing here?” Did I call this house the second? No; it is the same house. Rum transformed it. Rum imbruted the man. Rum sold the shawL Rum tore up the carpets. Rum shook his fist. Rum desolated the hearth. Rum changed that paradise into a hell! I sketch two men that you know very well. The first graduated from onooPgsir 2 Btecai3L.inßtttuttt>nss-~HiB--father, mother, brothers and sisters were present to see him graduate. They heard the applauding thunders that greeted his speech. They saw the bouquets tossed to his feet. They saw the degree conferred and the diploma given. He never looked so well. Everybody Baid: “What a noble brow! What a fine eye! What graceful manners! What brilliant prospects!” All the world opens before him and cries: “Hurrah! hurrah!” Man the second: Lies in the station house. The doctor has just been sent for to bind up the gashes received in a fight. His hair is matted and makes him look like a wild beast. His lip is bloody and cut. Who is this battered and bruised wretch that was picked up by the police, and carried in drunk and foul and bleeding? Did I call him man the second? He is man the first! Rum transformed him. Rum destroyed his prospects. Rum destroyed parental expectation. Rum withered those garlands of commencement day. Rum cut his lip. Rum dashed out his manhood. Rum, accursed rum! This foul thing gives one swing to its scythe, and our best merchants fall; their stores are sold and they sink into dishonored graves. Again it swings its scythe and some of our best physicians fall into sufferings that their wisest prescriptions can not oure. Again it swings its scythe, and ministers of the gospel fall from the heights of Zion, with- long, resounding crash of ruin and shame. ~Some of your own households have already been shaken. Perhaps you can hardly admit it; but where was your son last night? Where was he Friday night? Where was he Thursday night? Wednesday night? Tuesday night? Monday night? Nay, have not some of you in your own bodies felt the power of this -habits—You-think that you could stop. Are you sure you could? Go on a little further and I am sure you can not. I think, if some of you should try to break away, you would find a chain on the right wrist, ’and one on the left; one on the right foot, and the other on the left. The serpent does not begin to hurt until it has wound round and round. Then it begins to tighten, and strangle, and crush, until the bones crack, and the blood trickles, and the eyes start from their sockets, and the mangled wretch cries, “O God! O God! help! help!” But it ii too late, and not even the fires of woe can melt the chain when once it is fully fastened, I have shown you the evil beast. The question is, who will hunt him down, and how shall we shoot him? I answer, first by getting our children right on this subject. Let them grow up with an utter aversion to strong drink. Take care how you administer it even as a medicine. If you find that they have a natural love for it, as some have, put in a glass of it some horrid stuff, and make it utterly nauseous. Teach them, as faithfully as you do the Bible, that rum is a fiend. Take them to the alms house and show them the wreck and ruin it works. Walk with them into the homes that have been scourged by it. If a drunkard hath fallen into a ditch, take them right up where they can see his face, bruised, savage and swollen, and say, “Look, my son. Rum did that!” Looking out of your windows at some one who, intoxicated to madness, goes through the street, brandishing his fist, blaspheming God, a howling, defying, reeling, raving and foaming maniac, say to your son, “Look, that man was once a child like you.” As you go by the grog shop let them know that that is the place where men are slain, and their wives made paupers, and their children slaves. Hold out to your children all warnings, all rewards, all counsels, lest in after days they break your heart and curse your gray hairs. A man laughed at my father for his scrupulous temperance principles', and send: “I am more liberal than you. I always give my children the sugar in the glass after we have been taking a drink.” Three of his sons have died drunkards and the fourth is Imbecile through intemperate habits. Again: We will battle this evil by voting only for sober men. How many men are there who oan rise above the feelings of partisanship, and demand that our officials shall be sober menP I maintain that the question of sobriety is higher than the question o* availability; and that, however eminent a man’s services may be, if he have habits of intoxication he is unfit for any office in the gift of a Christian people. Our laws will be no bettor than the men who make them. Spend a feW days at Harrisburg, or Albany, or Washington and you will find out why, upon these subjects, it is impossible to get righteous enactments. Again: We will war upon this evil by organized societies. The friends of the rum traffio have banded together, annually issue their circulars; raise

fabulous sums of money to advance their interests; and by grips, pawwords. signs and strategeins set at defiance public morals. Let us confront them with organizations just as secret, and. if need be, with grips and passwords and signs, maintain our position, There is no need that our ph* ianthropic societies tell all their plans. I am in favor of all lawful strategy in the carrying on of this conflict I wish to God we could lay under the wine casks a train which, once ignited, would shake the earth with the explosion of the monstrous iniquity. Again: We will try the power of the pledge. There are thousands of men who have been saved by putting their names to such a document I know it is laughed at; but there are some men, who, having once promised a thiug, do it. 1 ‘Some have broken the pledge.” Yes; they were liars. But ‘all men are not liars. Ido not say that it is the duty of all persons to make such signature, but I do say that it would* be the salvation of many of you. The-glorious-work -of Theobald Mathew can never be estimated. At his hand 4,000,000 of people took the pledge, and multitudes in Ireland, England, Scotland anq America have kept it till this day. The pledge signed to thousands has been the proclamation of emancipation. Again: We expect great things from inebriate asylums. They have already done; a glorious work. I think that we are coming at last to treat inebriation as it ought to be treated, namely, as an awful disease, self-inflicted, to be sure, but nevertheless a disease. Once fastened upon a man, sermons won’t cure him; temperance lecturers will not eradicate it; religious tracts will not reinove it; the Gospel of Christ will not arrest it. Once under the power of this awful thirst, the man is bound to go on; and, if the foaming glass were on the othet side of perdition, he would wade through the fires of hell to get it. A young man in prison had such a strong thirst for intoxicating liquors that he cut his hand off at the wrist, called for a bowl of brandy in order to stop the bleeding, thrust his wrist into the bowl, and then drank the contents. As long as you make drinking respectable drinking customs will prevail, and the plowshare of death, drawn by terrible disasters, will go on turning up this whole continent from end to end, with the long, deep, awful furrow of drunkards graves. Oh ! bow this rum fiend would likq to go and hang up a skeleton in your beautiful house, so that when you opened your frontdoor to go in you would see it in the hall; and, when you sat at your table you would see it hanging from the wall; and when you opened your bedroom you would find it stretched upon your pillow; and, waking at night, you would feel its cold band passing over your face and pinching at your heart. There is no home so beautiful but it may be devastated by the awful curse. It throws its jargon into the sweetest harmony, What was it that silenced Sheridan, the English orator, and shattered thej golden scepter with which he swayed' Parliaments and CourtsP What foul) sprite turned the sweet rhythm of| Robert Burns into a tuneless babbleP 1 What brought down the majestic form 1 of one who awed the American Senate with his eloquence, and after a while! carried him home dead drunk? What l was it that swamped the noble spirit! of one of the noble herdes of the last war, until in a drunken fit, he reeled) from the deck of a Western steamer and was drowned P There was one whose voice we all loved to hear. He was one of the most Classic orators of the century. People wondered why i a man of so pure a heart and bo excellent a life should have such a sad countenance always. They knew not that his wife was a sot. Do not think that because human government may license you that therev for God licenses you. lam surprised to hear you men say that you respect the “original package” deeision, by which tha Supreme Court of the United States allows rum to be taken into States like Kansas, which have deoided against the sale of intoxicants. I have no respect for a wrong decision. I care not who makes it. The three Judges of the Supreme Court who gave the minority report against/ that decision were right, and the Chief Justice was wrong. The right of the State to defend itself against the rum traffio will yet be demonstrated, the Supreme Court notwithstanding. Higher than the Judicial Bench at Washington is the Throne of the Lord God Almighty. No enactment national, State, or municipal can give you the right to carry on a business whose one effect is destruction. God knows better than you do yourself the number of drinks you have poured] out. You keep a list; hut a more accurate list has been kept than yours. You may call it Burgundy, Bourbon, oognac, heidsieck, sour mash or beer. God calls It strong drink. Whether you sell it In low oyster-cel-lar or behind the polished oounter of a first-class hotel, the divine curse is upon you. I tell you plainly that you will meet your customers one day when there will be not counter between you. When your work is none on earth, and you enter the rdward of your business, all ths souls of the men whom you have destroyed will crowd around you, and pour their bitterness in your cup. They will show you their wounds, and say. “You made them:” and point to their unquenchable thrift, and say: “You kindled it,” and rattle their chair, land say: “You forged it.” Then their united groans will smite your ear: and with the hands out of which you once picked the sixpences and the dimes, they will push you off the verge of precipices; while rolling up from beneath, and breaking among the crags of death, will thunder. “Woe tO him that givetb his neighbor drink!’ 1