“Shall we sow tares and pray for bread?”—_Abd el Wahab._[1]
If we consider the manifold afflictions which in the after years of so
many millions of our fellowmen outweigh the happiness of childhood, we
can hardly wonder that several great thinkers have expressed a serious
doubt if earthly existence is on the whole a blessing. Yet for those
who hold that the progress of science and education will ultimately
remove that doubt, it is a consoling reflection that the greatest of all
earthly evils are avoidable ones. The earthquake of Lisbon[2] killed
sixty thousand persons who could not possibly have foreseen their fate.
In 1282 an irruption of the Zuyder Sea overwhelmed sixty-five towns
whose inhabitants had not five minutes’ time to effect their escape.
But what are such calamities compared with the havoc of wanton wars,
or the ravages of consumption and other diseases that are the direct
consequences of outrageous sins against the physical laws of God? The
cruelty of man to man causes more misery than the rage of wild beasts
and all the hostile elements of Nature, but the heaviest of all evils in
our great burden of self-inflicted woe is undoubtedly the curse of the
poison vice. The alcohol habit is a concentration of all scourges. In
the poor island of Ireland alone one hundred and forty million bushels
of bread-corn and potatoes are yearly sent to the distillery. The
shipment of the grain, its conversion into a health-destroying drug, the
distribution and sale of the poison, are carried on under the protection
of a so-called civilized government. _Waste_ is not an adequate word for
that monstrous folly. If the grain farmers of Laputa[3] should organize
an expedition to the sea-coast, and under the auspices of the legal
authorities equip an apparatus for flinging a hundred million sacks
of grain into the ocean, the contents of those sacks would be lost,
and there would be an end of it. The sea would swallow the cargo. The
distillery swallows the grain, but disgorges it in the form of a liquid
fire that spreads its flames over the land and scorches the bodies
and souls of men till the smoke of the torment arises from a million
homesteads. We might marvel at the extravagance of the Laputans, but
what should we say if the priests of a pastoral nation were to slaughter
thousands of herds on the altar of a national idol, and in conformity
with an established custom let the carcasses rot in the open fields till
the progress of putrefaction filled the land with horror and pestilence;
if moreover, among the crowd of victims we should recognize the milch
cows of thousands of poor families whose children were wan with hunger,
and if furthermore the intelligent rulers of that nation should supervise
the ceremonies of the sacrifice, distribute the carcasses and calmly
collect statistics to ascertain the percentage of the resultant mortality?
The LOSS OF LIFE caused by the ravages of the alcohol plague equals the
result of a perennial war. The most belligerent nation of modern times,
the Russians, with the perpetual skirmishes on their eastern frontier,
and their periodical campaigns against their southern neighbors, lose
in battle a yearly average of 7,000 men. The average longevity of the
Caucasian nations is nearly 38 years. Of their picked men about 45 years.
The average age of a soldier is now-a-days about 25 years. The death of
7,000 soldiers represents therefore a national loss of 7,000 times the
difference between 25 and 45 years, _i. e._, a total waste of 140,000
years. Medical statistics show that in the United States alone the direct
consequences of intoxication cost every year the lives of six thousand
persons, most of them reckless young drunkards, who thus anticipate
the natural term of their lives by about twenty years. But at the very
least, two per cent. of our population is addicted to the constant use
of some form of alcoholic liquors. Prof. Neison, of the British General
Life Insurance Company, estimates that rum-drinkers shorten their lives
by seven years, beer-drinkers by five and one-half, and “mixed drinkers”
by nine and one-half years. For the city of London, Sir H. Thompson
computes that drinkers of all classes shorten their lives by six years.
But let us be quite sure to keep within the limits of facts applying to
all conditions of life, and assume a minimum of four years. A total of
4,120,000 years for the population of the United States is therefore a
moderate estimate of the annual life waste by the consequences of the
poison vice! In other words, in a country of by no means exceptionally
hard drinkers, alcohol destroys yearly thirty times as much life as the
warfare of the most warlike nation on earth. The first year of the war
for the preservation of the Union and the suppression of slavery cost
us 82,000 lives. When the death list had reached a total of 100,000 the
clamors for peace became so importunate that the representatives of our
nation were several times on the point of abandoning the cause of the
most righteous war ever waged. Yet the far larger life waste on the altar
of the Poison-Moloch continues year after year, and for a small bribe
not a few of our prominent politicians seem willing to perpetuate that
curse to the end of time. Among all the nations of the Christian world,
with the only exception of the Syrian Maronites,[4] the poison vice
has shortened the average longevity of the working classes by at least
five years. Political economists have calculated the consequent loss of
productive force, but there is another consideration which is too often
overlooked. The progress of degeneration has reduced our life term so
far below the normal average that the highest purposes of individual
existence are generally defeated. Our lives are mostly half-told tales.
Our season ends before the harvest time; before the laborer’s task
is half done he is overtaken by the night when no man can work. The
secret of longevity would, indeed, solve the chief riddle of existence,
for the children of toil could then hope to reach the goal of the
visible compensation which, on earth at least, is now reserved for the
exceptional favorites of fortune. That hope is diminished by everything
that tends still further to reduce our shortened span of life, and beside
increasing the burdens of existence, the poison vice therefore directly
decreases the possibility of its rewards.
Yet that result is almost insured by the LOSS OF HEALTH which all
experienced physiologists admit to be the inevitable consequence of the
stimulant habit. Every known disease of the human system is aggravated by
intemperance. The morbid diathesis, as physicians call a predisposition
to organic disorders, finds an ally in alcohol that enables it to defy
the expurgative efforts of Nature. A consumptive toper will fail to
derive any benefit from a change of climate. A dram-drinking dyspeptic
can not be cured by outdoor exercise. The influence of alcoholic tonics
tends to aggravate nervous disorders into mental derangements. But
even the soundest constitution is not proof against the bane of that
influence. Before the end of the first year habitual drinkers lose that
spontaneous gayety which constitutes the happiness of perfect health as
well as of childhood. The system becomes dependent upon the treacherous
aid of artificial stimulants, and the lack of vital vigor soon begins to
tell upon every part of the organism. Alcohol counteracts the benefit
of all the hygienic advantages of climate and habit, and it is doubtful
if the effect of its continued influence could be equaled by the
intentional introduction of contagious diseases. A medical expert might
collect the most incurable patients in the leper slums of Shanghai, in
the lazarettos[5] of Naples and the fever hospitals of Vera Cruz, and
distribute them in the cities of another country; yet a year after the
dissemination of such diseases the hygienic condition of a temperate
nation would be better than that of a drunkard nation after a year of the
strictest quarantine protection. In the sanitary history of the Caucasian
nations alcohol has proved a worse plague than the Black Death.
The WASTE OF LAND and the WASTE OF LABOR must be considered together,
in order to comprehend the total amount of the loss which the fourteen
most civilized nations inflict on themselves by the unspeakable folly of
devoting from 20 to 25 per cent. of their fertile area to the production
of stimulating poisons. If the land thus abused were simply neglected, if
it were abandoned to the weeds and tares, the laborers who now cultivate
it in the interest of hell might employ their time in assisting their
friends and help them to cultivate better or larger crops on the soil of
the adjoining lands. If they should prefer to emigrate, their abandoned
fields might be cultivated by their neighbors. Even children in the
intervals of their play might plant cherry stones, and help the soil to
contribute to the welfare of the community. As it is, it contributes only
to the development of diseases, vices and crimes. The productions of the
land, the toil of the husbandmen, are not only utterly lost, but become a
curse to the population of the country. Starving Ireland devotes a third
of her arable lands to the production of distillery crops. Spain begs
with one hand and with the other flings two-fifths of her produce to the
poison vender. The statistics of the last census show that distilleries
devour every year 34,300,000 acres of our total farm produce; breweries,
9,600,000; wine cellars, cider mills (not to mention tobacco factories),
about five millions more!
The old settlers of western Arkansas still remember the excitement caused
by occasional raids of predatory Indians who used to cross the Texas
border and devastate the farms of the frontiersmen. Near Arkadelphia they
once burned three hundred acres of ripe corn, and half a dozen counties
joined in the pursuit of the marauders. Imagine the blazing indignation,
the mass meetings, the general uprising of an outraged people, if the
Mormons should take it in their heads to burn three million acres of
our grain crop. Yet the distillers not only burn up more than the
tenfold amount, but fan the flames to kindle a soul and body consuming
conflagration, and shriek about infringements of their privileges if a
bold hand here and there succeeds in snatching a brand from the burning.
The WASTE OF REMEDIAL EXPENDITURE must be considered under a separate
head, for beside squandering their own resources, the votaries of the
poison fiend waste those of their neighbors, who have to devise means
for mitigating the resulting mischief. The care of drunkards, _i. e._,
of persons picked up in the streets in a state of life-endangering
intoxication, costs our hospitals a yearly sum of $5,000,000. A list
of the various diseases which can be traced to the direct or indirect
influence of intemperance would require the enumeration of nearly all
known disorders of the human organism, but, though drunkards become a
burden to their families oftener than to the charitable institutions of
the community, it has been ascertained that they constitute 30 per cent.
of the inmates of such establishments as county infirmaries, charity
hospitals, almshouses, poorhouses and lunatic asylums. Prisons proper,
that is, institutions for the cure of moral disorders, are filled with
patients where derelictions in forty out of a hundred cases have been
committed either under the immediate influence of intoxicating liquors,
or as a consequence of such direct results of intemperance as loss of
property, loss of credit, loss of moral or mental integrity. In 1870 the
prisons of the United States cost the nation a yearly sum of $87,000,000.
By this time their cost probably amounts to a full hundred millions.
The magistrates of our city courts have to waste half their time on
the trial of drunkards. On the blackboards of our metropolitan station
houses “D. D. C.” after the name of a prisoner means So-and-So locked
up for drunkenness and disorderly conduct; they have to abbreviate the
specification of that offense to save a little space for other memoranda.
If the indirect consequences of the poison vice could be traced through
all their ramifications, it would be found that the suppression of that
vice would relieve our cities from a burden equivalent to a full half of
all their municipal taxes.
The MORAL LOSS is not confined to the direct influence of the
brutalizing poison. The liquor traffic defiles all participants of
a transaction which involves a sin against Nature, a crime against
society and posterity, and an outrage against the moral instincts of
the veriest savage, for more than five thousand years ago the lawgivers
of the Bactrian nomads[6] recorded their protest against the vice of
intoxication. A drunkard who flees from the prohibitory laws of his
native place can not escape the voice of an inner monitor. The liquor
dealer who points to his license is not the less conscious that he is an
enemy of mankind, and that his servants eat the wages of a soul and body
corrupting vice. The lawgiver who can be bribed to connive at that vice
not only sins against the laws of political economy, but against Nature
and the first principles of natural ethics, and forfeits his claim to the
respect of the community. Faith in the sanctity of the law, in the wisdom
and integrity of the legislator, is the very corner-stone of public
morals, but that faith is incompatible with a system of legalized crime,
and the lawgiver who consents to sanction the outrage of the poison
traffic undermines the basis of his authority, and thereby the authority
of the law itself. It is wholly certain that larceny and perjury
combined do not damage the state the hundredth part as much as the curse
of the poison vice; yet what should we think of the moral status of a
legislative assembly devising a plan to increase the national revenues
by granting license to pickpockets and professional false witnesses?
Imagine a Titus Oates[7] offering his services on the public streets,
and a chief justice compelling the courts to recognize the legality
of his business, and protect him in the enjoyment of its emoluments!
Imagine Jack Sheppard[8] filching the weekly wages of a half-witted
working man, and flaunting a government license if the wife of his victim
should demand the restitution of the plunder. The absurdity of such an
arrangement might seem too glaring to imagine its possibility. Yet for
the same reason posterity may refuse to credit the records of our liquor
system; for, translated into plain speech, the contract between the state
and the rum vender means even this: “On condition of receiving a share in
the yearly profits of your business, I herewith grant you the right to
poison your fellow-citizens.”
The LOSS OF WEALTH, which some of the foregoing considerations will
enable us to estimate, has increased with the progress of our national
development in a way which in many respects has made that progress a
curse instead of a blessing. Thirty-five years ago our brethren in
Maine had a hard fight against the champions of the liquor traffic, but
they had to deal with whiskey alone. Since then our foreign immigrants
have introduced ale, lager beer, and French high wines, and threaten
to introduce _absinthe_[9] and opium. The poison vice has assumed the
magnitude of a pandemic plague. According to the statistics of the
Treasury Department, the alcohol drinkers of the United States spent
during the last ten years a yearly average of $370,000,000 for whiskey,
$53,000,000 for other distilled liquors, $56,000,000 for wine, and
$140,000,000 for ale and beer. Together, $624,000,000 a year. Under the
head of liquors evading the revenue tax, Prof. W. Hoyle, of Manchester,
adds 20 per cent. for Great Britain, Commissioner Halliday 15 per cent.
for the United States, and Dr. Bowditch 18 per cent. for the state of
Massachusetts alone. Let us assume the minimum of 15 per cent. The total
direct cost of the poison vice (without including tobacco and other
narcotic stimulants) is therefore $705,000,000 a year. The indirect cost
eludes computation, except under the three following heads: 1. The loss
of productive capacity, as revealed in the difference between the yearly
earnings of a manufacturing community under the protection of prohibitory
laws or under the influence of the license system. 2. The inebriate
percentage of patients in our public hospitals, and of convicts in our
prisons. 3. The loss sustained by the employers of agents, trustees,
clerks, etc., addicted to the use of intoxicating liquors. The aggregate
of these indirect losses we will assume to be only $350,000,000 a year,
though several political economists compute it as _equal to the direct
cost_. Our estimate does not include the amount of rum-begotten distress
relieved by private charity, nor the rum percentage of undetected crime,
nor yet the wholly incalculable value of the benefactions, reforms and
improvements _prevented_ by the use of intoxicating liquors among the
upper classes. We can therefore be quite sure of understating the truth
if we estimate the aggregate cost of the poison vice at $1,055,000,000
a year—a yearly sum equivalent to the cost value of all our public
libraries, our church property, school property, steamboats, bridges, and
telegraphs taken together.
Prohibition would put a stop to one half of that prodigious waste. We
will not delude ourselves with the hope that the deep-rooted habit of
the stimulant vice could at once be wholly eradicated by any legislative
measures whatever. For years to come 20 per cent. of the aggregate
would undoubtedly be devoured by liquor venders finding means to elude
the vigilance of the law. Fifteen per cent. would be spent on other
vices. Fifteen per cent. more would probably be wasted for frivolous
purposes—innocent, as compared with the crime of the poison traffic, but
still on the whole amounting to a loss of national resources. The waste
of the remaining fifty per cent. could be prevented by prohibition. In
ten years the saving of that sum and its application to useful purposes
would transform the moral and physical condition of our country. With
five billion dollars we could construct ten bridges over every one of our
hundred largest rivers. We could build an international railroad of a
gauge that would enable the denizens of snow-bound New England to reach
the tropics in twenty-four hours. We could realize Professor Lexow’s
project of providing every large city with a system of free municipal
railways connecting the centers of commerce with the suburban homes of
the workingmen. We could make those suburbs attractive enough to drain
the population of the slums. We could counteract the temptations of the
grog-shops by providing the poor with healthier means of recreation; city
parks with free baths, competitive gymnastics and zoölogical attractions
for the summer season, and reading rooms with picture galleries and
musical entertainments for the long winter evenings. We could employ
home missionaries enough for a direct appeal to every fallen or tempted
soul in the country. We could cover our hillsides with orchards and
line our highways with shade trees; we could plant forest trees enough
to redeem thousands of square miles in the barren uplands of the West.
Each township in the country could have a free school, each village a
free public library; we could help the sick by teaching them to avoid
the causes of disease; we could prevent rather than punish crime; we
could teach our homeless vagrants the lessons of self-support, and found
asylum colonies for the lost children of our great cities. And moreover,
we could increase the savings of the next decade by the endowment of
a National Reform College, with a corps of competent sanitarians and
political economists, for the training of temperance teachers, with local
lecturers, traveling lecturers, and free lecture halls in every larger
city of the country.
Only thus prohibition could be brought to answer its whole purpose, for
we should remember that the practical efficiency of all government laws
depends on the consensus of the governed. Without the coöperation of the
teacher the mandates of the legislator fall short of their aim. But it is
equally certain that in the field of social ethics the teacher can not
dispense with the aid of the legislator, and that our lawgivers can not
much longer afford to ignore that truth, for the penalty of the neglect
already amounts to the equivalent of the average yearly income of _seven
million working people_. In the South a million men, women and children
of farm laborers earn less than a hundred millions a year, _i. e._, $500
for every family of five persons. In the manufacturing districts of the
North they would earn less than $200,000,000. We can therefore again be
wholly certain of not overstating the truth, if we assert that in the
United States alone the poison vice devours every year the aggregate
earnings of more than _fourteen hundred thousand families_. In one dollar
bank-notes of the United States Treasury, one billion dollars could be
pasted together into a paper strip that would reach up to the moon.
Stacked up in bundles, they would form a paper pile a hundred feet long,
fifty feet wide, and fifty feet high.
If the equivalent of so many creature-comforts could be employed for
the benefit of the poor, it would almost realize the dreams of a Golden
Age. But even if we could save it from the hands of the poison vender by
burning it on the public streets, all friends of mankind would hail the
conflagration as the gladdest bonfire that ever cheered the hearts of
men. For its flames would save more human lives than the perpetual peace
of the millennium; it would prevent more crimes than the civilization of
all the savages that infest the prairies of our border states and the
slums of our large cities. Nay, it would save us from evils for which
mankind has thus far discovered no remedy, for intemperance robs us of
blessings which human skill is unable to restore.
SUNDAY READINGS.
SELECTED BY CHANCELLOR J. H. VINCENT, D.D.
[_January 4._]
Think of God as your constant benefactor—that he made you, that he
sustains you in every moment of your existence—that, to express yourself
with the simple energy of inspiration, in him you live, and move, and
have your being—that in all the joys which are scattered over the
pilgrimage of life, we see nothing but the kindness of God always
exerting itself in our favor, and meeting us in every direction—that
though we seldom look beyond the creatures which surround us, it is God
who reigns in these creatures and makes them subservient to his most
wise, his most gracious, his most benevolent purposes; that though in
the hey-day of youth we are carried along the tide of gayety without
care and without reflection, it is God who gives to the spirit of man
all its cheerfulness; that though we stop short in our gratitude at the
benefactor who relieved and at the friend who supported us, it is God
who reigns over the constitution of the mind, and could by a single word
of his power make every companion abandon us, and every friend look upon
us with an altered countenance; that though I call the house in which I
live my own, and find in the endearments of my family my repose and my
happiness, it is God who gave me my home, who spreads security around
it, and fills it with all its charities; that though my path in society
be dignified by the homage and civility of my acquaintances, it is God
who reigns in the human breast and administers all the delight of social
intercourse; that though my eye expatiates in rapture on the landscape
around us, it is the living God who beautifies the scene, and gives it
all its magnificence and all its glory; in short, that everything we
enjoy is a gift; that in whatever quarter happiness is met with, a burden
of obligation and dependence lies upon us; that we have nothing which
we did not receive—that our all is suspended on God, and that to him we
owe all the praise, all the gratitude, all the obedience. Now will any
man who is acquainted with the movements of his own breast, say that
this praise and this obedience are actually given? Are not the pleasures
of life often tasted without acknowledgment? Is not the conduct of life
often proceeded in without any reference to the will and authority of
him who is the author of it? Is not the mind in a state of habitual
estrangement from God, his existence absent from our reflections, and his
superintendency as a judge and as a lawgiver absent from our principles?
Go to whatever quarter you please for happiness, there is no escaping
the conclusion that God is the giver of it, in his pervading energy
which gives effect and operation to all things. You can not fly out of
his presence, nor repair beyond the limits of his sovereignty.—_From Dr.
Chalmers._
[_January 11._]
Of all the impossibles which ever were attempted, there is none so wild
and so irrational as to attempt an independence upon God. It is in virtue
of him that you are held together. He measures out to you every moment of
your existence. He gives you not merely the air you breathe, but he gives
you the faculty of breathing. He provides for you not merely the external
goods which are scattered around you in such bounteous profusion, but
it is he who furnishes you with the capacity of enjoying them. You talk
of the pleasures of the world, and fly to them as your refuge and your
consolation against the displeasure of an offended Deity, but think that
it is only by a continuance of his unmerited favor that you have these
pleasures to fly to. He can take them away from you; or, what perhaps
is a still more striking demonstration of his sovereignty, he can make
them no longer pleasures to you. He reigns within as well as without you.
To him you owe not merely what is external, but to him you owe the taste
and the faculty which enjoys it. He can pervert these faculties. He can
change your pleasures into disgust. He can derange the constitution of
the inner man, and make you loathe as tasteless and unsatisfying what
you at present indulge in with delight or look forward to with rapture.
He is all in all. The whole of our being hangs upon him, and there is no
getting away from his universal, from his ceaseless, from his unexcepted
agency. Now, do the Almighty the same justice that you would do to an
earthly benefactor; measure the extent of his claims upon you by the
extent of his benefits; think of the authority over you which, as your
Creator and as your constant preserver, he has a right to exercise; think
of your perpetual dependence, and that all around you and within you, for
every moment and particle of your existence is upheld by God; and tell
me, if either in the thoughts of your hearts or in the actions of your
life you come up to the demand which his justice and his authority have a
title to prefer against you?—_From Dr. Chalmers._
[_January 18._]
What then, art thou, O, my God; what, I ask, but the Lord God? For who is
Lord but the Lord? or who is God save our God? Most high, most excellent,
most potent, most omnipotent, most piteous and most just; most hidden
and most near; most beauteous and most strong; stable, yet contained
of none; unchangeable, yet changing all things; never new, never old,
making all things new, yet bringing old age upon the proud, and they
know it not; always working, yet ever at rest; gathering, yet needing
nothing; sustaining, pervading, and protecting; creating, nourishing,
and developing; seeking, and yet possessing all things. Thou lovest, and
burnest not; art jealous, yet free from care; repentest, and hast no
sorrow; art angry, yet serene; changest thy ways, leaving unchanged thy
plans; recoverest what thou findest, having yet never lost; art never
in want, while thou rejoicest in gain; never covetous, though requiring
usury (Matt. xxv:27).… Thou payest debts, while owing nothing; and when
thou forgivest debts, losest nothing. Yet, O my God, my life, my holy
joy, what is this that I have said? And what saith any man when he speaks
of thee? Yet woe to them that keep silence, seeing that even those who
say most are as dumb!
Oh! how shall I find rest in thee? Who will send thee into my heart to
inebriate it, so that I may forget my woes, and embrace thee, my only
good? What art thou to me? Have compassion on me, that I may speak. What
am I to thee, that thou demandest my love, and unless I give it thee art
angry and threatenest me with great sorrows? Is it, then, a light sorrow
not to love thee? Alas! alas! tell me of thy compassion, O Lord my God,
what thou art to me: “Say unto my soul, I am thy salvation.” So speak
that I may hear. Behold Lord, the ears of my heart are before thee; open
thou them, and “say unto my soul, I am thy salvation.” When I hear, may I
run and lay hold on thee. Hide not thy face from me. Let me die, lest I
die, if only I may see thy face.
Cramped is the dwelling of my soul; do thou expand it, that thou mayest
enter in. It is in ruins, restore thou it. There is that about it which
must offend thine eyes; I confess and know it, but who will cleanse
it? or to whom shall I cry but to thee? Cleanse me from my secret
sins, O Lord, and keep thy servant from those of other men. I believe,
and therefore do I speak; Lord, thou knowest. Have I not confessed my
transgressions unto thee, O my God; and thou hast put away the iniquity
of my heart. I do not contend in judgment with thee, who art the truth;
and I would not deceive myself, lest my iniquity lie against itself. I
do not, therefore, contend in judgment with thee, for “if thou, Lord,
shouldst mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?”
O Lord God, grant thy peace unto us, for thou hast supplied us with
all things; the peace of rest, the peace of the Sabbath, which hath no
evening. For all this most beautiful order of things, “very good” (all
their courses being finished), is to pass away, for in them there was
morning and evening.
But the seventh day is without any evening, nor hath it any setting,
because thou hast sanctified it to an everlasting continuance; that
which thou didst after thy words, which were very good, resting on the
seventh day, although in unbroken rest thou madest them, that the voice
of thy Book may speak beforehand unto us, that we also after our works
(therefore very good, because thou hast given them unto us) may repose in
thee, also in the Sabbath of eternal life.—_From St. Augustine._[1]
[_January 25._]
Now tell me, Christians, have you hitherto understood it, and do you
still understand it, in this manner? Let each candidly examine himself
in the presence of God. Where is the ambitious man, who, looking on
his ambition as the wound of his soul, desires in good earnest to be
thoroughly cured? Where is the voluptuous man, who, truly afflicted at
his unhappy situation, wishes efficaciously, and as his sovereign good,
to be freed from his passion? Where is the avaricious man, who, ashamed
of his injustice, sincerely and from his heart detests his iniquity?
Where is the woman, who, listening to religion, hath a horror of vanity,
and thinks of extirpating her self-love? From what passion, from what
vicious and ruling inclination hath this divine Savior as yet delivered
you? By what, then, do you know him to be a Savior? And if he be a
Savior, by what mark do you pretend to know that he is yours? What hath
he by your own means performed in your regard? Now, as I perceive that
you are so ill disposed, should I not prevaricate, did I declare to you
his coming as a cause of joy? And to speak as a faithful minister of
the Gospel, ought I not to tell you, what in fact I tell you? Undeceive
yourselves, and bewail your woeful situation, for, while enamored with
the world, you obstinately persist in such criminal dispositions, though
the Savior be born, no more advantage accrues to you from his sacred
birth, than if he were not born.…
… Hath this spirit of truth been hitherto a spirit of truth for us?…
Whatever profession we may make of being, as Christians, the disciples
of the spirit of truth, are we really persuaded of the truths of
Christianity? Hath he made us relish them? Hath he given us a sincere
and efficacious disposition to put them in practice? We adore these
divine truths in speculation; but do we conform our conduct to them?
We speak of them perhaps with eloquence and enthusiasm; but are our
morals correspondent with our words? We give lessons to others upon that
head; but are we ourselves fully convinced of them? Do we believe with
a steadfast and lively faith that, to be Christians, it is our duty not
only to carry our cross, but to place our glory in it? That, to follow
Jesus Christ, we must internally renounce not only all things, but even
ourselves? That, to belong to him, not only must we not indulge the
flesh, but must crucify it? That, to find grace before God, we must not
only forget injuries received, but return good for evil? Do we firmly,
and without hesitation, believe all these points of the Evangelic
doctrine? And can we bear witness to ourselves that we believe them as
fully and constantly in heart as we openly confess them in words? The
Apostles, the moment they received the Holy Ghost, were ready to lay
down their lives for the truth; are we ready, I do not say to lay down
our lives but to destroy our irregular passions? According to this rule,
is there room to believe that the spirit of truth hath undeceived us
with respect to a thousand errors which occasion all the misdeeds in the
world? That he hath disabused us of I know not how many maxims which
pervert us?… If he hath done nothing of all this, what proof have we
that we have received him? And if we have not received him, whom have
we to blame for it but ourselves?… Preserve us from so great and fatal
an irregularity, O Divine Spirit! and, to that intent, make us know the
things thou didst teach the Apostles. Grant that at last we may become
truly thy disciples; and be to us not only a Spirit of Truth, but a
Spirit of Holiness.—_From Bourdaloue._[2]
GLIMPSES OF ANCIENT GREEK LIFE.
Selected from J. P. Mahaffy’s “Old Greek Life.”