The old log school house--My studies and discontent--My first drink of
liquor--The companion of my first debauch--One drink always fatal--A
horrible slavery--A horseback ride on Sunday--Raleigh--Return home--"Dead
drunk"--My parents' shame and sorrow--My own remorse--An unhappy and silent
breakfast--The anguish of my mother--Gradual recovery--Resolves and
promises--No pleasure in drinking--The system's final craving for
liquor--The hopelessness of the drunkard's condition--The resistless power
of appetite--Possible escape--The courage required--The three laws--Their
violation and man's atonement.
When I first started to school, log school houses were not yet things of
the past, and well do I remember the one which stood near the little stream
known as Hood's creek, and Sam Munger, from whom I first received
instruction. The next school I attended was in a log house near where
Ammon's mill now stands. I attended one or two summer terms at each of
these places. There is nothing remarkable connected with my early
school-days. They glided onward rapidly enough, but I saw and felt
differently, it seemed to me, from those around me; but this may be the
experience of others, only I think the melancholy, the fear, the
unhappiness which hung over me were not as marked in any one else. I
studied but little, because of my discontented and uneasy feeling, but I
kept up with my lessons, and have yet one or two prizes bestowed on me
twenty years ago for being at the head of my class the greater number of
times.
I recollect with painful clearness the first drink of liquor that ever
passed my lips. It has been more than twenty-four years since then, but my
memory calls it up as if it were only yesterday, with all the circumstances
under which I took it. It was in the time of threshing wheat, and then, as
in harvesting, log-rolling, and everything that required the cooperation of
neighbors, whisky was always more or less used. I was little more than six
years of age. A bottle containing liquor was set in the shadow of some
sheaves of wheat which stood near a wagon, and taking it I crawled under
the wagon with a neighbor now living in Raleigh. We began drinking from
this bottle and did not stop until we were both pitiably drunk. The boy who
took that first drink with me has since had some experience with the
effects of alcohol, but at this time he is bravely fighting the good battle
of sobriety and may God always give him the victory. I never could taste
liquor without getting drunk. When one drop passed my lips I became wild
for another, and another, until my sole thought was how to get enough to
satisfy the unquenchable thirst. To-day if I were to dip the point of a
needle into whisky and then touch my tongue with that needle, I would be
unable to resist the burning desire to drink which that infinitesimal atom
would awaken. I would get drunk if hell burst up out of the earth around
me--yes, if I could look down into the flames and see men whose eye-brows
were burnt off, and whose every hair was a burning, blazing, coiling,
hissing snake from their having used the deadly liquid. And if each of
these countless fiery snakes had a tongue of forked fire and could be heard
to scream for miles, and I knew that another drop would cause them to lick
my quivering flesh, yet would I take it. O horror of horrors! I would
plunge into the flames forever and ever. After I once taste I am powerless
to resist. When I was ten years of age I went one Sunday with a neighbor
boy several years older than I, riding on horseback. The course we took was
a favorite one with me for it led toward Raleigh, just north of which place
I contrived to get a pint or more of the poison called whisky. The doctor
from whom I got it had, of course, no idea that I was going to drink it,
especially all of it, but drink it I did, getting so completely under its
horrible influence that when I arrived at home I fell senseless against the
door. My father and mother heard me fall and came out and took me into the
house, and just as soon as the heat of the fire began to affect me, I sank
into a dead stupor; all consciousness was gone; all feeling was destroyed;
all intelligence was obliterated. I lay upon my bed that night wholly
oblivious to everything, knowing not, indeed, that such a creature as
myself ever existed. The morning came at last, and with it I opened my
eyes. Describe who can the thoughts which rushed through my distracted
brain. For a little while I knew not where I was or what I had done. My
head was throbbing, aching, bursting. I glanced about me and on either side
of my bed my father and mother knelt in prayer! Then did I remember what
had befallen me, and so keen was my remorse that I thought I would surely
die, and, in fact, I wanted to die. O, much loved parents--father on earth
and mother in heaven--how often since then have I felt anew the shame of
that terrible hour--how often have I seen your sacred faces, wet with the
tears of that trial, come before me, looking imploringly heavenward as if
beseeching for me the mercy of the infinite God!
That morning the family gathered about the breakfast table, but what a
shadow rested over all. A solemnity of silent sorrow was upon us. The peace
of yesterday had flown with my return home, and the dark misery of my soul
tinged with the shade of the grave's desolation the clouds which were
gathering in our sky. O, how often have I prayed that the time might be
given back, and that it might be in my power to resist the curse; but the
past is implacable as death, and I must bear the tortures that belong to
the memory of that most unhappy day. That day, and for many succeeding
ones, I read an anguish in the saintly face of my mother that I had never
seen there before. My father also bore about with him a look of deep
suffering which haunted me for years. For one day I suffered intensely both
mentally and physically, but being of a strong, vigorous, and healthy
constitution, I was almost completely restored by the following morning. Of
course I resolved and promised my father and mother that I would never
again taste liquor. For some time I faithfully kept my promise, and for
weeks the very thought of liquor was revolting to me. No one becomes a
drunkard in a day or week. Alcohol is a subtle poison, and it takes a long
time for it to so undermine man's system that he finds life almost
intolerable unless stimulated by the hell-broth which must surely destroy
him in the end, unless he closes his lips like a vise against it. But for
me, I never could drink, from my childhood, without coming under the
influence of the accursed poison. I never drank because I liked the taste
of liquor, but because I liked the first effects of it. I was never able to
tell good liquor or rather pure alcohol--for such a thing as good liquor
has never been made--from the worst, the meanest, manufactured from drugs.
The latter may be more speedy than pure alcohol, but either will destroy
with fatal certainty and rapidity. I drank, as I have said, for the
effects, and in the first years of my drinking my first emotions were
pleasurable. It sent the blood rushing to the brain, and induced a
succession of vivid and pleasing thoughts. But invariably the depression
that followed was in the same ratio down as the former was up, and after a
time I lost that first pleasant, unnatural feeling, and drank only to
satisfy an indescribable passion or craving. At first the wine glass may
sparkle and foam, but let it never be forgotten that within that sparkle
and foam is concealed the glittering eye of the uncoiled adder. It is the
sparkle of a serpent's skin, the foam of the froth of death. Here I must
confess that for the past five or six years I have not been able to attain
one moment's pleasure from drinking. Every glass that I have touched has
proven to be the Dead Sea's fruit of ashes to my lips. I drank wildly,
insanely, and became oblivious for days and weeks together to all which was
about me, and finally awoke to the horrors which I had sought to drown, but
now intensified a thousand fold. No man ever buried sorrow in drunkenness.
He can not bury it that way any more than Eugene Aram could bury the body
of his victim with the weeds of the morass. Whoever seeks solace in whisky
will curse the hour which saw him commit a mistake so fatal. Woe to him who
looks for comfort in the intoxicating glass. He will see instead the
ghastly face of murdered hope, the distorted vision of a wasted life, his
own bloated corpse. The habit of drink after a time becomes more than a
mere habit; the system comes to demand and crave liquor, it permeates and
affects every part of the body until every function refuses to perform its
part until it has been aroused to action by its accustomed stimulant.
The most hopeless and wretched slave on earth is he who has bound himself
with the fetters of alcohol, and it is a sad and lamentable truth
that among thousands very few ever escape from the soul-destroying,
health-ruining bondage of an appetite for intoxicating drink. There is only
one here and there of all the hosts that are enchained and cursed who
succeeds in breaking the bonds which bind body, soul and spirit. So far as
the prospect of success is concerned in winning men from evil, I would say,
let me go to the brazen-faced and foul-mouthed blasphemer of the holy
Master's name; let me go to the forger, who for long years has been using
satanic cunning to defraud his fellow-men; let me go to the murderer, who
lies in the shadow of the gallows, with red hands dripping with the blood
of innocence; but send me not to the lost human shape whose spirit is on
fire, and whose flesh is steaming and burning with the flames of hell. And
why? Because his will is enthralled in the direst bondage conceivable--his
manhood is in the dust, and a demon sits in the chariot of his soul,
lashing the fiery steeds of passion to maniacal madness. No possible motive
or combination of motives can be urged upon him which will stand a moment
before the infernal clamorings of his appetite. Wife, children, home,
relatives, reputation, honor, and the hope and prospect of heaven itself,
all flee before this fell destroyer. The sufferings and agonies untold of
one human soul securely bound by the chains forged by rum are enough to
make angels weep and devils laugh. I have no desire to discourage those who
have this habit fastened on them. I would not say to them: You can not
break away from it. I would do all in my power to aid and strengthen every
such person in any attempt he might make to be free. There is escape, but
courage is required to make it, and greater courage than has ever been
exhibited on the field of battle, amid the thunders of cannon, the roar of
deadly conflict, the gleam of sabre and glitter of bayonet. But rather than
die the drunkard's death, and go to the drunkard's eternal doom, every
drunkard can afford to make this fight. It were better, ten thousand times,
that every such one should do as I have done--voluntarily go to an asylum
and be restrained until he so far recovers that he can of his own will
resist temptation. And there is another aid--a strength stronger than our
own--God! He will help every unfortunate one that goes to him in sincerity
and humbly implores the divine aid.
I desire here to make a statement in justice to myself. There are three
laws, the human, the natural and the divine. You may violate a human law,
and the judge, if he sees fit, may pardon your offense. If you violate the
divine law, God has prepared a way of escape, and promises pardon on
conditions within the reach of all, but for a violation of that which I
call natural law, there is no forgiveness. The penalty for every such
violation must be, and is, fully paid every time, and while natural laws
are as much a part of God's creation as the divine, he would no more set
aside a penalty for a violation of one of nature's laws than he would blot
out a part of his written word. Yet there are recuperative powers and
forces in nature that are wonderful, and there is a spiritual strength that
helps us to bear, and overcome, and endure every affliction. I was made a
new creature in Christ Jesus at Jeffersonville, Indiana, on the 21st of
last January, and had I then gone to work to recuperate and restore by all
natural means, my broken body, I am most certain that I never again would
have tasted liquor; but instead of using the means God had placed about me,
in the supreme ecstacy which comes to a redeemed, a new-born soul, I went
to work ten times more laboriously than ever, and soon completely exhausted
my bodily strength. My system was drained of every particle of its power to
resist the slightest attack of any kind whatsoever, much less to make a
successful struggle against my great enemy, and so, physically and mentally
exhausted when I was assailed by the black, foul fiend of alcohol, I fell,
and fell a second time. I resolved, yea, took an oath the most solemn, that
rather than again be overtaken by a disaster so dire, I would have myself
entombed within an asylum for the insane. Here at last, I was placed, and
here I intend to remain until nature shall restore to my body sufficient
strength to resist, with God's help, the next and every attack of my enemy.
As God is my witness, I had rather remain within these walls and listen to
the cries of the worst maniac here, from day to day, until the last hour of
my life--yes, and die and be buried here in the pauper's graveyard, than
ever again go out and drink. And now as I close this chapter with a full
heart, I go down on my knees in supplication to God for strength and grace
to keep me from that which has wrecked all my life and made it a continued
round of sorrow and shame. I ask every one who reads this chapter, to pray
to God for me with all your heart and soul. Oh! men and women, pray for
wretched, miserable, sorrowing, suffering, lonely me.