p. 132The Intemperate Husband

INFERNO, vi.

MILTON, Samson Agonistes.

The sense of the most enlightened Christian ages, basing its judgment on Holy Writ as well as on the fitness of things, deemed it equitable that the punishments of eternity should be a real expiation of the guilt, and by the sense that had sinned. Hence, intemperance in all its loathsome forms, is represented by the great poet,—as punished in a land of eternal darkness, where the abject multitude were immersed in “a mixture foul” of discolored water and sleety slush, large hail and rain pelting the sufferers unceasingly, and filling the land and the atmosphere with intolerable stench. Over this vile and filthy fold of the drunkard,—as over some miry farm-yard with its swine,—the monstrous form of three-headed Cerberus,—the gluttonous and insatiable, kept sleepless watch, rending the prostrate forms with his cruel fangs, and filling the hideous darkness with his continuous barking.

Surely, when one considers calmly what that form of intemperance is which we designate as habitual drunkenness in a husband and parent,—it must be evident that the eternal death as here described, is but the natural consequence and just retribution of the drunkard’s present life. For the intrinsic guilt of intoxication consists not so much in the gratification of the animal appetite for strong drink, or of the craving for the pleasurable excitement which is the first stage of inebriety,—as in depriving one’s self knowingly of the mastery over one’s bodily faculties and, above all, over one’s reason.

It is this temporary loss and suspension of the highest powers of the soul,—of those which are Godlike in man,—that constitutes the specific guilt of drunkenness. The sin of the suicide, the self-destroyer, the man who takes away his own life,—is a something most awful to contemplate. It is the throwing away, by one act of despair or defiance, of all the gifts of the most bountiful Creator, the unmaking of all the gracious plans of His most wise providence in favor of a human soul; it is the setting aside, against all the laws of nature and nature’s God, of one’s responsibilities to Him and to our kind in the present and throughout the boundless future.

This, and much more than this, is all comprised in self-destruction. But intoxication, whether by alcohol or by opium, is the beginning of self-destruction. It ends,—as every enlightened reader knows,—by destroying the body, by debasing and destroying the soul, by destroying the home, breaking the wife’s heart, disgracing and ruining the children. It brings man, destined for the close companionship of God and his angels in the life to come, down to the level of the beast in this world.... But, no! this is most unjust to the beast.

It is but too familiar an expression with us when we see a man surrendering himself to the excesses of inebriety, to say that “he is making a beast of himself.” The brute is never false to its nature, never sinks below the level of the instincts, the intelligence that nature has given it. Nothing is more temperate and abstemious than the irrational animal which we are wont injuriously to compare with degraded man, when he acts against the laws alike of his spiritual and his animal nature. The dog, even in its extreme thirst, will lap up daintily just enough of water to satisfy its need. It is most dainty, when it has no choice between pure and impure water, in barely lapping once or twice of the latter; and under no pressure of appetite will it so much as taste of what it knows to be poisonous or hurtful. A very ferocious bear in the Jardin des Plantes, at Paris, was condemned to be killed by the authorities. The keepers resolved to destroy it by poison. So they impregnated the bread and injected the meat they threw to it with the most deadly substances known to the chemist. The animal, although kept without food for several days to render it the more ravenous, was too wary to follow the promptings of its hunger. It smelled the treacherous food over and over again, turned it on every side, and then went away. Presently, however,—as if it had been devising some plan to meet the difficulty,—it returned to where the poisoned food lay, and pushed it steadily toward its water-trough. Then, after washing it copiously again and again, smelling after each ablution, it came to the conclusion that it might safely taste it. It did not eat it up all at once, but by small pieces, washing each of these over again as a further precaution. This being reported by the keepers to the magistrates, they revoked the order for the animal’s destruction. It deserved to live.

It is also well known how much labor and fatigue the camel can undergo amid the burning sands of Africa. This most useful beast is the very impersonation of temperance, performing the longest journeys under the most trying circumstances, living on the scantiest fare and depending on the supply of water laid up in its complex stomach. It is a supply on which its master often depends in the direst extremity of thirst,—the frugal animal thus saving the life of man at the expense of its own.

We do the beast a foul wrong when we say, that man by drunkenness sinks down to its level,—whereas it is only by sheer violence that brutal man can bring the beast down to his own level by making it drink perforce. Yet, though you may reduce the poor brute to helpless intoxication, do you not bring it down to your level. It has no moral law to guide it; and, if it had, you can only make it drunk by sheer violence done its nature and in spite of its own desperate struggles.

This outrage was perpetrated on the brute once,—and during a war which we shall not designate here. A besieging army had been for months beleaguering a mighty fortress; and, as the siege dragged its slow length along, the officers were wont to spend the uncertain intervals of battle in such amusements as they could find or devise. Neighboring regiments had their festive meetings, and their leaders but too often forgot past dangers and the perils of the morrow in most unseemly dissipation. One of the most notable frequenters of these clubs was a young officer who was always accompanied by a magnificent Newfoundland dog. One evening,—the eve, indeed, of a day since become famous,—the gallant friends had indulged in longer libations and louder mirth than ever; they had “made a night of it,” not knowing, they said, who would survive the struggle on the morrow.

Just as they were about to separate, some one remarked that the Newfoundland dog was the only sober individual present, and thereupon it was moved and resolved that the dog be made drunk. So, there are these gentlemen, these brave defenders of their country’s honor, engaged in holding the poor struggling animal down, while they poured wine and brandy down its throat. The innocent and temperate animal resisted frantically the outrage done to it by the united strength of these “lords of creation;” at length, half strangled, half poisoned, sick and helpless, the poor dog writhed on the ground, rejecting, with the native vigor of its unimpaired stomach, the poison it had been forced to swallow.

So, the dog as well as its master had to be “carried home” that night. The struggle of the morrow passed by without completely ending the siege. Of those who had been actors in the inhuman scene just described, we know not how many perished. But, not very long thereafter, the survivors met, as before, to make merry, and with them came the master of the dog,—and the dog also,—though not quite all the way.

He had followed his master, forgiving, faithful animal as he was, the cruel injury done himself, on that memorable night;—had followed his master through the camp from tent to tent, and line to line, till they drew near the house or tent used as a club-room. As they approached it, the dog fell behind his master, and when the latter at the very door turned round to call the animal to him, the other turned and fled with the speed of the wind. No coaxing and no threats ever afterward could make the ill-used dog come near the spot where high-born, educated, and brave gentlemen had once reduced him to their own level of physical helplessness,—but not to their own depth of moral degradation.

We know that it is becoming fashionable in our midst, to set aside the salutary severity with which the Church in former times visited both the man who died by his own hand and the man who drank himself to death. With the waning of true religion, charity, dissevered from truth, becomes cruelty, and our caricature of mercy in her maudlin ministrations, becomes the worst of unkindness. True charity loves as God loves, the soul before the body, and in its work of saving the former it also saves and sanctifies the latter.

Our modern doctors and moralists will have it that the despair of the suicide,—the supreme wrong done to the Infinite Mercy and exhaustless patience of the Creator, by renouncing it and putting one’s self beyond its pale,—is insanity, rendering the doer of the most dreadful of deeds irresponsible for his act. They will have it, too,—these modern blind leaders of the blind,—that drunkenness is disease, that habitual drunkenness is chronic disease, by which the brain becomes so weakened, that the will loses all control over its own inclinations.

Oh, we do not deny that just as successive acts of virtuous self-denial impart to the will a continual increase of strength and generosity, even so a long series of guilty indulgences weaken it in the like proportion. We know that habitual generosity and self-sacrifice, aided as they are by the ever-present grace of God, will end by making the Christian man a Godlike being in his strength to overcome every obstacle to virtue, and in the supernatural facility with which he performs the most heroic deeds of holiness.

Knowing, also, what the wise pagans proclaimed long ages before Christ,—that vicious acts breed vicious habits, and that habitual vice is the worst form of slavery,—we must only recall to parents and to all who have the training of youth, this fundamental truth in practical morality: The man who commits one sinful act knows, that by so doing he only disposes himself the more readily to commit a second, and that the second renders more easy still the committing of a third,—every successive fall from the level road of virtue increasing, almost immeasurably, our downward velocity. The drunkard’s guilt, in his very first sin, consists, not only in his offending against God and himself by transgressing the Divine Law and the law of his own nature, but in acquiescing in the immediate and necessary consequences of his sin, such as the inability to discharge obligations and duties incumbent on him, the scandal given to others by his evil example, and this very rendering of a second act of drunkenness both more easy and probable.

The child should be warned against the formation of evil habits, and taught that evil habit is a chain of adamant by which the soul fetters its own freedom,—the most glorious and sacred of all the gifts of the Creator. This weakening, fettering, and destroying of the soul’s innate freedom—its most Godlike attribute and power,—is known, or ought to be known to every human soul in possession of its reason, as the inevitable consequence of evil acts become evil habits. This is the very nature of sin. Most true, therefore, in the estimation of all ages, is the affirmation of the great poet:

“All wickedness is weakness.”

The first act of wickedness weakens the will, takes away a part of its power for good; every succeeding act adds to the weakness in an increasing ratio. This weakness, this wickedness is “shameful,”—shameful in the eyes of God and men. The man who consents to the first sin, the first weakness, does a “wicked” thing, precisely because it is destructive of his own strength, his own dignity, his own happiness and that of others, as well as injurious to the most high God. Just as it is no excuse of a man’s folly, that, without any justifiable reason, he has again and again and again gone into a leprosy or a yellow-fever hospital till he has caught the plague in its worst form, although warned by physicians and others of the consequences of his foolhardiness; even so it is with the drunkard. He has been warned against the first act of intoxication, and the second, and the third, till the habit grew on him and possessed his soul as with the virulence of the most deadly disease.

And, where a man is at the head of a family, with a loving wife to care for and to cherish, with children to train, like the young of the eagle, to the loftiest flights of excellence, and the pursuit of virtues that lift the soul far above earth and its groveling satisfactions,—the contracting of habits of intemperance, or the exposing himself to contract them, is fearful guilt, and most awful responsibility at His judgment-seat who will hold the husband and father accountable for the life, the honor, the happiness, the souls of wife and children.

And the higher a man is born, the more richly he is endowed with talents, worldly wealth, and great opportunities, the more favored he is by education and position—and the more terrible is that responsibility; because all these are powers given him to make his home-life blissful, and his home the center from which his own power for all good may radiate far and wide.

The American public has been obliged to recall, in the recent death of a most estimable lady in New England, not only that she was destined to become the bride of the most gifted poetical genius that ever shed luster on American letters, when, at the age of thirty-nine, he was found dead intoxicated with a broken bottle by his side; but that his career of profligacy had already been a long one,—dating from his very boyhood. Only two years before his death, he buried his lovely wife, the Annabel Lee of his well-known song,—buried her after having broken her heart, and dragged her through the mire of his own degradation and the extreme poverty brought on by incessant debauch.

Most touching and most instructive it is to recall a few passages of that gifted and guilty man’s writings, in which he records both his love for this innocent young thing and his remorse for the misery caused her.

At the very time when poverty and its saddest privations were preying upon the homeless wife, and nothing seemed able to reclaim the wretched husband from the degrading passion that preyed on his life and his honor, he wrote the poem of “The Raven,”—one of the masterpieces of American poetry. The “Raven” was that same dreadful passion whose fatal hold upon his will left him neither power of resistance nor hope of eternal salvation.

Listen to the awful utterances of that immortal verse, every word and line of which seems to have been written under the inspiration of that demon-haunted fever which ever attends upon alcoholic excess.

To the inveterate drunkard bound, like Prometheus, to his habits with chains which no effort of his can break, the remorse preying on his heart is worse than the beak of the vulture tearing the entrails of living man. And in that terrible remorse the most intolerable pang does not come from the constant remembrance of what the drunkard “might have been” and of what “he has brought himself to,”—so much as from the torturing knowledge of the shame, ruin, misery, he has brought upon his dear ones.

The young wife who chose him to fill her heart and her life with happiness, because she believed him to be what she was herself,—spotless, manly, true, strong to support her through life, devoted to duty, to home, to God, and to all the sacred and manifold obligations of husband, father, and Christian,—knew him not. And she awakened from her dream of innocent love and hope, to find the husband of her choice to be, like one of those horrid monsters of Scandinavian fiction,—a man having to all appearance the stature, the strength, and the beauty of the gods, but who was only half of an empty shell, a mask of humanity without heart, or flesh, or blood, or feeling.

We have seen many of these young wives entrapped into marriage with such half-men by some strange error of their own heart and judgment, by the ignorance and neglect of their own parents, or by some unworthy artifice of the half-man and his parents;—and they struggled on for years and years to conceal from every eye, even that of their nearest relatives, the dreadful secret of their own misery, rising beneath the load of their heavy cross to sublime heights of heroic self-sacrifice; arming themselves with invincible patience, meekness, and forbearance, in order to reform their companion, and to enlist in the work of reformation the good God and his angels. Their union reminded one of the cruel method devised by the abominable tyrant Mezentius,²2Mortua quin etiam jungebat corpora vivis, Componens manibusque manus, atque oribus ora, (Tormenti genus) et sanie taboque fluentes Complexu in misero longa sic morte necabat. ENEID, viii. 485-488. who bound the living to the putrid dead, that they might thus slowly perish of horror and loathing.

It is not, however, the torture of soul arising from the deception practiced on herself and the agony of having thus to live bound forever to one loathsome to every interior and exterior sense, that is the greatest suffering of the wife and mother; it is to see her home made desolate, her children worse than orphaned, every means of sustenance sacrificed piecemeal to the unhallowed appetite of him who should be the sustainer and provider of the home. This is the death-like shadow which falls on the home of the drunkard, frequently from the very first days of his married life; this is the gloom, worse than that of the Valley of Death, amid which his bride finds herself condemned to dwell,—the darkness and the despair increasing day by day, as the husband pursues his downward course. This is the raven that

“Still is sitting, still is sitting,”

above the door of the home which wifely devotion and motherly love are vainly laboring to brighten; this is the dark form of evil boding which haunts her waking and her sleeping hours like a living horror. Its “eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s,” its cruel beak is ever tearing her heart, and its prophetic voice,—as month of misery succeeds to month, and as the years come and go without alleviation to her intolerable burthen, ever seems to utter in her ears the fatal “Nevermore!” No,—there is never to be for her sunshine around the hearth, joy in her children’s endearments, assurance that the father’s name will not blight the prospects of her daughters, or that his vice will not cling like inherited leprosy to her sons.

We men are but too apt to commiserate the lot of the drunkard even in the last stages of his reckless and selfish course, when irreparable ruin has fallen on his home, and irremediable disease on himself. We say that “it is a pity; the man is so generous, so warm-hearted, gifted with such rare qualities of soul; so lovable, when he is himself, so sociable,” etc., etc., etc. Priests and others who have only seen him outside of his family circle, and when his fits of maudlin repentance were on him,—solely, or principally considered the wreck before them, beholding only in the man the qualities or gifts which he had neglected or perverted. We do not deny either that this infirmity attaches itself most frequently to the man of lively fancy, facile talent, warm heart, and open hand, or that,—when degraded and ruined by the misuse of his gifts,—the poor prodigal is still deserving of helpful sympathy and charitable compassion. It is not to be forgotten, however, that the Prodigal Son in the Gospel narrative, was unmarried, and that his debaucheries had not ruined a home, broken a wife’s heart, and brought children to disgrace and beggary.

As we are holding up the mirror of truth to men, we must remind them of what the wife is suffering in her cold, cheerless, darkened home, while the self-ruined husband is parading his native generosity of disposition, and soliciting the sympathy of his old acquaintance, as if he were the victim of other people’s injustice, instead of being the destroyer of his home, his family, and himself.

You, dear reader, who know with what a priestly charity and tenderness we are anxious to touch on all these details, will agree with us that these “unselfish” and warm-hearted drunkards, are in their own wretched homes and toward their families, the most cruelly selfish, cold-hearted, and unfeeling of husbands and parents. Is it not true, that in looking upon that sad wreck of humanity we call an habitual and irreclaimable drunkard, we give all our pity to the fallen man before us, and forget the wife and the children at home, whom his merciless and heartless self-indulgence reduced to want and starvation?

Have you not heard of, have you not seen, these men living for years upon the earnings of wives, who had not been brought up to such labor? Have we not known these men to steal and drink the money so hardly, so heroically earned by their delicate and drooping companions for the support of their suffering children, to keep a roof above them, and scant fire on the hearth, and scant bread on the board?—Yes, we have known these “warm-hearted,” unprincipled brutes to steal from the wife a whole week’s earnings, and spend the whole of it in the neighboring tavern, treating their vile companions all round to cup after cup of the drugged alcohol,—till not one penny was left to get bread for the hungry children on the Sunday morning? And, viler than this vile husband and his peers of the bottle, viler even than words can express, the tavern-keeper dealt out cup after cup of the murderous beverage so long as the money lasted, fully aware the while of the sore, sore need of the hapless wife and hungry children at home!

Unselfishness, indeed! Have we priests not known more than one of these same men, praised by their casual acquaintances for their amiability and open-handed liberality, to be drunk daily while a mother or wife lay on her death-bed, drunk while she lay in her coffin, and to have come staggering drunk to her grave? Have we not known wretches so utterly reckless of all sense of honor and shame that they would have stolen the marriage ring off the finger of mother or wife in the grave to buy one last glass of alcohol?

Talk of unselfishness! Have we not seen these utterly selfish and utterly unmanly men forget all the most sacred feelings and imperious duties of the husband and the parent, and indulge in their wildest freaks of intoxication, when their sick wives most needed tenderest nursing and lay at death’s door for many days in succession? Yet these abominable brutes would return from their long nightly or daily debauch to enter perforce the sick-room and imperil the helpless sufferer’s life by noisy demonstrations of affection or bursts of passionate abuse.

The fiend, that seems to possess the souls of men who indulge in the dreadful poisons invented by modern distillers, seems to transform his slaves into fiends after his own image and likeness,—impelling them to show a devilish ingenuity in torturing the poor, patient, overtaxed woman who has to bear the double curse of their name and their companionship.... Shall we continue on this subject?

O men, O true men, who read this page, forgive the writer for penning truths so disgraceful to human nature, so painful to the reader, and so unspeakably painful to the writer himself. If, in holding up the mirror to you, such diabolical forms appear, where the divine features of the true Christian man,—the child of God in life and manners,—should alone appear,—let the fearful apparition only stimulate us all to a salutary hatred of the besetting vice of our age.

Where is the radical remedy? it may be asked. We know but one. The rearing of our boys in such ignorance and such horror of intemperance, that they may be like holy Samuel, or Elias, or John the Baptist, or the thrice-blessed descendants of Jonadab the Son of Rechab, Nazarites from their birth, never tasting wine or strong drink of any kind. Oh! if this book could bring forth such fruit in every family in which it is read, how gladly would the writer sing his Nunc dimittis!³3“Now dost thou dismiss Thy servant, O Lord, According to Thy Word, in peace, Because my eyes have seen Thy salvation.”—ST. LUKE, ii. 29, 30.

There is, however, one class of men to whom, in particular, we address this concluding paragraph,—those, namely, who are engaged in the traffic of intoxicating drinks. We remind distillers, that, while we should under no circumstances interfere with the necessities and the liberty of lawful trade, there are certain modern expedients in their special business, which are alike beyond the necessities of lawful trade, and a criminal violation of the freedom it should enjoy. It is not only the distilling of alcoholic liquors from substances which render the liquor distilled essentially deleterious, but the drugging of pure alcohol so as to make it injurious or poisonous, or the selling for wine or for any other like well-known drink, what is a dangerous or deadly counterfeit, skillfully disguised.

But it is to tavern-keepers, and all who are engaged in retailing alcoholic stimulants, that our words would fain appeal with all the earnestness and charity of a priestly heart.

We have seen fortunes,—great fortunes, even,—made in this dangerous business, and made, too, by men who did not care what they sold or to whom they sold,—provided they found and kept their customers till these had given the last penny they had, and taken much more than they could bear of intoxicating drink. We have seen these men flourishing suddenly, their children springing up around them like these trees of rapid growth, that take root in an unwholesome Southern swamp, live a short and brilliant season, and pine away as suddenly as they had grown up, without leaving healthy fruit or a lasting progeny behind.

The blessing of God does not come with money made in violation of His most binding laws; money so made is also burthened with the curse of widowed mothers, of heart-broken wives, of children rendered homeless, penniless, and parentless. And these terrible curses will melt the money in the hands of those who inherit it, and often consume the possessors themselves.

Only think of it. Here is a man calling himself a Christian, a Catholic, having a family to rear, and wishing to educate them according to the dictates of the faith of their baptism. He knows that it is a deadly sin to allow any person to become intoxicated in his house; and yet, because his customers may get as much to drink as they please at the next tavern, he thinks they may as well get drunk in his house. “If I do not give them as much liquor as they want,”—he reasons,—“they will get it elsewhere; and my customers will leave me.” So, he refuses no one, and gives to any extent.

This is not the worst. There is among these customers one man, the father of a family, who is an habitual drunkard, who is,—to the tavern-keeper’s certain knowledge,—drinking his wife and children out of house and home; and who, besides, is leading a life of intolerable disgrace and misery. He has been warned by the neighbors of the ruin this man is bringing on his dear ones;—he has been warned again and again by the drunkard’s unfortunate wife. And yet he allows that recreant husband and father to remain his customer, to drink and get drunk in his house, day after day, for weeks, for months, for years,—till the man’s ruin and that of his family are consummated! Do you think,—can any one think,—that this conduct on your part will meet with God’s approval? that it will bring a blessing on you and yours? or that it can bring anything but God’s withering curse, blighting yourself, your ill-gotten fortune, and your children after you?