The Catholic World, Vol. 27, April 1878 to September 1878Various
Religion
The Catholic World, Vol. 27, April 1878 to September 1878
Various
Catholic Church -- Periodicals
grapes into the goblet whence he and his disciples drank? Talk to one of
these people about the desirableness of some regard for the habits and
customs of the multitudes in this wide world who use wine and spirits
without abusing them; he regards you with a withering contempt for your
ignorance, and informs you that _they are all drunkards_ and must be
_reformed_; that if five glasses of wine make a man drunk, one-half of a
glass must make him one-tenth part drunk; that liquor is never
necessary, even in disease as a remedy; that the Good Samaritan was
really poisoning the poor fellow to whom he gave the wine; and he leaves
on your mind the general impression that Solomon had yet a great deal to
learn from Sons of Temperance and prohibitory-law men when he
over-hastily recommended in his Proverbs to “give drink to the
sorrowful.” Just as impracticable, though in a different way and for a
different reason, is the man who has no sympathy for habits and needs
which he never knew; who never had a generous impulse in his life; whose
every act is based on cold reason and personal interest; who seldom or
never took, and who never longed for, a glass of wine since his
wedding-day; who has no sympathy for those differently situated in life
or of different physiological diathesis. He has neither genuine sympathy
for the unfortunate drunkard nor fellow-feeling for those who use
liquor. Mistaking oftentimes his own plentiful surroundings for honesty,
the want of temptation for temperance, and his own success in life for
virtue, we need expect from him no other cry than “do away with the
whole thing.”
Those poor degraded wretches at the other extreme of society who, from
congenital inclination, bad surroundings, evil training, folly, disease,
or the gnawing remorse engendered by failure in life, have fallen a prey
to the accursed poisons sold as drink, their intellect shattered and
their physical constitution prostrate, do not, we confess, deserve a
very ardent sympathy from a community for which they have done little
but harm. Still, that community was to blame that received money for
licensing the houses that sold them narcotics instead of beer, henbane
instead of wine, and liquid damnation for strong drink. It is, at least,
a duty which we owe in future to all who can control themselves that,
when they ask for bread, they shall not be furnished with a stone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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