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The Ministry of Healing
What is it to him if they, too, are driven to degradation and ruin? He
grows rich on the pittances of those whom he is leading to perdition.
Houses of prostitution, dens of vice, criminal courts, prisons,
almshouses, insane asylums, hospitals, all are, to a great degree,
filled as a result of the liquor seller’s work. Like the mystic Babylon
of the Apocalypse, he is dealing in “slaves, and souls of men.”
Behind the liquor seller stands the mighty destroyer of souls, and
every art which earth or hell can devise is employed to draw human
beings under his power. In the city and the country, on the railway
trains, on the great steamers, in places of business, in the halls of
pleasure, in the medical dispensary, even in the church, on the sacred
Communion table, his traps are set. Nothing is left undone to create
and to foster the desire for intoxicants. On almost every corner
stands the public house, with its brilliant lights, its welcome and
good cheer, inviting the working man, the wealthy idler, and the
unsuspecting youth.
In private lunchrooms and fashionable resorts, ladies are sup-
plied with popular drinks, under some pleasing name, that are really
intoxicants. For the sick and the exhausted, there are the widely
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advertised bitters, consisting largely of alcohol.
To create the liquor appetite in little children, alcohol is intro-
duced into confectionery. Such confectionery is sold in the shops.
And by the gift of these candies the liquor seller entices children
into his resorts.
Day by day, month by month, year by year, the work goes on.
Fathers and husbands and brothers, the stay and hope and pride of
the nation, are steadily passing into the liquor dealer’s haunts, to be
sent back wrecked and ruined.
More terrible still, the curse is striking the very heart of the home.
More and more, women are forming the liquor habit. In many a
household, little children, even in the innocence and helplessness
of babyhood, are in daily peril through the neglect, the abuse, the
vileness of drunken mothers. Sons and daughters are growing up
under the shadow of this terrible evil. What outlook for their future
but that they will sink even lower than their parents?
From so-called Christian lands the curse is carried to the re-
gions of idolatry. The poor, ignorant savages are taught the use of
liquor. Even among the heathen, men of intelligence recognize and