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Incentive to Crime
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the liquid poison, they are in Satan’s control. He rules them, and
they co-operate with him.—
Letter 166, 1903
.
Nature of Crimes Committed Under Alcohol
—The result of
liquor drinking is demonstrated by the awful murders that take place.
How often it is found that theft, incendiarism, murder, were commit-
ted under the influence of liquor. Yet the liquor curse is legalized,
and works untold ruin in the hands of those who love to tamper with
that which ruins not only the poor victim, but his whole family.—
The
Review and Herald, May 1, 1900
.
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 act 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 medi-
cal dispensary, even in the church on the sacred Communion table,
his traps are set. Nothing is left undone to create and to foster the de-
sire for intoxicants. On almost every corner stands the public house
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with its brilliant lights, its welcome and good cheer, inviting the
workingman, the wealthy idler, and the unsuspecting youth. Day by
day, month by month, year by year, the work goes on.—
Drunkenness
and Crime, 8
.
The Drinker Not Excusable
—While intoxicated, every degree
of crime has been committed, and yet the perpetrators have been
excused in many instances, because they knew not what they were
doing. This does not lessen the guilt of the criminal. If by his own
hand he puts the glass to his lips, and deliberately takes that which he
knows will destroy his reasoning faculties, he becomes responsible
for all the injury he does while intoxicated, at the very moment
he lets his appetite control him, and he barters away his reasoning
faculties for intoxicating drinks. It was his own act which brought
him even below the brutes, and crimes committed when he is in a
state of intoxication should be punished as severely as though the
person had all the power of his reasoning faculties.—
Spiritual Gifts
4a:125
.