LETTER XLV.
Dear Charles,—Yes I am, indeed, grieved; but I am
not surprised to hear that our old acquaintance, Selden, has
become an inebriate!
You think it passing strange this should be, in circumstances
like his;—at the head of his profession;—with an
easy fortune;—in the midst of a lovely family;—and after
having been for long years a model of sobriety and virtue;
—and his sudden inebriety without seeming temptation!
Some of your townsmen suppose his fall arose from
refusal to take the pledge. No, no! Charles, his fall belonged
to his new view. He had reached that most terrific
point in life, whence the world, in its essential nothingness,
its colorless nakedness, its insipid staleness, is clearly perceived,
as if one saw into its intrinsic emptiness with the
eyes of his very soul:—an hour fraught with infinite peril
to a certain class of intellectual men!
Occasional glimpses of the world's vanity are caught
through various loopholes and slight rendings in the screen
of hope and fancy; but, in early manhood we can shut our
eyes, and, retiring to a more secure part of the gauzy and
brilliant and magnificent concealment, can hug ourselves
into comfort, as one does in his cushioned seat, near the
winter hearth, while tempestuous winds are raging without.
As we advance towards the middle life, however, the
curtain lifts itself by degrees from around us, and, sooner or
later, suddenly vanishes for ever! Woe, then, to the man
who has built an eternity of hope and joy on the baseless
vision! That moment is the crisis of his destiny!
To such a man are but few alternatives; all of them desperate,
save one,—and that only alternative the natural
heart hates. The man must contrive to become wholly absorbed
again in what is seen and felt to be essential vanity
and hideous deformity; or he must betake himself to drunkenness
and dissipation; or he must commit suicide; or he
must honestly repent of his sins, and at once and for ever and
totally abandon the world as a chief good, trample it under
his feet, and “set his affections on things above.”
Charles, I repeat,—that to some men of certain intellectual
habits and peculiar tempers, the hour of full and clear
perception of the absolute and essential emptiness in life, is
an hour on which hangs heaven or hell! If such men will
not then choose heaven, they must either stifle reflection and
deaden conscience, or die—die, either the lingering death of
drunkenness, or the instant death of what is commonly called
suicide! Most prefer,—and it is a choice and not an accident,—most
prefer the lingering death; not a few, the immediate
suicide! Hence, Charles, the headlong, reckless
worldliness and dissipation of these—hence the sudden and
hopeless intemperance—hence the alarming and seemingly
unaccountable self-murder!
Only the short-sighted and the inexperienced stand amazed,
however, and say, “Why all this? such and such persons
were in the midst of honors, and wealth, and usefulness,
and happiness”—for, these very circumstances, so far
from staying the crisis, only brought it on. It is the hopeless,
irremediable, essential and disgustful vanity of these
very things, that sickens the deep soul even unto death!
They can no more rejoice in them than we can long after, and
kiss, and eagerly swallow a hateful and loathsome medicine!
They can no more draw near, than we can to the picture of
food, or of fire, when we are perishing with hunger and cold!
We inwardly curse all as demoniacal insults and mockeries!
And would you say to the tempted and wounded spirit,
“Sign the Pledge?” Go—point your finger, earth-worm,
against the tempest, and say to the warring elements, “Peace,
be still!” Go—bid the angry waves of the wrathful ocean
to be calm! Charles—dear Charles!—I tell you—(and it is
the word of one that has a right to speak)—I solemnly tell
you, that, to the anguished, melancholy soul, weighed down,
—oh! by what mountain pressure of unspeakable woe, and
tossed by its frightful tumults, and raging with the fires of
an inward hell—I solemnly tell you, that this advice, well
meant as it may be, is a most pitiful mockery! Listen to me,
Charles:—our poor friend Selden must either drink or die;
or he must, in all the religious sense of the term, choose God
for his portion.
Charles, waste not his precious time by pointing our dear
friend to the temperance pledge. Does he, do you think,
need information about the fatal consequences of drinking?
Is he to be affected by the common-place about the force of
example, and the comeliness of sobriety? I tell you, he is
drinking to prevent suicide! Take from Selden, just now, his
intoxicating cup—and unless you can almost instantly give
him the Christian's hope and joy—he will die by his own
hand! He is now committing the crime—slowly indeed—
but knowingly and deliberately!—he has seen the frightful
vision of blank nothingness in all the things of earth, and
with a terrified soul he is hiding away!
Oh! my friend, point him to the cross! Urge him to
prayer! Pour upon his tumultuating and deeply-wounded
spirit the oil and wine of our heavenly religion! Throw
upon his sight the ineffable beauties, and unchanging excellence,
of that immortality which the Son of God revealed!
Show him that city whose foundation is eternal and whose
maker and builder is God! If—oh! if you can!—help him
to be reconciled to our Heavenly Father!—and in that moment
he will dash to the earth the maddening, accursed,
damning bowl! Let him be pervaded with the ravishments
of that life—and this will fade away!—will vanish for ever!
he will heed it not—he will know it not!
Without this, you may have, possibly, a temporary success.
As long as his mind is diverted from reflection—and his eyes
shut from seeing—and his ears from hearing,—“Vanity
of vanities—vanity of vanities—all is vanity,”—stamped
indelibly upon all the lying forms of earthly glory and beauty,
and crying out in all pervading tones of darkest melancholy
with every passing breeze,—Selden may refrain. But,
Charles, when, like the horrible fits of hydrophobia returning
after the short calm produced by medicines having power to
retard but not to cure; when the unutterable reality comes
again and again, as it will to the sober;—then Selden, as
many others, if unreconciled to God,
must drink or die!
Alas! how often the calm ones pass some inebriate of
this sort and say, “Wretched man, why did he not sign the
pledge? Could he not sit down and think of his talents—
and honors—and wealth—and family—and happiness—and
example—and do as we have done—refrain from drinking?”
Hear me, ye inexperienced and untempted;— — the man
did think of all these things!—and at the thought, and with
the thought, and because of the thought, sprung up that
howling and demon tempest!—and that hell-flame was kindled,
which could not be hushed and quenched at your bidding
nor at his! But one voice only in the universe can
then speak peace!—and if he will not hear that voice,—and
distinct enough it is amidst that raging hell,—the man must
drink or die!
Pass not such scornfully, worldly wise man—child of
pleasure—son of ambition—strong now in resolution never
so assailed—full of the pride of life and the buoyancy of hope
—and freshness of fancy—O thou, who boastest of honor,
and adherest to the pledge!—for, when that hour of unimaginable
and indescribable horror of darkness comes—faith
in Jesus Christ will save thee from the drunkard's grave, but
the pledge—never!
Charles, I do know, that this philosophy of intemperance
and madness and suicide, as to many noble and generous and
honorable persons, is true. I know it from observation, and
—if you must have it—from experience. Oh! friend!—I
have stood, and suddenly as if carried by the spirit, upon
a high point, naked, bleak, cheerless, and isolated from all
beings but God and my soul;—and thence have I, with
strangely increased power of sight, looked forth upon the
whole world revealed!—and, I do declare unto you, its whole
glory and grandeur and power and wealth were as intrinsically
worthless as the dust of a balance! All had no more
force to move the desires of my soul than the veriest straw
of vanity or bubble of emptiness that floats in the air or on
the water!—yes! and, oh! the concentrated bitterness of that
hour!—I felt,
if this is my all, then be it all
accursed! I
renounce it!—I abhor it!—I shudder at it!—I flee from it!
Oh! my God! be reconciled to me—reconcile my soul
to thee! Give me a
good! Give me thyself! Let me
see and understand and value thy glory! Let me, by
grace, come into some lowest and humblest place in
that
city—or I
must even now
die! Death is preferable to this—
nature
cannot—CANNOT endure this!
Charles, had not some faint hope of winning Christ and
heaven arisen!—had not some sweet dawn of that world
been cast into my horror-stricken soul!—had not a thrill of a
secret and strange emotion stirred, like the thrill of a heavenly
music in my heart!—had not something akin to the
ravishment of the ineffable come!—I must have died, or my
intellect must have been wrecked for ever!
Mourn for those inebriates, Charles—throw your arms
around their necks, and pour tears of piteous compassion on
their cheeks—they have seen that sight! Tell them, there
is hope and happiness and joy and peace and honor and
wealth, and all infinitely transcending what, in that sudden
revelation, vanished for ever!—but tell them all this belongs to
that life, and not to this! Tell, them, it is God's Spirit that
has made this revelation to their secret souls, to drive them
into Heaven! It is a revelation of mercy, and not of wrath.
Charles, I do know why some comparatively virtuous
persons become on a sudden inebriates; why some die by
their own hands; and why others become the inmates of a
mad-house! And I do know that such must be pointed by devout
Christians, not to the Temperance pledge, but to the
Cross!
