Page:A Reply to "The Academy's" Review of "The Wine Question in the Light of the New Dispensation".djvu/99

92 A REPLY TO "THE ACADEMY'S" REVIEW. from the absence of temptation or from the strength of resolute will it has never been made manifest, is always latent, and ever ready to be lit up at the faintest alcoholic provocation. The smallest sip of the weakest form of fermented or distilled liquor has power to set in a blaze the hidden, unhallowed fire. Persons ignorant of the inexorable law of heredity in alcohol, indiscriminately rebuke and denounce the vicious drunkard and the diseased dipsomaniac. But to medical experts it is as clear as is their own existence that there are multitudes of persons of both sexes and in all positions in life, who. though they may never have yielded to the enticements around them, are yet branded with the red-hot iron of alcoholic heredity. There is no nobler sight on earth than the triumph of such weighted ones over their lurking and implacable foe—a foe the more terrible that it lies concealed within their own bosom. The only safety for all such lies in entire and unconditional abstinence from all alcoholic drinks. Such must shun all the alcohols. Every fermented and distilled liquor is their enemy. Though added horrors, such as delirium tremens, may be heaped up by a resort to impure spirits and the heavier alcohols, the purest ethylic alcohol, or the weakest and most delicate fermented wine, is strong enough to awaken the dormant appetite, and provoke a thirst too often, alas! quenched only in death. Whatever their station or their accomplishments, the subjects of the inherited drink-crave can abstain or can drink to excess, but drink moderately they can not. If, in a state of consciousness, they taste an alcoholic beverage at all, whether on the plea of sickness at thy prescription of a physician, or on the plea of religion at the exhortation of a priest, they are in imminent danger. Their whole system is, as it were, set on fire. Unless happily enabled to master the giant appetite in the very first moment of its re-awakened life, they are truly taken possession of by a physical demon—a demon easily raised, but once raised, almost beyond the power of even a Hercules to slay.