Page:Artabanzanus (Ferrar, 1896).djvu/118

110 I am not fond of wine. You may make yourself easy on that score. I never was fond of wine, or any other intoxicating drink. It is one of the greatest blessings I have ever enjoyed, and one for which I have always been most deeply grateful, that I am able even to reside in a house where intoxicating liquors are sold without feeling the slightest temptation to partake of them myself. In the present state of our world, the desire for stimulating beverages is a prominent and gloomy feature. There is no greater cause of dishonour, dishonesty, lasciviousness, violence, and even downright murder itself. The love of it reduces thousands of men and women, who were once clever and beautiful, aye, and good and true, to degrading, wretched poverty, and associates them with hardened criminals and revolting crime. What will they say, I wonder, when they stand before the judgment-seat of God, and hear the sentence of perpetual banishment from His presence pronounced because they could not or would not resist that vile temptation! Yet we must hope and pray for the mercy of God for the poor, weak, deluded creatures.'

'You can lecture well on temperance, Ubertus,' said the Doctor, 'and you have improved your knowledge by your residence here. You saw the multitudes of people in the Pleasure Department of this city; if you called all those people together in the great primordial abyss, which is more than ten miles in diameter, the place would be crowded to suffocation, and I believe if you asked them all what had brought them to ruin, ninety-nine out of every hundred would answer that it was love of wine, or gin, or brandy, or rum, or whisky.'

'It is, indeed, most astonishing,' I replied, 'to perceive how this gigantic disease keeps spreading, and is ever on the increase. Among men and women, too, who ought to have sense and discretion, who are in possession of their intellectual faculties, who have wit and talents to guide them