Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/145

Rh choose one of the two: oppose drunkenness or cooperate with it—serve God or mammon.

If you are a young man who have never as yet taken liquor, never as yet been poisoned by the poison of wine, treasure your innocence and freedom from temptation. If you taste, the temptation will be all the harder for you to overcome it. And do not believe that wine will increase your gaiety. At your time of life gaiety is natural, genuine, good gaiety; and wine only changes your true, innocent gaiety into a drunken, senseless, vicious gaiety.

Above all beware of wine, because at your time of life it will be harder for you to resist other temptations; wine weakens in you the force of reason, which is most needful at your age to help you resist temptations. After you have imbibed you will do what you would not think of doing when sober. Why subject yourself to such a terrible risk ? If you are a grown man who have already got into the habit of using intoxicating drinks, or who are just beginning to form that habit, make haste while there is yet time to get out of this awful habit, or else before you look around it will get control of you, and you may become like those that are irrevocably drunkards, who have perished by reason of wine. All of them began just as you have. Even if you have the ability throughout your life to use intoxicating drinks in moderation, and may not yourself become a drunkard, yet if you continue to drink wine and serve it at your table, you may perhaps make your younger brother, your wife, your children, drunkards, for they may not have the strength as you have to confine themselves to a moderate use of wine.

And above all understand that on you as a man, who have reached the very prime of life, as the master of the house, as the controller of the destiny of others, rests the responsibility of guiding the lives of your household. And therefore if you know that wine brings no advantage, but causes great evil to men, then not only are you not obliged slavishly to do as your fathers and grandfathers used to do,—to use wine, to buy it and serve it to others,—but, on the