Evil Consequents to Drunkenness.

The evils and sad consequents of drunkenness (the consideration of which are as so many arguments to avoid the sin) are to this sense reckoned by the writers of holy Scripture, and other wise personages of the world. 1. It causeth woes and mischief,⁷⁸⁷⁸Prov. xxiii. 29; Ecclus. xxxi. 26. wounds and sorrow, sin and shame;⁷⁹⁷⁹Multa faciunt ebrii quibus sobrii erubescunt. Senec. Ep. 83, 17. it maketh bitterness of spirit, brawling and quarrelling; it increaseth rage and lesseneth strength; it maketh red eyes, and a loost and babbling tongue. 2. It particularly ministers to lust, and yet disables the body; so that in effect it makes man wanton as a satyr, and impotent as age. And Solomon, in enumerating the evils of this vice, adds this to the account,⁸⁰⁸⁰Prov. xxiii. 33. ‘thine eyes shall behold strange women, and thine heart shall utter perverse things: as if the drunkard were only desire, and then impatience, muttering and enjoying like an eunuch embracing a woman. 3. It besots and hinders the actions of the understanding, making a man brutish in his passions, and a fool in his reason; and differs nothing from madness but that it is voluntary, and so is an equal evil in nature, and a worse in manners.⁸¹⁸¹Insaniae comes est ira, contubernalis ebrietas.—Plutarch — Corpus onustum Hesternis vitiis animum quoque praegravat.—Horat. Ebrietas est voluntaria insania.—Senec. 4. It takes off all the guards, and lets loose the reins of all those evils to which a man is by is nature or by his evil customs inclined, and from which he is restrained by reason and severe principles. Drunkenness calls off the watchmen from their towers; and then all the evils that can proceed from a loose heart and an untied tongue, and a dissolute spirit, and an unguarded unlimited will, all that we may put upon the accounts of drunkenness. 5. It extinguisheth and quenches the Spirit of God and with wine at the same time. And therefore St. Paul makes them exclusive of each other:⁸²⁸²Ephes. v. 18. ‘Be not drunk with wine wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit.’ And since Joseph’s cup was put into Benjamin’s sack, no man had a divining goblet. 6. It opens all the sanctuaries of nature, and discovers the nakedness of the soul, all its weaknesses and follies; it multiplies sins and discovers them; it makes a man incapable of being a private friend or a public counsellor. 7. It taketh a man’s soul into slavery and imprisonment more than any vice whatever,⁸³⁸³Prov. xxxi. 4. because it disarms a man of all his reason and his wisdom, whereby he might be cured, and therefore commonly it grows upon him with age; a drunkard being still more a fool and less a man. I need not add any sad examples, since all story and all ages have too many of them. Amnon was slain by his brother Absalom when he was warm and high with wine. Simon, the high-priest, and two of his sons, were slain by their brother at a drunken feast. Holofernes was drunk when Judith slew him; and all the great things that Daniel spake of Alexander⁸⁴⁸⁴Alexandrum intemperantia bibendi, et ille Herculanus ac fatalis scyphus perdidit.—Senec. Ep. 1xxxiii. 21. were drowned with a surfeit of one night’s intemperance: and the drunkenness of Noah and Lot are upon record to eternal ages, that in those early instances, and righteous persons, and less criminal drunkenness than is that of Christians in this period of the world, God might show that very great evils are prepared to punish this vice; no less than shame, and slavery, and incest; the first upon Noah, the second upon one of his sons, and the third in the person of Lot.