p. 141 | Temperance

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 22, 1883

Temperance.

For Whom to Go.

The following is the manner in which John B. Finch made the wife of a liquor-seller commit herself in favor of the principle of prohibition:—

We believe that the only way you can prevent drunkards is the destruction of the place where the germs of drunkenness are disseminated.

I talked in New York one time, and the next day a lady stopped me on the street, and said, "I don't think much of you." I told her that was a good thing for me, especially if my wife should find it out. She said: "You have no business to talk against liquor-sellers, when it is your business to save drunkards." I said: "If you will give half as much money for saving drunkards as your husband gets for manufacturing them, I will make it a business to pull them out of the gutter." She said: "You can't think I am very smart." I said to her: "Suppose there was a window in your house all covered with mud, what would you do?" Said she: "I would go and wash it." "And I see a boy and I say to him, 'Boy, I will give you a dollar if you will creep down, and when she gets that window washed, slap it with mud.' You would go and wash it the second time, and he would again splash it with mud; and you would wash it again, and he would put on more mud; and the fourth time you would go—"

"No," said she, "I would go for that boy."

"Well," I said, "that is my position. I am perfectly willing to go down in the gutter and pick the fallen man up, but I tell you, after having seen him redeemed, his children in the Sabbath-school, and his wife happy, I will go for the man who is mean enough to drag him down for money."