The Drunkard’s Son by Sel.

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · May 23, 1878

The Drunkard’s Son.

By Sel.

A little boy stood in the door of a dilapidated house in the suburbs of a country village. His threadbare dress was of finer texture than seemed appropriate to such a lowly dwelling, and there was an easy gracefulness in the child’s manner that bespoke an early training more refined than the children of poverty usually receive.

Eight summers only had the boy seen; but there was an unnatural thoughtfulness on his brow, and as he stood absorbed in the contemplation of a subject evidently painful, his eye gleamed with a strange light, his bosom heaved, the blue veins in his fair young brow grew swollen and rigid, and the deep flush of anger spread over those beautiful features.

“Mother,” exclaimed he, turning suddenly toward a pale woman who sat busily plying her needle, “I shall run away. I can’t live in this old house and be half starved, and see you work day and night—and all because my father will get drunk. Yesterday the boys got angry with me and called me the ‘son of a drunkard.’ I can’t bear it, mother,—I will run away.”

The mother gazed on her boy, as he stood there with clenched fists and gleaming eye, and the hot tears rained down her cheeks; for she knew how it must be for her sensitive boy to meet the cold scorn of the world. “And leave your mother?” was her only answer. It was enough.

“I will never leave my poor mother,” said the boy, as he threw himself sobbing on her bosom. “They may call me names, if they will; and, mother, if we starve, we will starve together,” he added, sinking his voice almost to a whisper.

“We shall not starve, my son,” said the mother. “He who said, ‘Ye are of more value than many sparrows,’ will take care of us. Can you trust God, my child?”

“Yes, mother,—and I will never leave my dear, good mother.”

Day after day passed, and the high spirit of the boy was often chafed by the scorn and taunts of his companions. The cruelty of an inebriate father, and the wretchedness of a drunkard’s home, imparted no healing balm, no soothing influence. Yet he loved his mother; for her sake he was willing to endure; and the strong restraints of her love kept him from the vices to which he was constantly and fearfully exposed.

We cannot tell his heart-struggles; cannot tell how these aspirations to be and to do, rising, as they do, in every noble soul, did often gild his future with their radiance, only to be shrouded in darkness by the one reflection, the one withering blight—the aspiring boy was a drunkard’s child. Hard indeed is the heart of a drunkard. But we can tell how nobly he clung to that mother in all those years, and how honorably and successfully he fills one of the best pulpits in the land, aided in every good work by that wise, loving and pious mother,—Sel.