A Strong Case | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Feb 21, 1878

A Strong Case.

At a recent temperance meeting, an old officer of Napoleon, who had been twenty-three years a soldier gave his experience. He rose before the audience tall, erect, and vigorous, with a glow of health upon his cheek, and said: “You see before you a man seventy years old. I have fought two hundred battles, have had fourteen wounds upon my body, have lived thirty days on horse-flesh, with the bark of trees for my bread, snow and ice for my drink, the canopy of heaven for my covering; without shoes or stockings on my feet, and with only a few rags for my clothing. In the desert of Egypt I have marched for days with a burning sun on my uncovered head, feet blistering in the scorching sands, with eyes, nostrils, and mouth, filled with dust, and with a thirst so tormenting that I have opened the veins of my arms and sucked my own blood. Do you ask how I survived all these horrors? I answer, that under the providence of God I owe my preservation, my health, my vigor, to this fact, that I have never drank a drop of spirituous liquor in my life.” And continued he, “Baron Laray, of the medical staff chief of the French army, has stated it as a fact that the six thousand survivors who safely returned from Egypt were all of them men who abstained from the use of ardent spirits.”—Sel.