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Must Support My Family

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 3, 1871

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 37, No. 3.

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“Must Support My Family.”

By Henry Ward Beecher

“How fare you, Aleck? It’s an age since I saw you! What are you doing for a living, old fellow?” “Well, a little of pretty much everything. I’ve been a marker in a billiard saloon; then I went up to Snake & Wolf’s, as a sort of clerk; and now I’ve settled down in business for myself. Call in and see me.”
“What business? Where did you pitch your tent? What kind of business is it?”
“Oh, it’s the universal-supply business.”
“What’s that?”
“Well—it’s selling liquor.”
“A grogshop? That’s a pretty business for your father’s son! Snake & Wolf keep a gambling-den, don’t they?”
“Yes—though they call it a saloon of fortune.”
“Why, Aleck, what’s got into you? You used to be above such things! You are going straight to the devil.”
“Fact; I think so sometimes myself. Should like a better business; but it pays. A man must take care of his family.”
We suppose that this excuse for wicked practices is as old as the flood. It is probable that there never was a villainous course that had any money in it, that men have not justified themselves in practicing, on the ground of supporting their families.
But what kind of support is that? Has a father the right to prostitute his integrity for the sake of his children? What sort of bringing up will children get, whose bread is earned at the expense of their parents’ good name? If the children turn out ill, then the parent will have corrupted himself for the sake of destroying his children. But if, from some kind, overruling providence, the children grow up to honest manhood, what a shameful legacy is their father’s name!
Food and clothes are very important, doubtless; but they may be bought at too dear a price. “Man shall not live by bread alone.” No man has brought up his children kindly who has cared only for their animal wants. Children need a father’s instruction in morals, his example in following all goodness, and his succor when they are over-tempted. Young people will have enough to tempt them without having a father as an example of evil-doing.
No; no man supports his family well who earns his children’s bread by wicked practices. If a man may keep a dram-shop on the plea that his family must be supported, he may, with equal propriety, keep a gambling-den, or pander to passionate immoralities, or even steal and rob. There is no moral evil which may not be committed if this plea is sound. But the plea is unsound. It is a disgrace to make it, and still more disgraceful to follow courses which require one to make it.
No man would like to eat the bread that Judas would have bought with his thirty pieces of silver. But, to betray morality, to undermine the virtue of society, to pursue a course that degrades one’s self, or one’s fellow-men, is to betray Christ in the person of the poor and weak. No man can afford to take home the wages of corruption.
Men will perjure themselves; will defile their consciences; will commit petty frauds without number; will consort with the men that are pests to society, and then carry home the wages of their iniquity to feed a tender wife or sweet little children thereon. He would be a monster who should feed his children on carrion. He does worse who earns their bread by his own corruption.—Henry Ward Beecher.