Without a Headache

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Nov 10, 1898

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 24, No. 45.

“Without a Headache.”

One of the merits of a certain brand of whisky, as set forth in its advertisement, is that it is “the whisky without a headache.” The very claim is an admission on the part of its friends of one evil of at least all other brands of whisky. Whoever heard of advertising “water without a headache,” or “bread without a headache,” or “lemonade without a headache”? It is indirectly an advertisement that every other brand of whisky has with it the headache.

Would to God that that were all the evil that any whisky had with it! And we could almost wish that the ache was ten times worse than it is, and universal among those who willingly drink the poison. That ache is the merciful warning of God that the whisky is toxic—poison. It is placed there in mercy to warn of greater evils to follow its continued use. We are sorry, if it be true, that there is a whisky without this danger signal. The headache is a small thing. Would that the heartaches of the deadly, damnable stuff could rise up as the personified fiends that they are, in every glass which the drinker quaffs,—the heartaches of fathers and mothers, of wives and children, sometimes of husbands, oftentimes of the drunkard himself as he winds his crooked way down the steeps of lost manhood to utter ruin. O reckless, careless indulger, confirmed inebriate, turn from the wretched stuff to Jesus Christ! The water of life which He will give knows neither headache nor heartache.