The Wreck of a Man

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Nov 8, 1883

The Wreck of a Man.

WHAT wreck is more shocking to behold than the wreck of a dissolute man—the vigor of life exhausted, and yet the first steps of an honorable career not taken—in himself a lazar-house of disease; dead, but by a heathenish custom of society, not buried. Rogues have had the initial letter of their title burned in the palms of their hands. Even for murder, Cain was only branded on the forehead; but over the whole person of the debauchee or the inebriate the signature of infamy is written. How nature brands him with stigma and opprobrium. How she hangs labels all over him to justify her disgust at his existence, and to admonish others to beware of his example. How she loosens all his joints, sends tremors through his muscles, and bends forward his frame as if to bring him upon all fours like kindred brutes, or to degrade him to the reptile's crawling. How she disfigures his countenance, as if intent upon obliterating all traces of her own image, that she may swear she never made him! How she pours rheum over his eyes, and sends foul spirits to inhabit his breath; and shrieks as with a trumpet from every pore in his body, "Behold the beast!" —Selected.