A PREACHER DRUNK by Obediah Oldschool

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 23, 1887

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 13, No. 24.

"A PREACHER DRUNK."

By Obediah Oldschool

THE secular papers take a special interest in the preachers. In a leading daily last week there was a half column of telegraphic special under the head, in bold face, "A Preacher Drunk." The facts were as follows: A young minister who had been intemperate before his conversion and call to the ministry, was persuaded to take a glass of wine by one who pretended to be his friend. The old appetite revived, and he was led on step by step until he was found in a saloon dead drunk. The men who plotted his ruin summoned the reporters to see him in his degradation. It was a big item and the enterprising caterers for those who read the daily papers telegraphed it all over the country. A preacher drunk! Why it was as good as a cyclone. They worked it up in their best style, and expected it to make a sensation. And it did.

I have a neighbor who gets his religion from the Sunday newspapers, and, of course, has a buzzard's appetite for carrion. He came to me with that paragraph marked, and said, "See here, Oldschool, you believe in preachers and I don't. Tell me what you think of that!" I read it and replied: "I think the editor and reporter have paid the Christian ministry a high and deserved compliment in that dispatch."

"Why so? A compliment to the cloth to report that one of them was drunk last night in a saloon?"

"Yes, and I can make you see it if you will listen to me. Do you know how many preachers there are in the United States?"

"No; but I reckon there's lots of them, for it's an easy way of getting a living."

"I am not sure of that. People are mighty particular nowadays. A preacher has got to be smart or they won't hear him. A man who has brains enough to get a living by preaching in these times could get rich in any other profession. But as you can't answer my question I shall have to answer it myself. According to the census of 1880 there are over 75,000; and now, mark you, when one of these 75,000 falls it is considered so remarkable that it is telegraphed all over the land. The Bible says the ministers are but men. It speaks of them as 'earthen vessels.' And the great wonder is that among so many so few turn out badly. So you see the publication of this case 3,000 miles from where it occurred shows how rare and remarkable it is. They don't have commonplace and every-day occurrences telegraphed across the continent. And now let me ask you another question: Suppose, when you open your daily paper to-morrow you find a dispatch at the head of a column from Danbury, N. J., or Dover, Del., with the heading, 'A Lawyer Drunk,' and that in the dispatch all the details are given of A. B., a promising young lawyer, who became intoxicated, and was found in a low groggery dead drunk, what would you think in that case?"

"I would think that the editor was a fool."

"Why so?"

"Because there are lots of lawyers all over the country who get drunk every day. The finding of a lawyer in a whisky shop is hardly an item of local news, much less an item to be wired across the continent."

"Well, how is it with doctors and merchants? Suppose the paper should have a dispatch of a quarter of a column whenever any of them got drunk anywhere in the United States?"

"Why, bless you, no paper would be big enough to hold all the dispatches. We could send half a dozen from this one town every day."

"Yes, and don't you see the result of your own admissions? The fall of Christian ministers is regarded by telegraph operators as a first-class item, like an earthquake, a cyclone, or a million-dollar conflagration. It is a thing so rare, so unexpected, so out of the usual course of things, that it must be sent flashing around the world. You don't believe in ministers, but you do believe in rumsellers. You don't go to church to hear our preacher, but you spend your Sundays in Tom O'Flanagan's saloon. You think, of course, that Tom is a better man than Rev. Dr. Abell, or you would not prefer his society. Now suppose you read in your daily paper that Jim McGrady over in some town on the Atlantic Coast was found drunk this morning behind his own bar; would you come to me and say, 'Read that?'"

"Why, no, of course not."

"Well, why not?"

"Because that's a thing that happens every day in hundreds of places. It wouldn't be news. A man who handles edged tools will cut his own fingers once in a while, no matter how careful he is. And besides it's no great matter if a fellow does get a little too much now and then."

"No, not a great matter, as it seems, for your chosen companions—the model men whose society you cultivate—but a very great matter for one preacher out of 75,000, and he evidently led astray by a rumseller. Some heartless saloonist, knowing that this young preacher had once been dissipated, and that the appetite for strong drink might be revived, watched for him as a spider watches for a fly, and enticed him into his den on purpose to destroy him. You know that nearly all the bar-tenders will do such things and glory in them, and yet you admire them and patronize them. But when they succeed in bringing a preacher, one out of 75,000, down to their level and yours, you denounce the whole ministry as a nuisance and a fraud. It is to cater to such buzzard appetites as yours that the daily papers have these scandals telegraphed. But they don't realize that in so doing they are paying the highest possible compliment to the general purity of the Christian ministry."—Obediah Oldschool, in the Interior.