AWFUL, BUT TRUE | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Mar 16, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 11.

AWFUL, BUT TRUE.

THE following appeared some time ago in a religious weekly, published in New York City.

A young lawyer won and married a bride that was the object of her parents' refined affections, and the favorite of all the circles of her numerous friends.

A beautiful cottage, elegantly located, and beautifully furnished by her parents, was the home of this favorite pair. Several years glided by, and the husband began to ply the sparkling glass. Warning from the Bible, entreaties from his devoted partner, the solemn pleadings of his friends, could not arrest his downward path.

One fierce winter's night he came reeling through the snow, and found his wife in a miserable, cold room, an invalid, and trying to keep her two babes warm. The drunken madman swore he would soon have it warm enough. Midnight came. The tempest had increased; the elements were in fierce conflict, while the raging fiend in human form was within. How he fired his home will never be known. The flames, fanned by the wind, drove the wife out, bearing her darlings, to face the awful tempest. A quarter of a mile off stood the nearest house. Soon exhausted, she sank down in the deep snow, with her helpless babes clinging to their mother. But a few moments sufficed to reduce their lovely home to ashes.

In the morning the sobered author of this ruin, with the parents and friends, were searching under snowdrifts for the lost ones. At length, wrapped in a spotless winding-sheet, they were found. White as marble, the lovely features of the mother disclosed frozen, silent tears on the cheeks, and the cherub forms clasped in her arms.

What changed that promising young lawyer to a fiend? Who murdered those two innocent babes, clinging to the dead form of the fond mother? Who destroyed that happy home, blighted the fondest hopes and blotted out the young life of that devoted wife and affectionate mother? The skeleton fingers of that silent form point to the saloon as the place where the man became the fiend, and to the rum-seller as the guilty party.

"Woe unto him that giveth his neighbor drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunken also." Hab. 2:15.—Selected.