A Rum-Ruined Home

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Aug 14, 1879

A Rum-Ruined Home.

JOHN B. GOUGH tells the following:—

"A minister of the gospel told me one of the most thrilling incidents I have heard in my life. A member of his congregation came home for the first time in his life intoxicated, and his boy met him upon the door-step, clapping his hands and exclaiming, 'Papa has come home!' He seized the boy by the shoulder, swung him around, staggered, and fell in the hall. That minister said to me, 'I spent the night in that house. I went out, bared my brow, that the night air might fall upon it and cool it. I walked up and down the hill. There was his child, dead! there was his wife in strong convulsions, and he asleep.' A man about thirty years of age, asleep, with a dead child in the house, having a blue mark upon the temple where the corner of the marble steps had come in contact with the head as he swung him round, and a wife upon the brink of the grave! 'Mr. Gough,' said my friend, 'I cursed the drink.' He told me that I must remain until he awoke, and I did. When he awoke he passed his hand over his face and exclaimed, 'What is the matter? where am I? where is my boy?' 'You cannot see him.' 'Stand out of my way. I will see my boy.' To prevent confusion, I took him to the child's bed, and as I turned down the sheet and showed him the corpse, he uttered a wild shriek, 'Ah, my child!' That minister said further to me, 'One year after that he was brought from a lunatic asylum to lay side by side with his wife in one grave, and I attended his funeral.' The minister that told me that fact is to-day a drunken hostler in a stable in Boston. Now tell me what rum will not do? It will debase, degrade, imbrute, and damn everything that is noble, bright, glorious, and godlike in a human being. There is nothing drink will not do that is vile, dastardly, cowardly, sneaking, or hellish."

—The Morning.