Drunkenness

“ In vain we plead drunkenness or the poison of wine, wineless drink upsets the dry and there is drunkenness this side of wine. Men have dreams and most are sleepwalkers, awake they snore, and with their eyes open do what in sobriety would be blind madness. ”

“ PHENOMENA OF DRUNKENNESS.
The consequences of drunkenness are dreadful, but the pleasures of getting drunk are certainly ecstatic. While the illusion lasts, happiness is complete; care and melancholy are thrown to the wind ”

“ Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar. ”

“ I have never yet, I confess, seen a drunken man in the streets, but I have heard more about drunkenness among white men, and seen more decent men above or below themselves with drink, than I care to think about. And the vice runs up into all sorts of circles and societies. Never was I more astonished than at one pleasant dinner party to hear a pair of pretty lips say casually of a gentleman friend then under discussion, "He was drunk." ”

“ Every mother suffers, I’m not even saying at the sight of her drunken son, but at mere a thought of this possibility, any master avoids a drunkard employee, every uncorrupt person is ashamed of himself that he was drunk. Everyone knows that drunkenness is bad. But here the educated, enlightened people get drunk and yet they are quite confident that there is nothing here is not only shameful and wrong, but that it is even cute, and with pleasure and laughter recall amusing episodes of their past drunkenness. ”

“ The main exciting cause of drunkenness is, I believe, firmly, bad air and bad lodging.
A man shall spend his days between a foul alley where he breathes sulphuretted hydrogen, a close workshop where he breathes carbonic acid, and a close and foul bedroom where he breathes both. In neither of the three places, meanwhile, has he his fair share of that mysterious chemical agent without which health is impossible, the want of which betrays itself at once in the dull eye, the sallow cheek—namely, light. ”

“ Especially, therefore, in liquor crafty men’s characters are wont to be seen through, stripped as they are of their mask through the caitiff licence of intoxication, through which reason, weighed down in the soul itself by drunkenness, is lulled to sleep, and unruly passions are roused, which overmaster the feebleness of the mind. ”

“ If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience. ”

“ Let drunkards know from this scripture that, (1.) They ungratefully abuse their bodily strength, which God has given them for good purposes, and by degrees cannot but weaken it. (2.) It will not excuse them from the guilt of drunkenness that they can drink hard and yet keep their feet. (3.) Those who boast of their drinking down others glory in their shame. (4.) How light soever men make of their drunkenness, it is a sin which will certainly lay them open to the wrath and curse of God. ”

“ A debauch fevers the system, and no man can stand a perpetual succession of fevers without injuring himself, and at last destroying life.
Drunkenness, in the long run, changes its character. The sensations of the confirmed tippler, when intoxicated, are nothing, in point of pleasure, to those of the habitually temperate man, in the same condition. We drink at first for the serenity which is diffused over the mind, and not from any positive love we bear to the liquor. ”

“ Drunkenness is a sin. Drunkenness is the "state of being drunk with strong drink or alcoholic liquor so that the use of the faculties is materially impaired." (Web. Dic.) Oh, the sorrow and trouble that drunkenness has brought to little children, homes, wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, sisters, brothers and nations! ”

“ Then, again, drunkenness leads to the commission of countless other sins. Apart from sins committed under the influence of drink, there are many sins to which drink leads. I have known a case in which a woman, who began life with high motives and honest intentions, being afflicted with a great and deep sorrow, was advised by her friends to seek consolation in drink. The glass which she then took led to another, and that one to another, and so on, until to-day that woman is pronounced by those very friends to be a hopeless and confirmed drunkard. ”

“ How different to know in what drunkenness consists,—as being a state occasioned by a vapor that rises from the stomach,—and being drunk effectively. Without doubt, the drunken man knows neither the definition of drunkenness nor what makes it interesting for science. Being drunk, he knows nothing; whilst the physician, although not drunk, knows well in what drunkenness consists, and what are its predisposing conditions. ”

“ Did mortals understand that drunkenness is not alone a benumbing of the senses, a more or less pronounced anaesthesia, but that gradually it occasions a separation between the ego and the animal soul or conscious self, and that continued excesses lead to a wider separateness, a final domination of the animal soul, and that when dissolution occurs, the alcoholized spirit body has become a fit tenement for its wretched occupant, in fear and horror they would recoil from a peril so deadly. ”

“ I never saw either the mate or the man at the wheel, or any of the men who were then on deck, drunk, or anything like it, during the whole voyage.”
“That may be,” said the other; “but I did not say it was drunkenness, but the drink, that I thought was at the bottom of it. The men may have been the worse for drink without being drunk.” ”

“ Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.
Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.
And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, of whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; ”

“ XXIII. Madness.—This terrible infliction often proceeds from drunkenness. When there is hereditary predisposition, indulgence in liquor is more apt to call it into action than when there is none. The mind and body act reciprocally upon one another; and when the one is injured the other must suffer more or less. In intemperance, the structure of the brain is no longer the same as in health; and the mind, that immortal part of man, [158] whose manifestations depend upon this organ, suffers a corresponding injury.
Intoxication may affect the mind in two ways. ”

“ There is more of Turn than of Truth in a Saying of Seneca, That Drunkenness does not produce but discover Faults. Common Experience teaches us the contrary. Wine throws a Man out of himself, and infuses Qualities into the Mind, which she is a Stranger to in her sober Moments. ”

“ Then, again, take our attitude toward drunkenness. We have recognized that what drove men to frenzy in drink and largely promoted drunkenness was not so much the liquor itself as the adulterations in the liquor. ”

“ Whereas commonly those that are drunken are drunken in the night, when they have despatched the business of the day, these neglect business, abandon it, and give up themselves to the service of the flesh; for they sit at their cups all day, and continue till night, till wine inflame them—inflame their lusts (chambering and wantonness follow upon rioting and drunkenness) —inflame their passions ”

“ But for their own satisfaction and encouragement they should know that in comparison with former times the drunkenness of to-day amounts to nothing.
Where one man drinks too much in these days, a thousand men and a thousand women were frightfully drunk a few years ago. ”

“ Immediately after breakfast, he had the word passed, fore and aft, that no man should be drunk that day, and that six dozen (not of wine) would be the reward of any who should dare, in the least, to infringe that order. What is drunkenness? What it is we can readily pronounce, when we see a man under its revolting phases. ”

“ While drunk the drunkard is insane, and when not drunk he is an abject slave. His appetite controls him, soul and body; he will sacrifice his property, his reputation, and the comfort of wife and children to gratify it. If, gentle reader, you have witnessed the struggles which some have witnessed of men striving earnestly to break loose from that habit, you would not be so ready to pronounce drunkenness always a sin; you would hardly dare thus to judge the poor victim. God alone can realize what he suffers. ”

“ Examine the drunkard’s body after death, and you see in the stomach, in the liver, in the heart and brain signs of a diseased condition. At the same time, I am ready to admit that there are many who drink out of mere cussedness or who are so wretched that they take to it for temporary relief; or who just drink because they live in a drunken set, and like to do as others around them do. Whatever p. 232the immorality, the vice, or the sin of drunkenness, in a very large number of cases the drunkard is more to be pitied than blamed, as the subject of disease. ”

“ In conclusion, I have to repeat that I do not agree with the Societies in considering ardent spirits always hurtful in health, or in recommending the instant disuse of liquor in all cases of drunkenness. ”

“ I make it a rule, the drunkard says, always to treat when I meet another man; and when I am alone and take one glass I feel like another man and so I treat myself to a second and so on. Go to the asylums and prisons, and many of the wretched inmates will tell you they are there through drunkenness whose first cause was a drunkard's example. Read the records of the fearful sacrifice of human life in shipwrecks, collisions, fires, and explosions, and you will find that drink was at the bottom of most of them. ”

“ It has even been contended, with much show of learned authority, that since drunkenness leads to disease and early death, the proneness to strong drink in the long run causes the elimination of the unfit, and results in a general sobering of the community, a race being therefore temperate in proportion to its past sufferings through alcohol. ”

“ Among the townspeople as in the country parts drunkenness from alcohol is almost unknown. Instinctively this race has a fear and horror of it; it feels itself intoxicated from its birth—drunk without drinking. ”

“ The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. ”

“ We will mention here only one of these effects: alcohol prepares the way for sins against chastity; the enemy of innocence is present in alcohol.
2. The Wise Man in Holy Writ thus addresses the drunkard: "Thine eyes shall look after strange women and thy heart - speak perverse things." And Sirach remarks: "Wine and women make wise men fall off." And in Proverbs it is expressly Stated: "Wine is a luxurious thing, and drunkenness riotous." ”

“ To attempt to cure the drink crave by the machinery of the temperance pledge is a course discredited in the eyes of all scientific inquirers. In spite of the gigantic temperance organization of the last fifty years, drunkenness the world over is not less, but more. ”

“ Wine exhibits a man as he is when the organized effects of ancestral and contemporary civilization upon his character are temporarily obliterated. We need no better illustration of the truth that drunkenness is not stimulation but paralysis of the cerebrum, than the order in which, under the influence of alcohol, the powers of the mind become progressively suspended. ”

“ The drunkenness which is so sadly common among the peasantry is largely referable to the same cause; it is not physical but astral sensation which is sought, and to some extent obtained, by means of the absorption of alcohol. ”

“ Even on sacrificial occasions, drunkenness is to be condemned. “When, however, you high officials and others have done your duty in ministering to the aged and to your sovereign, you may then eat to satiety and drink to elevation.” ”

“ Worse, if possible, even than this—the licensed dram-shop is instrumental in creating a new generation of drunkards. For thither resort our young men, the future hope of the country, who speedily fall before the seductions of the place, their habits of sobriety are subverted, their moral sense is blunted, their will palsied, and they drift rapidly into the appalling condition of habitual drunkenness. ”

“ The time is when a person is neither “drunken nor sober, but neighbour to both,” as Bishop Andrews says in his “Ex—ale—tation of Ale.” The moment is when the ethereal emanations begin to float around the brain—when the [37] soul is commencing to expand its wings and rise from earth—when the tongue feels itself somewhat loosened in the mouth, and breaks the previous taciturnity, if any such existed.
What are the sensations of incipient drunkenness? First, an unusual serenity prevails over the mind, and the soul of the votary is filled with a placid satisfaction. ”

“ In certain nervous conditions our mere physical powers are proof against the action of alcohol, and though ten times more drunk than the toper, who, incoherently stammering, reels into the gutter, we can walk erect and talk with fluency. Indeed, in this artificial exaltation of the sensibilities, men often display a brilliant wit, and an acuteness of comprehension, calculated to delight their friends, and terrify their physicians. North had reached this condition of brain-drunkenness. ”