Riotous Living
The younger son.., took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living.” — Luke xv. 13.
Nothing can be nobler than a true and thorough manhood, where, amid the seductions of sense, the soul still retains the mastery of itself by retaining its loyalty to God. Such men are always impressive: men like Blake, content with the softest plank for a pillow; men like Havelock, who, never thinking of comfort, never lost sight of duty; men like Grimshaw, who, with meat to eat that others knew not, would dine on a crust of bread, then preaching the love of Jesus till the tears ploughed white channels in the grimy faces of the Yorkshire colliers, would turn into his hay-loft and find it Eden in his dreams; men like Milton, of maidenly purity of heart and heroic grandeur of purpose, “himself a true poem, that is, a composition of the best and honourablest things,” and flowing forth accordingly in the stately song which still ennobles English literature; men like Paul, who, ‘’ keeping the body under, and bringing it into subjection,” was enabled to bring myriads in subjection to the Saviour, and perform those prodigies of daring and devotion at which the world will wonder evermore.
Such men command our homage. For the moment we forget that they are of like passions with ourselves, and they give us a new and exalted conception of what human nature can perform when sustained by high motive and animated by the Spirit of God.
On the other hand, it is deeply distressing to find the higher nature dethroned or in thraldom. Wild stories circulate in many lands. In Northern Europe they tell how a child has been carried off by wolves, and brought up amongst them — taught to live in wolfish fashion, sleeping in the forest, joining in the hunt of the reindeer or aurochs, and drinking with savage delight the blood of the palpitating prey. And in Africa the like story is told — how the man has been kidnapped by the baboon, and, hurried up the mountain, has spent amidst these hideous monsters a horrible captivity.
The risk is real. The climate may be good, the settlement may promise all that heart can wish, and the vicinity may be so far cleared as to make the immediate homestead tolerably secure; but it is folly to deny all danger. A wise man will be cautious; and if cautious he need not be nervous. It is only right and kind to give warning; and pleasant as is the lot of your inheritance, it is well to remember that the thickets and steep places are haunted. Frightful ogres frequent them, and they are sure to sally forth on the heedless wanderer. There are even instances on record where they have vaulted over the enclosure and carried off from the threshold some hapless victim. The names of three of the best known and most mischievous are — the Lust of the Eye, the Lust of the Flesh, and the Pride of Life; or, as they are sometimes called, Vanity, or the Love of Display; Sensuality, or the Love of Low Pleasure; and the Affectation of Fashion, or the Keeping-up of Appearances.
As long as the younger son remained at home he was comparatively safe; but the far country was the native land of these monsters. There was no patrol to keep them down, no reward was offered for their destruction, and being thoroughly bold and fearless, they came down into the streets and gardens; and this poor senseless youth was soon seized hold of and carried captive at their will.
A hateful sight it is to see the man the slave, the brute the master. At first there may be some disgust, some effort to escape, some feeble, impotent resistance; but too often it ends in the utter degradation of the higher nature and the brutalising of the man. The old fables come true. The voluptuary becomes a satyr; the sybarite, the toper, and glutton are transmuted into swine.
For a hundred years England has yielded no scholar comparable to Richard Porson. With a memory in which words and things were alike imperishable, and with that marvellous intuition which enabled him to personate any author, Greek or Roman, and in the broken parchment or faded manuscript at once perceive what ^schylus or Tacitus had meant to say, he had withal a wit which made him welcome at the board of rich and clever men; and to feed the wit he plied the wine, till in floods of liquor wit and wisdom both were drowned, and, the remains of the scholar buried in mere beastliness, the sot disappeared from society. For a hundred years Ireland has yielded no dramatist, no orator, equal to Richard Brinsley Sheridan; but even for that brilliant genius, whose versatile talents brought London to his feet and carried captive the senate, strong drink was too powerful, and, in place of bouquets and ribbons, with writs and executions showering around him, he lay on his desolate couch bankrupt in character as well as in fortune, and would have been carried off in his blankets to the debtor’s gaol had not the apparitor of a mightier tribunal stepped in before the sheriff’s officer and claimed the prisoner. For a hundred years — nay, through all the years — Scotland has yielded no poet who could seize the heart of the nation as it was seized by Robert Burns — master alike of its pathos, humour, chivalry. Alas! that pinions capable of such a flight as “Bruce at Bannockburn’’ and” Mary in Heaven,” should have come down to get smeared and bird-limed on the tapster s bough; alas! that from the Cottar’s Saturday evening he should have passed away to the companionship of drunken ploughboys and coarse bullies in their night-long carousals in low taverns. But so it was; and, standing by the untimely grave of the Scottish minstrel, truth and tenderness can only say —” What bird in beauty, flight, or song. Can with the bard compare. Who sang as sweet and soar’d as strong As ever child of air %
“Oh! had he never stoop’d to shame
Nor lent a charm to vice,
How had Devotion loved to name
That Bird of Paradise!“”^
Wine Is a mocker; strong drink is raging. Like the skulls which a savage carries at his girdle or sets up on poles in his palace-yard, and tells the traveller what a mighty warrior this or the other was till his axe or arrow laid him low; so, of all the sins, Intemperance is the one which, reaped from the ranks of British genius, boasts the most crowded row of ghastly trophies. To say nothing of the many sorely wounded, amongst the actually slain it numbers the musician and the artist, the philosopher and the poet, the physician and the lawyer, the statesman, the preacher, the judge. As we hinted already, for the greater part it gains its advantage by beginning so early and in a guise so little formidable. In elfin minuteness it enters the student’s parlour or even the school-room dormitory, and the champagne breakfast or the furtive wine-party lays the foundation of a lifelong sorrow. Like the spear some ten or twelve fathoms long with which the Vancouver Indian ploughs the river-bed, and the barbed point comes off In the first great
* James Montgomery.
sturgeon which it pierces, the tenacious fibre uncoiling as he flies: so, paddHng over the surface of society, it is with a long shaft that the demon of Drunkenness explores for his victims; but when one of his barbs gets fairly through the mail it usually fixes and is fast. The line is a long one, and will hold for years. It marks the victim; and the first time he rises another dart strikes through his liver, and then another, and at last a great many: — the social glass leading on to the glass suggestive or the glass inspiring, and the glass restorative leading on to the glass strength-giving, and that again to glasses fast and frequent, — glasses care-drowning, conscience-coaxing, grief-dispelling, — till, gasping and dying, the hulk is towed ashore, and pierced through with many sins, weak, wasted, worthless, the victim gives up the ghost, leaving in the tainted air a disastrous memory.
Whether coarse or refined, riot speedily wastes the reveller s “substance.” Not only does it sap the constitution, and soften the brain, and shatter the nerves, and enfeeble the mind, but it exhausts the estate, and soon brings the spendthrift to poverty. And if the passion still urge and the fear of God has departed, wild methods will be tried to meet the demand and assuage the frantic craving. Keepsakes will be sold or pledged, to part with which would once on a time have looked like sacrilege. Money will be borrowed as long as any one will lend it, and then it will be taken from the till, or intercepted on the way from a customer or correspondent; and thus — it is a tale a thousand times told — dissipation leads on to dishonesty; and in keeping up the jovial life, nay, in merely keeping up appearances, character will be vilely cast away.
On a Saturday morning in July 1850 two inquests were held in Newgate. One suicide was a pugilist, who, on the previous day, had been sentenced to die as a murderer; the other was an insurance clerk, who had, on the same day, been adjudged to ten years’ penal servitude. His name we need not recal; but it is well to know his story. As a clerk, he had a salary of ^200 a-year, but he had tastes for the gratification of which two hundred a-year was a trifle. Fond of the theatre, it became the height of his ambition to be personally acquainted with those glorious creatures who on the stage personate kings and queens, and he was greatly flattered when some of them accepted his invitation, and partook at his expense of a costly supper. The experiment was so successful that it was soon repeated; but in entertaining actors and actresses no actor of them all was sustaining a part so arduous as his own. He was too illiterate to be a judge of plays, but in such cases the want of scholarship is readily forgiven to a wealthy man. And it was for a wealthy man that this patron of the drama needs must pass, and with infinite effort — effort compared with which the tight-rope is pastime — for six years he kept up the illusion. His equipage in Hyde Park so elegant, his suburban villa so splendidly furnished, giving by turns a quiet dijeuner or a sumptuous banquet, he was applauded as a fine open-handed fellow, and was envied, as a man is apt to be envied who is made up of money. But when the truth came out and he was proclaimed a swindler and a thief, his poor dastard spirit could not survive the degradation; and after such a taste of luxury, what a prospect ten years of prison fare and servile drudgery! The profligate was caught, but the prodigal did not come to himself; and so from within those gloomy walls, in the same short summer night fled by the same guilty exit spirits twain — the blood-stained murderer, and the man who, by false appearances, and for the praise of fools, had doubly destroyed himself’’^
On a winter morning in 1856 — a Sunday morning — a friend of ours, a physician, was sent for to the Hampstead work-house. It was to view a lifeless body which had been just picked up in the neighbourhood of a pond, and which there was no difficulty in identifying. A member of Parliament, once a junior Lord of the Treasury, a chairman of banks; able, influential, successful, what could be wanting? what could go wrong? The great wants were integrity, openness, truth: and the thing which put him all wrong was the pride of life, and the consequent need to keep up a hollow appearance. For this he forged documents and issued false shares, and embezzled funds to the extent of hundreds of thou- * Facts Failures and Frauds by D. Morier Evans, pp. 74-105.
sands of pounds; and when opium could no longer dull the corrodings of conscience, and the evil day was imminent, he wrote to a friend: ‘’ Dear Robert, — To what infamy have I come, step by step, heaping crime upon crime! and now I find myself the author of numberless crimes of a diabolical character, and the cause of ruin and misery to thousands. O how I feel for those on whom this ruin must fall. I could bear all punishments, but I could never bear to witness the sufferings of those on whom I have brought such ruin. It must be better that I should not live. O that I had never quitted Ireland! O that I had resisted the first attempts to launch into speculations! If I had had less talents of a worthless kind and more firmness, I might have remained as I once was, honest and truthful, and I would have lived to see my dear father and mother in their old age. I weep and weep now, but what can that avail?” Then putting a bottle of poison into one pocket and the silver cream-jug into the other, as soon as the streets were quiet he rose from his lonely tea-table, and from the warm well-carpeted room in Gloucester Terrace walked forth into the cold February midnight. Carrying his load of guilty memories he climbed the hill to Hampstead Heath, and passing the darkened houses where, their week’s work done, the honest trader and the day-labourer slept securely, he sought the spot where the largest and most successful of swindlers was to lay down the burden of a life no longer bearable, and add another commentary to the ancient texts, “The way of transgressors is hard. Happy is the man that feareth alway.”
Our hearts are weak, and we have continual need to pray, “Deliver us from evil;” for temptations are sometimes terrible. When in front of his own cathedral Bishop Hooper was fastened to the stake and the fire was slowly burning, they held up a pardon, and told him that he had only to say the word and walk at liberty. “If you love my soul, away with it!” was the exclamation of the martyr as every tortured fibre called for pity, but the loyal spirit revolted from the wickedness. So there may come a fiery trial where the adversary has got in pledge your income, your earthly prospects, your parents or your children, and asks if you will be so infatuated as to cast them away when the stroke of a pen, the pronouncing of a word, a nod or sign would suffice and save the whole. When the furnace is thus seven-times heated it will need much grace in view of the proffered bribe to cry, “Away with it!” and yet, through His timely succour, who, in the days of His flesh and in view of an awful alternative, poured forth strong crying and tears, such ordeals have been encountered by men of like passions with ourselves, and from this lesser Gethsemane they have emerged with spirit softened and character confirmed, enriched by the loss, perfected by the suffering.
However, it was not by a roaring lion, but by a plausible tempter that man was first led into evil; and our greatest danger arises from the subtlety of Satan and the pleasures of sin.
“I’ve heard that poison-sprinkled flowers
Are sweeter in perfume
Than when, untouched by deadly dew,
They opened in their bloom.
I’ve heard that with the witches’ song,
Though harsh and rude it be,
There blends a wild mysterious strain
Of weirdest harmony;
So that the list’ner far away
Must needs approach the ring,
Where, on the savage Lapland moors,
The demon chorus sing.
And I believe the devil’s voice
Sinks deeper in the ear
Than any whispers sent from Heaven,
However soft and clear.”*
Gratuitous wickedness is rare; nor is it by a single bound or stride that eminence in evil is attained. In doing wrong the transgressor usually fancies that there is an absolute necessity: he cannot help himself: the end justifies the means: and when once the poisoned perfume is inhaled, when once the “weird harmony” has beguiled the sense — that is, after the first false step has been taken — the devil suggests, “In for a penny, in for a pound. The money will never be missed. Nothing venture, nothing win.” Or in conjunctures more horrible still, and when there seems only one way to cancel the debt or conceal the delinquency, he whispers,” Dead * Aytoun’s Bothwell.
men tell no tales;” and now that the last of fifty steps, all wrong, but all seemingly inevitable, has proved a plunge into the abyss, the evildoer wakes up with blood on his hands, with a ghastly crime on his conscience, with the sting of the never-dying worm in his bosom.
If you would pass innocently through a difficult world, keep within the rules. Let your life be open, your eye single, your walk in the broad light of day. If a mistake is committed, lose no time in acknowledging it; and beware of getting complicated with unprincipled or low-minded companions. They will be sure to use you as the cloak or the catspaw of their own designs, and then, when their purpose is served, or when the day of disclosure arrives, they will sacrifice you and save themselves.
Keep within the homestead. If compelled to quit the parental roof, cast yourself all the rather on your Heavenly Father’s grace and guidance. And do not forsake the sanctuary. Many years ago we remember a fine youth who from the far north came up to be a clerk in the Post Office. For a long time he was constant in his attendance on the means of grace, and retained his amiable hopeful dispositions. But by-and-by his visits to the house of God became desultory; and not only did he disappear from the church, but he became shy of our own society. Years passed without seeing him, and then we were asked to visit him at the Old Bailey. It turned out that he had fallen in with careless acquaintances, who had drawn him away from his earlier friends, and led him to misspend the Sabbath. Eventually he had married a worldly-minded woman, with stylish notions, and in order to supply her expensive tastes he had ended by taking money out of letters. We asked when he had been last in his old place of worship. He said that it was on the Sunday after his first offence had been committed, and when the sermon referred to an agitation then in progress for a Sunday delivery of letters in London. Bearing as it did on the circumstances of his own downfall, he still remembered an expression to the effect: — “The fear of detectives is a poor substitute for the fear of God; nor will the authorities find it easy to obtain as servants men willing to break the Fourth Commandment, but warranted to keep the other nine.” In his case, however, the broken Sabbath was no fault of the authorities. The day of rest was at his own disposal. The departure from God was his own evil heart, and so were the consequent dishonesty and ruin and disgrace.
Keep within your income. As we hinted at the outset, the great temptations to expense are the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life; and to these the great antidote is, not a limited income so much as a large self-denial. It is the lust of the flesh when the litde boy spends all his halfpence on sugar-plums. It is the lust of the eye when the peer cannot resist the porcelain of Sevres or the mosaic of Rome, but exhausts his estate in adorning his palace. It is the pride of life when the servant flaunts in finery and lets her parents starve; when the merchant spends on his mansion or his equipage all by which his neighbour or the world might be profited. But just as people can be profuse who are not earning a penny, so there are rich men who do not riot, and who in the generous use of their income enjoy a continual feast. If self-denying, you too will be rich. From personal expenditure saving all that you can, you will find it available for the most blessed of all bestowments; and in paying the school-fees of a younger brother, in a thoughtful gift to a sister, in lightening the burden of a toil-worn father, in promoting the comfort of a faithful old servant who can work no longer, in a subscription to the missionary society or the Sunday-school excursion, in contributing to the happiness or welfare of others you will reap the divine reward of self-denial.