Daily Devotional

Wherever we may look, there are temptations for men of weak principles. Many a man who enters our cities is induced to spend a few spare dollars in sensual pleasure, and the hard-earned money that could have been invested in the Lord's treasury, succoring the distressed, reclaiming the guilty, and reforming the dissipated, goes to fill the till of the liquor seller, while the spender's powers are enfeebled by his eating and drinking and dissipation.

The reaction is sure to come. He loses precious years of probationary time, if not his own soul, through indulgence of appetite. The continual transgression of nature's laws is a continual transgression of the laws of God. The present weight of suffering and anguish which we see everywhere, the deformity, decrepitude, disease, and imbecility, making our world one vast hospital, enfeebling mental, moral and physical powers, --all this misery, accumulated from generation to generation, exists because fallen man will break the law of God; for sins of the greatest magnitude are committed through the indulgence of perverted appetite.

The effort made to create taste for the disgusting, filthy poison, tobacco, leads to the desire for stronger stimulus, as liquor, which is used on one plea or another, for some imaginary infirmity or to prevent some possible disease. Thus there is created an unnatural appetite for these nerve and brain destroying stimulants, an appetite which strengthens with every repeated indulgence until the shackles of habit bind the victim in the veriest bonds of slavery.

The Bible declares that no drunkard shall inherit the kingdom of God. What then of the drunkard-maker, who places the bottle to his neighbor's lips? Tobacco and liquor stupefy the brain and defile the user, but the evil does not end here. Fathers transmit to their children their own irritable temper, polluted blood, and enfeebled physical, mental, and moral powers; and their own vitiated appetite, intensified, is reproduced in the children. Thus the father of dissipated habits, makes himself accountable for the mold of character he gives his children.

Intemperance of any description is the worst kind of selfishness. How can any man or any woman keep the law of God requiring man to love his neighbor as himself, and indulge intemperate appetite, which benumbs the brain, weakens the intellect, and fills the body with corruption and disease? Those who pursue this course are in a fair way to lose both worlds. Christ came to our world to give to man moral power, that he might, through the mercies of Christ, combined with his human effort, present his body a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is his reasonable service.