Temperance by N. Y. Tribune

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jul 20, 1882

Temperance.

By N. Y. Tribune

Broken Laws of Life.

AN incident went the rounds of last week's papers as occuring in one of the interior towns of Pennsylvania, which was marked with peculiarly dark lines of tragedy. A young clergyman of exceptional talent and sensitive temperament, gave himself, during the last year, to hard study, setting extraordinary tasks for himself, such as committing the whole Bible to memory, etc. His brain suddenly gave way, and he became a violent maniac, and was carried to an asylum in sight of the sympathizing town, manacled hand and foot, and pleading wildly for his mother not to allow him to be taken from his home.

This is one of the hard problems of life which make skeptics inveigh most bitterly against the justice of God. Here was a man whose purpose doubtless was to serve his Master, to convert souls from death; but, because he overtaxed a physical organ, he drops, a useless wreck, by the wayside. There are plenty of similar instances about us in everyday life. In the colleges, for example, a young fellow becomes, by dint of natural ability and hard work, a first-honor man; his classmates applaud every triumphant step; his family, a mother and sisters, probably, dependent on his future success for support, hang eagerly on him, with proud devotion; his life is pure, his aims are high and pure; and suddenly he staggers, and falls to rise no more. Four such instances we recall now; two are in insane asylums, one is an imbecile, the other, knowing that his brain was hopelessly diseased, ended his life in the waters of the Potomac. Similar tragedies go on in every business and profession, though with different catastrophes. A man, let us say, is born with a peculiar talent, or gift, for music, art, literature; some capacity for the high, fine expression of the truth, which would make him a power for good in the world; but he cannot make money enough by it to keep wife and children in the social rank which he thinks they should hold. Hence he turns to some lower, but more remunerative work, or he degrades his art into the manufacture of salable wares; paints cheap, false pictures, writes popular, trashy books or plays. When he grows old, he tries, perhaps, to take up his real work again, but the magic power is lost forever. "The mill will never grind with the water that is past." Then he himself, and all his friends, bemoan a wasted life, regard him as in some way a martyr; and, invariably, in a vague way hold God accountable for it, and for the cruel injustice of the fact that a man cannot be Pegasus and a cart-horse at once, cannot carry grist to the mill for his family, and touch empyrean heights at the same leap. God, too, is held responsible for the failure of overworked brains, as in this last pitiable case.

Now the popular error in this matter is, that when a man's motive in life is good, the public expect God to work a miracle in his behalf to help him to accomplish it, and are aggrieved with a sense of the Divine injustice if it is not done. No man who was not a fool, if he had a delicate machine for weaving lace, would go to work to make carpets with it, or be surprised, if he did, that it would break to pieces with the strain. Or, if he had an instrument of tone and compass fit for rendering divine harmonics, and chose to jangle waltzes and discords on it for years, he would not be indignant at nature or God if it was out of tune, and forever incapable of echoing heavenly music. Yet every man of sense knows that his physical brain is a material machine, an instrument, subject to material waste and injury just as much as any Cremona. If he persistently maltreats it, he alone is responsible for its ruin. God is not accountable. He does not work material miracles for any man, however good his motive in life may be. Christ himself, would not throw himself down from the pinnacle, even to prove that he was the Son of God, in the hope that he would be miraculously held up. The man who puts an intolerable weight on his brain, throws himself down in such a hope; and the man who gives up his real, high mission for a while in the world in order to grub money, or to set his family on a fashionable basis, in the hope that he can go back to it at will, has thrown himself down a suicidal height, from which no angels will bear him up.

Each man and woman is set down here in the world with a stock of physical and mental capacity, subject to inexorable laws, to which ordinary common sense will enable him or her to submit. If he chooses to break them, not all the faith of the patriarchs and apostles will save him from the punishment. If the son of a saint tipples brandy every day, his father's righteousness, and his own late repentance may bring his pardon from God, but will not keep off delirium tremens. When Pattison, the African missionary, exposed himself to storm and tempest for years in preaching Christ, he doubtless won a heavenly crown, but he was racked no less with neuralgia and devoured with fever. God's mercy is infinite in dealing with the soul, but, oddly enough, it is the skeptic only that expects it to interfere with physical laws which are inexorable. The earlier in life we recognize their strength and unalterable fulfillment, the better we shall serve the purpose for which we are sent into the world.