Meditation LXVIII.
Meditation LXVIII.
ON A MAN WHO DIED BY LIQUOR.
Under sail, Mediterranean, March 6, 1759.
In how many things is it possible for man to sin? Every blessing he can turn into a curse! Every mercy he can suck misery from! By excess—the means of life become the occasion of death. How sad a use make we of God's creation, when it renders us incapable of serving our Creator.
This is the case, not only with the drunkard and glutton—but with the carnal-minded man, who focuses on the cares and riches of this world!
This demented wretch, this poor fellow-creature—used his blessings to his own destruction. He was a more cruel suicide or self-murderer, than if he had given himself a mortal wound. For then he might have died awake, and with the exercise of his reason—but now he undergoes the last, the most tremendous change while in a stupor, and totally deprived of the use of reason!
He drank until he dropped down in a drunken stupor, out of which it was impossible to awake him—until plunged into the eternal and changeless world! How terrible to die in such a condition!
If any dreams, reflection, or remembrance of former things, could penetrate his profound slumber, his deep stupor—he would wish himself to be still among his companions, drinking another glass, and quaffing it down merrily among his mates.
But O how inconceivably astonished, and terribly surprised—to find himself in his sober wits, standing before the solemn tribunal, and hear his final sentence passed! Gladly would he recoil into the besotted body which he just left—but the union is dissolved, the tie is broken, and he is thenceforth an inhabitant in the eternal world of the damned!
Perhaps he dreamed, while the fiery spirits were burning up his vitals, that he was drinking at some cooling stream. But how disappointed to find his first draught to be the wine of the fierceness of the wrath of God, poured out without the least mixture of mercy!
The last words he spoke were curses—but how does it strike him with terror to hear the belching of consummate despair—while he felt himself at once surrounded with the howlings of hell, the blasphemies of the damned, and all the groans and yellings of the burning pit! What tongue can tell, what heart conceive what he must feel?
Indeed the thoughtless rabble seemed somewhat amazed at his premature death. But how superficial is their concern while they continue the very same excesses which proved fatal to their fellow-creature!
But however amazed man may be at this manner of the soul's going into eternity, in such a doleful case, in such a melancholy condition—this is actually how the whole graceless world dies.
For even though they have the use of all their senses, and the exercise of their reason to the last—yet their souls, with respect to spiritual things—are as fast asleep, as deadly and deeply intoxicated with the juice of the vine of Sodom, even the draughts of sin and pleasure—as this poor man who died as an alcoholic. And they shall be equally astonished, terrified, tormented—when they awake in the eternal world of the damned!
Back to Meditations 61 to 90