Theosophy - The Influence of Alcohol - by Annie Besant - Adyar Pamphlets No. 138
Adyar
Pamphlets - No.138
THE
INFLUENCE OF ALCOHOL
by
Annie Besant
Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, Madras, India
First
Edition
1892, Second 1912, Third 1930
Publisher’s
Note
Some
requests have been received to provide the T.S. Order of Service workers
with a suitable pamphlet in the cause of Temperance and so a second edition
was issued. It was originally a lecture delivered in the Livesey Central
Temperance Hall, London, on 7th February, 1892, under the
presidency of Mr. George Ling of the Temperance movement.
[Page
1] FRIENDS, when I was asked
to speak from the platform of your Hall — when I was told that
your association took the broadest lines in not compelling or trying
to compel the assent of any one to views on subjects outside that which
you are united to support — when I learnt that you were
thus liberal in your views, I was ready and glad to take the opportunity
of adding my voice to the many voices that are heard all over the country
protesting against the use of alcohol, and against the influence exerted
by that use, not only on the bodies, but also on the minds of those who
take it. My own position in the matter is very likely founded upon principles
that may not be identical with those held by many of you; but then I
am not sure that it may not be at once useful and interesting to hear
the way in which the question presents itself to one whose views of the
universe at large may be different from the views of many present. I
am not going to proceed this morning on the lines of argument that will
be most familiar to you. I am not going to deal with the drink-question
in its bearings on the subject of poverty. I am not [Page
2] going to discuss drinking
in relation to the misery it spreads throughout the country, or the
crime of which it is the source. I am not going today to point you
specially to the misery of the drunkard's home, or contrast in appearance,
in health and in mental endowment, the children of the drunkard and
the children of the abstainer: all those are useful aspects of the
subject; are arguments that everyone of you may well have at your
fingers' ends when you are trying to combat this great enemy of our
race — strong drink, — but the lines which I am going
to follow may possibly suggest to some of you fresh arguments with which
to supplement the others; and even those of you who may disagree with
the foundation on which they are based, may yet find in the arguments
themselves useful reinforcement for your general line of thought. And
now so far as I am concerned, I am a Teetotaler because I am a Theosophist;
that is to say, it is part of the working out of the Theosophical view
of the nature, the constitution, and the destiny of man. The views I
hold with regard to man's nature, the views I hold of the relationship
of one man to another, joined, as I believe them to be, by a bond of
brotherhood that nothing can avail to break — the influence that
is, which one man has upon another — it is these views which have
led me to become an abstainer. Then the view of the body as the mere
tabernacle in which dwells the Intelligence that is the real man; such
I say, are the [Page
3] views, roughly,
that lead me to the standpoint of teetotalism in practical life;
and it is these views that I am going to put to you as possibly affording
argument that may be to some extent unfamiliar, but which will work
into other arguments more familiar to you, and so strengthen your own
position as against those who advocate the use of alcohol — those
who say it is an article of diet, nourishing and so on, and that
it is useful to be taken. You may then show them that it is not
useful but mischievous; not of the nature of a help but of a
hindrance, and that what is wanted is the absolute cessation
of the drink-habit; not merely what is called temperate or moderate
drinking, and so on. I hold that alcohol itself is essentially
a destructive, mischievous agency, and therefore its use ought
to be entirely opposed, entirely renounced, as of no benefit
in the economy of the human body. That is the position I am going
to take up.
And
now, first, as regards the body. We look on the body, of course, from our
standpoint, as an instrument of the spiritual Intelligence which we regard
as the man himself; that is, looking at ourselves, we regard the body as
the coating, the garment, the instrument, used for work in the physical
world, so that the efficacy of the work will very largely depend upon the
integrity of the instrument. Just as no workman could perform a good piece
of work if he were using, say a blunt [Page
4] chisel,
a twisted screwdriver, or a hammer whose head fell off the moment he
struck a blow with it; so cannot the real man, the inner man, the true
man, do effective work on the physical plane, if the instrument whereby
that work is to be performed is injured, spoilt, blunted, or stunted
by any habit which injures physical life. With regard to the body, we study
it, in its formation, in its living functions, and in its influence over
the whole of the men and women — the whole of
the animal, plant, and mineral world around us. We allege that man, as
regards his body, is part and parcel of the world around him — that
between the man's body and the bodies of all other men (I use the word, of
course, to include women also) and things, having physical shape and form,
there is a constant interaction going on — that all these are built
up of what the scientist speaks of as atoms, and molecules,
and that when you come to consider these atoms and molecules you will
get to understand what they are. Studying them as we do from a double
point of view, we say that an atom, like the man of whom it forms a part,
is a complex and not a simple thing, that it is essentially a living
thing — that your bodies are built up of
innumerable lives — that all these atoms that go to make up the physical
body are living things – lives in themselves, and that, according
to their health or lack of health, will be the general health, or general
lack of health, of the body which they gradually build up. It is an old Theosophical [Page
5]
teaching, that all the world
is made up of these lives; that the mineral, the vegetable, the animal,
and the man differ not in the material of which the body is composed, but in
the way in which that material is
organized; that you have these atoms at one time in the mineral,
at another in the vegetable, and at another in the human body, and that
it is the difference of their arrangement, and of the way in which they
are held together which makes the total organism take on one or another
form of living thing. Now western science very much agrees with us in
its investigations on this point. Those of you who have followed the
investigations of our most eminent physicians will notice how, more and
more, during the last few years, they have been studying what are called
bacteria and microbes; those minute bodies, those
tiny things that are only seen by aid of the strongest microscope — these,
we have been lately told by physicians, are at the very root of all
the diseases in men, so that when people come across a disease, the
doctor goes to look for the microbe that causes it, and whether it
is cholera, hydrophobia, influenza, or cancer, we are always being
told that our advanced scientists are searching for the microbe which
is the root of the mischief; because, if they can find what is acting
in this destructive fashion in the human body, then they will be
able to deal with its ravages better. They have gone a step further.
They have found out that very often a fight goes on in our
[Page 6] bodies
between the microbes that are constructive and those that
are destructive, so that if you get into your blood a destructive
kind of microbe that would poison you, and gradually kill you as
it multiplies, that may be met and stopped by starting against
them an army of constructive microbes who build up where the others
try to destroy, and who conquer this power for mischief by their
stronger power for good. So that gradually science is making us
look at our bodies as a kind of battlefield, in which all these
lower lives are fighting, the one against the other, and always
coming and going; so that our entire body is really a kind of
country, into which come immigrants from other countries, and out
of which go emigrants to other countries, and on the character
of the immigrants will largely depend our condition; and if from
other countries and neighbouring countries, there are all sorts
of bad immigrants coming in — immigrants who are pauperized,
drunken, and laden with every form of mischief, — then they will
poison the population of our own country, and spread in that healthy
population the diseases which they bring with them from other lands.
Now this, which almost sounds like a fairy-tale, is really a scientific
fact. There is no better fairy-tale teller than science — science
which observes and coordinates facts, and gives out its result to the
world. The Theosophists, studying this view of the body, find that
it works in with their own view.[Page
7]
It
is exactly the teaching which, for thousands of years, has formed part
of their own philosophy; so that our body is made up of these millions
upon millions of tiny lives which are always coming and going, always
changing from one position to another, and there is not a moment in your
life or in mine, in which we are not sending out swarms of these lives
into the atmosphere around us, and receiving from it in return other
swarms of lives. Science again will tell you that your physical body
changes in every single atom in seven years — that every morsel of your
body during that period goes away and is supplied by other morsels in exchange.
This is done of course in such minute particles that the change is invisible
to the eye, but the invisible world is none the less real — in fact,
really and truly, the invisible world is by far the most important, for the
invisible world is the world of causes, while the visible world is the
world of effects, and it is in this invisible world that the causes which tend
to make us what we are, largely exist. Now for a moment use your imagination
in the way that Tyndall suggested, when he spoke of the scientific use of the
imagination. Think of your body for a moment, and see it made up of all these
innumerable lives. See them (with the eye of the mind) leaving you after
they have resided in your body for a time and formed part of it. See others
coming in to take their place, as those that have been in your body for a
time pass [Page
8] away.
Now notice a curious physical fact. Supposing you have had a bad wound
that has healed. It leaves what is known as a scar. That scar may remain
with you all your life although the wound may have healed perhaps before
you remember. As a baby, in trying to stand in my cradle before I had
any business to be on my feet, I received a wound on my forehead from
the ornamental iron at the top of it, arranged so as to make a kind of
canopy. Now that scar has remained with me from that time to the present,
and will go with me to my grave. That scar remains though the body that
has it has changed so many times — each seven years I have lived since
the injury was caused. The scar remains, so that the new atoms that come
into the body take the print of the older atoms amongst which they come,
and just as those atoms I have received from the world around me take
the imprint of my body as shown in the scar, so do the atoms I send out
with them carry the imprint that has been put upon them during their
stay in my body, and carry with them my imprint so to speak, to the other
lives, the living things which may go to help to build up other bodies in
the future. So that, to use another simile, the human body is like a mint
that makes coin — bullion comes in, and goes out as coin
stamped with the mark of the mint. Our bodies are mint-stamping every
atom that goes out of them with the print and mark we put upon it, to carry [Page
9] that
mark with it, and so to leave our imprint on other organisms into which
they may go. Suppose that these atoms are always poisoned with
alcohol!
Alcohol
happens to be a substance which peculiarly takes up the magnetism of
those who come into contact with it. I may speak of it in the chemical
sense as a certain definite chemical compound made up of certain chemical
atoms held together in a particular way. You may have a variety of
forms depending on the number of the atoms that go to make them up,
but, whatever the numbers, they always bear the same proportion to
each other. The alcohol-radical is made up of two elements — carbon
and hydrogen — perfectly
harmless in themselves, perfectly respectable members of the chemical
family. They only become disreputable in their combination into a particular
form, and when you get a particular combination of them and add to them
part of the molecule of water, you then get what you speak of as spirit,
which is of course largely diluted before ordinarily taken, but the
mischievous part of this diluted drink is the particular combination
of chemical atoms and the proportion they bear to each other, known to
the chemist as the alcohol-radical. Whether you get it in methylated
spirit, in your beer, wine, etc., whether you get it in still more fiery
forms like the potato spirit — which is largely used in the manufacture
of the cheaper form of spirits, and is even more destructive and [Page
10] energetic
than that which is ordinarily used — however you get it, it is always
essentially marked by the same characteristics, and those characteristics
cannot be separated from it. They are the direct result of this particular
combination of the chemical elements. When taken into the
body the alcohol carries with it the magnetism of the different persons
who have been mixed up in its preparation. As a rule, persons who
are concerned in the making of these drinks are not the most thoughtful,
refined, or cultured of human beings. As a rule they show the influence
of that in which they are continually working, and get a certain physical
stamp upon them that enables you to recognize them as persons
who are normally connected with this particular form of industry.
I am not saying anything which is exaggerated — every one of you
must know it, from your own observation. Anyone of you could pick out
a brewer's man from a whole parcel of teetotalers. The physical body
is changed by that with which it is continually working. Then again,
in order to show in an exaggerated form
what I am putting to you, take the habitual drunkard. Do you mean to say
he cannot be recognized at once by certain physical marks, by the injury
he does to his tissues, recognized always by the impregnation of the whole
body, by the odour of the liquids he drinks ? and this is so much the case
that any one present who has the habit of absolute teetotalism will know [Page
11] that he has become very
sensitive to the whole of those emanations that come from the body penetrated
with alcohol. You know it the very moment you come near such a
person. If a person who drinks comes into an omnibus with you,
you are acquainted with the fact at once. I know it myself, although I have
not been a teetotaler all my life. For a great portion of my life
I drank the light French wines which have very little alcohol in them, 2,
3, 4, and up to 8 per cent, so that the amount of alcohol there is comparatively
slight; but still, taking any at all makes a difference, and I have noticed
that difference since I have been now for some years past an abstainer. I
have noticed that one very unpleasant result of teetotalism is the greater
sensitiveness that it gives with regard to everybody else who
drinks. I say unpleasant, because the majority do drink, and in every way
you lay yourself open to this extremely uncomfortable result, as you cannot
avoid going about amongst people who habitually take some amount of
spirituous liquor. Even moderate drinking is perceptible to
those whose senses have become very sensitive by long and complete
abstention. On Tuesday last, I was lecturing in South Wales, and had
to travel back to a certain point at which I wished to catch a connecting
train. A football match had been played in the place where I was
lecturing, and the players were returning to Cardiff in the train by
which I traveled. [Page
12] Unfortunately, almost
everyone of them had drunk heavily, and some of them were absolutely
intoxicated. The result was, that it made me positively sick to be near
them, although you may be sure, I kept as far from them as I could. The
strong emanations, physical emanations, that came from the bodies of
those people who had been in the habit of drinking, and still continued
it, were simply sickening, so that I am speaking not the language of
exaggeration, but of physical fact.
It is a literal
fact that from everyone of our bodies emanations go out. They fall upon the
bodies around them, upon human beings, plants, and minerals, and thus is
continuing this constant interaction between all things amongst which we
live, so as to make a link between you, and every body, and everything else,
and constituting the drink habit not only a curse to the people who drink,
but to the community and the nation. It has been said that the drunkard is
no man's enemy but his own. That is not true. Apart from the obvious fact
that the wife and children suffer, and that the example is demoralizing,
the drunkard is a focus of poison to the community in which he is a physical
being. I am not yet speaking of the mental and moral mischief, but of physical
results, and men who put alcohol into their bodies make the alcohol mark
on the atoms of which those bodies are composed. They scatter those atoms,
stamped with alcohol, over the whole of the community, [Page
13] and sober
people get these atoms into their bodies and suffer in that
fashion from the drunken habits of their neighbours. So that it is not
a mere self-regarding matter. Nothing is self-regarding really, because
we cannot help being linked to each other, but drunkenness is most other-regarding,
and a man has no more right to drink, and to scatter these poisoned
atoms through the community, than he has a right, if he has small-pox,
to go into an omnibus or cab and leave there the poison of smallpox to
be absorbed by the next person who occupies the seat he has quitted. You
will see now why I said at the beginning that although I am speaking from
a different standpoint from that to which you are accustomed, some of the
arguments I employ may be used by you when dealing with drunkenness.
You can enforce them by the whole of the later observations of western
science with regard to the effect of these tiny atoms on our bodies,
if you do not care to take the stronger view I do, that every atom is a
life, an organized life, with power to affect everything with which it
comes into contact, and when it is a poisoned life, a germ in full activity
that may breed further disease in the body with which it comes into contact.
This, of course, has to be remembered on the other side. Let us suppose
a person with small-pox, or any kind of infectious disease, to scatter
about the poison germs. It does not follow that everybody on whom those
germs fall will get the disease, because you [Page
14] not
only want the germ, but you want the soil in which that germ can
germinate and fructify. So far, then, we can guard ourselves against
being the unwilling hosts of these poison germs. We cannot help them
coming, but we can make the soil so un-fructifying that they will
starve for want of nourishment. We can do that by making the soil
of the body thoroughly healthy; by taking care that we never poison
an atom when once it comes into our body; by taking care that we
purify the body by always keeping the poison away as much as possible,
and so in that fashion — to
use a technical term — to
sterilize the soil on which otherwise the germ would grow.
To
illustrate: The scientific man takes a germ, and puts it into the mother
liquid, as it is sometimes called. In that it grows and multiplies; so
that you may find some instances in which scientific men have captured
a germ or microbe and put it into a bottle filled with liquid which contains
all the nourishment that particular microbe wants for its rapid development.
The microbe begins to grow, and there are many cases in which microscopical
microbe, over-fed, has developed until it has become visible to the naked
eye in its full power of mischief, forced into a development truly abnormal.
On the other hand it has been put into a liquid which is sterilizing, that
is, it has not got the particular form of nourishment it is able to assimilate,
and so it grows weaker and weaker until the [Page
15]
power for mischief has grown
very small. That is only showing you, like a picture, what may happen in
the bodies of men. The body of man may be like the mother liquid of the scientist,
giving all the materials in which the alcohol microbes, so to speak, may
flourish. Thus, when an atom poisoned with alcohol comes to you from some
drunken neighbour, and it finds in your body a host convenient for itself,
it will grow and multiply in the soil you provide, and will intensify your
own predisposition towards the alcoholic disease, by bringing fresh materials
to the soil in which that material may increase and grow. In that way drunkards
injure each other, and the very
atmosphere of the public-house tends to feed the drunkenness of the
people. On the other hand, if a body be pure, if it
does not give the same tendency, the same nourishment that suits
the development of this atom impregnated with alcohol, then gradually
that atom, if it has no nourishment, will be starved, will slowly
change its character, and take on the healthier condition of those
other atoms amidst which it finds itself. Hence you can guard yourself
against this poison by keeping your own body pure from all alcohol.
You may indeed have one that is almost proof against such mischief.
You
will readily see from this how difficult it is to break the alcohol
habit — how terrible is the struggle when the victim first begins
to fight against it — how he will go without drink sometimes [Page
16] for weeks and
months, and then suddenly, as by an imperious physical necessity, break
out. That is a war, a literal war, that is going on in the bodies of
drunkards, and these atoms that by years of drunkenness have been fed and
nourished, cannot be suddenly got rid of, and cannot at once be destroyed.
You
will see, then, why it is that, as a Theosophist, I am in favour of absolute
abstention; how I look on alcohol not as a food, not as a useful stimulant,
but as an absolute poison. The danger of what is called moderate drinking
lies in this nourishing of the alcohol germ, which may very easily develop,
and so if the person come into unfortunate conditions, his moderation may
pass into excess, and the ordinary sober man may become a drunkard by
this poisoning received from the life around him. Surely also this will show
the enormous importance of abstention, to the parents of families. The life
of the child, so far as the physical body is concerned, is very largely
influenced by the life given physically by the parents. How can a child be
born with a body physically healthy, if that body be built up of atoms that
are physically poisoned ? The father and mother give the germs of physical
life and the materials of which the physical body is composed. If these are
drink-poisoned, the child comes into the world with the drink tendency
physically implanted in the body that the parents have given [Page
17] it.
Surely that is a responsibility that no man or woman should dare to take.
They have no right to create a physical body which is poisoned in this
fashion, before it has a chance for itself in the outer world. They have
no right to hand on to a child a body which, by its physical constitution,
is already impregnated with the alcoholic tendency. People say to men: " Oh,
you should drink to keep your strength up. You should take porter and
beer, in order that you may be strong." They might as well say: " You
should take poison in order that you may live." All these things not only
poison the mother but the child, because the materials are poisoned, and
on this point, if you will pardon me a moment's digression, men are very
largely to blame. I know a great deal, as you are aware, of life in the East
end. My work has been specially amongst women, and one of my greatest
difficulties is when these girls of 16, 17, and 18 get engaged. There
is no earthly objection to that, for it is natural and right; but the young
man, as a rule, likes the girl to drink with him. If she won't go and take
a glass, he says she is bad tempered, or sulky, or stuck-up. I have said
to the girls over and over again : " I do not believe you care for the drink." (Here
let me say we do not allow any alcoholic drink at all in the Club we have,
and I find the girls enjoy the coffee and tea thoroughly.) They say: " We
do not care for it, but Tom or Will, does not like it, if we won't take
a sup with him."[Page 18]
Now if a man who is engaged to a
girl practically forces her, either by chaff or jeering, or in any other way,
into occasionally taking a glass, he has no right to blame the wife when she
keeps up the habit. I have never yet found the man who liked his wife to drink.
And yet they all want the sweetheart to drink ! Well, you cannot cut people up
in that way. If you start them before marriage they will go on afterwards, and
no man has a right to complain of a drunken wife, when he has jeered at the girl's
first refusal to take any drink at all. So that after all, this is a question
not only that concerns the woman who drinks, but that concerns other men and
women; and there are none of those divisions that people are so fond of making.
All questions really interest men and women alike in their issues, and this
drink-curse is a thing they must fight together hand in hand, here as
elsewhere, trying to make the world better by the influence they exert over
those with whom they live.
There
is another standpoint from which I am also strongly an abstainer. This
again is Theosophical in its origin, and I do not know that you will be
inclined to follow me even so far probably as you have agreed with my
former argument — with the principle of it, at least. I said at the
beginning that we regard man, not as a body but as one who uses a
body. The body is the house while the man is the tenant, and we allege that
the man passes from body to body, and that he makes in [Page
19] each human life practically
the house he is going to inhabit in the next. So that during one life he
builds up his next habitation, and by the intellectual and spiritual activity
of one human existence he modifies the physical conditions of his next experience
in human life. That of course is what is called the doctrine of reincarnation.
It is one that many thoughtful people accept as throwing an extraordinary
light on many of the problems of human life. Let me show you how it bears
on this drink question. We say that the power in you that really makes
you human, is THOUGHT; that that is the power that moulds action and life;
that a man is what he thinks much more than what he does — that
what he does very largely depends upon the circumstances about him, but
that what he thinks governs his reaction on those circumstances.
For instance, supposing a man is not honest in his thought — that is,
suppose he is ready to take an undue advantage, if he can do it without discovery,
suppose he is not thoroughly upright in his inner nature — whether
that man is outwardly a thief or not depends very largely on circumstances.
If he gets the chance he will be a thief, because in his thought he is a
thief; and as a matter of dry fact, there is many a man who commits a theft
who is not nearly as much a thief as others who go down to their graves
and have the epitaphs of honest men. Now what the man thinks is what
he is. [Page
20] Some
of you may hold special religious views, but there is not one great
religious teacher in the world who has not laid stress on the thought
far more than on the action of man — the thought of the man is
the most important, for it governs the action. As a man thinks, so
he acts. Now on that foundation, and based on a large number of experiments
with which I cannot trouble you this morning, the Theosophist has come
to the absolute knowledge of the fact that, as you think, you are continually
creating forms of ethereal matter not visible to ordinary eyesight,
but visible under certain peculiar conditions, even of the nervous
system. Take a man who is suffering from delirium tremens.
It is not a fancy that he sees. That man is in a real world, although not
in the objective world you are most acquainted with. He sees certain things
by a certain faculty which is asleep in the ordinary man, but which can
be stimulated into abnormal power under certain conditions, for good or
evil. One of those conditions is the continuous drink habit, which has
this peculiar physiological result, that it brings into activity this ordinarily
latent sense of sight, and under those conditions he sees thought-forms
of a very low and horrible character, but still thought-forms. You may
have noticed the very peculiar fact that the type of things seen in delirium
tremens is the same, whoever the person may be. The kind of thing the patient
sees is of the same sort. These things are real, [Page
21] in a particular form of
existence which is veiled from you in the ordinary body, and with which
you only come into contact under these very abnormal conditions. Now your
mind is always making forms in this ethereal matter, perhaps the matter
spoken of as a possibility by Professor Clifford. Various experiments
have been tried to prove that this really does exist, and that every time
you think you are producing in the mental world a form that is the image
of your thinking. If you look closely into hypnotism you will soon
get the idea. The patient sees a thought-form, and is able to describe
it, although no word is spoken, and no contact between the thinker and
seer takes place. Sometimes you get it in what is called the medium, who
is able to see a thought-form, and speaks of it generally as a spirit-form,
but it is only a form of very subtle matter. Now these thought-forms
we say persist, and the true, the real man, has the character which
is made up of them. They go to mould even the outer body. Notice
the difference between men whose lives have been noble or base in
the outer world, when the man comes to be old. You can tell the one
from the other. The beauty of the noble old man or old woman is not
a beauty of feature — it is a beauty of general expression and
appearance. It is the inner character, shining out through the mask or
veil of the body. That is what persists — that inner form which
the true man makes for himself, and it is that ethereal [Page
22] form that very largely
models the physical form of the next incarnation. This means that in
your life you are making your own future tendencies, and that when you
come back to a new life's lesson, you will be marked with the tendencies
that you have been making in your present life, so that those tendencies
will form what is called the innate character. Children are not born
like sheets of blank paper, but with strongly marked characteristics,
sometimes vicious, and sometimes virtuous. Now, every man gets vicious
or virtuous tendencies somehow. There are three alleged ways in which
they can get them. There is one way that the purely physical scientists
will tell you of, that man gets them by physical heredity. If that be
so, it is a very sad truth, because it means that a child may be born
into the world doomed by the actions of other people to vicious characteristics
and tendencies, against which he will have to fight. Others say that
it comes by virtue of the gift of an over-ruling Providence, who gives
the soul or spirit to the child with all its tendencies, and so you
come to a terrible injustice, if it is true that men are thus handicapped
by an outside power at the start; but if neither of these views be correct;
if the real view be, that you and I, by our own actions and thoughts
in the past, have moulded the character which in the present life we
are using for helping or hindering our development, then there is no
more talk [Page
23] about
injustice. There is no longer injustice at the heart of things, as
in the other two ways of looking at it. We are responsible for our own
characteristics and that which we have made we must live through
as best we can. That is the view of human destiny which makes man master
of his own life. Bit by bit he builds up a noble character; by
continual carefulness and self-sacrificing love of others, he
builds up a character of sympathy, of strength, of willingness
to help, and of desire to improve. He is born into his next life-experience
with this character that he has built during a previous life,
and so has made himself a better instrument wherein he may progress
yet further, gaining new powers, new growth, fresh progress for
himself and for others. That is our Theosophical view of life — evolution,
continually progressing, our bodies moulded by this inner life,
and made a better and better expression of all its capacities
in life after life, the body reacting under this influence and
changing for higher and higher possibilities, until, millennium
after millennium, the human race is built better and better,
for a dwelling beyond that which it now occupies. And so you
trace upwards as you trace individuals, and you have in this
system of evolution, the reason for the progress of man.
You can understand then, how, with such a theory
of life, we should be strongly against drinking habits everywhere, for it is
as though [Page
24] in
building a house you deliberately took bad materials and poisoned
substances to build into your walls, so that when you came to dwell in
the house its very walls should be poison-giving instead of health-giving.
That is the other side of the question — the re-action on the inner
man of the dwelling he fashions for himself.
Whether
you take my first line of argument — the body built of these atoms
that we impregnate or stamp; or whether you regard it as a dwelling-place
of this true man — the inner self — you will see why the Theosophist
is likely to be a teetotaler, and why he throws all his influence against
the cursing of man by drink.
That,
then, friends, is why I
am glad to come this morning, and perhaps add some new weapons to the
arsenal you are accustomed to use against this enemy of man. I do not
ask any one of you to accept the peculiar side of my views without
thought and investigation. I am not putting it to you as a propagandist
might desire, to convince you of the truth of his views. I have only
tried to lay before you a definite reason why this position against
the use of alcohol altogether should be taken up by those to whom I
myself personally belong; and without accepting my theories as a whole,
I think you may find some of the arguments useful — at any rate,
in putting them before you, you will judge them for yourselves, for
you, I am sure, like [Page
25]
myself, will not form your
opinions merely upon an hour's lecture, but upon long and careful investigation.
I have put before you views I honestly hold, and ask none to accept them
until their reason judges them to be right. I ask none to take them,
until their own intelligence endorses them. I speak to you as one human
being to another, believing that these views are useful. I leave them
to your judgment, but do not desire to dominate any one. I do not wish
to force them upon any, but simply to express my views of man's nature,
and in doing so, to give you fresh reasons to justify the propaganda
you are carrying on in this matter. If we do not agree on all points,
we are united on one. We are agreed on this, that in the present hour
we are all practical creators, and to be a drunken creator is so ghastly
a possibility that, when once realized, I am sure it never will be faced.
|