I have come through the Valley of the Shadow into
which I ventured with a light heart, and those who know me might point
and say what was said of a giant: "There is the man who has been in
hell." It was true. Through the dim and sordid inferno, I moved as in a
trance for awhile, and that is what makes me so keen to warn those who
fancy they are safe; that is what makes me so discontented with the
peculiar ethical conceptions of a society which bows down before the
concocter of drink and spurns the lost one whom drink seizes. I have
learned to look with yearning pity and pardon on all who have been
blasted in life by their own weakness, and gripped by the trap into
which so many weakly creatures stumble. Looking at brutal life, catching
the rotting soul in the very fact, have made me feel the most careless
contempt for Statute-mongers, because I know now that you must conquer
the evil of evils by a straight appeal to one individual after another
and not by any screed of throttling jargon. One Father Mathew would be
worth ten Parliaments, even if the Parliaments were all reeling off
curative measures with unexampled velocity. You must not talk to a
county or a province and expect to be heard to any purpose; you must
address John, and Tom, and Mary.
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