Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.
Ver. 21. Murders, drunkenness] This is often the mother of murder. Domitius, the father of Nero, slew Liberius, an honest man, because he refused to drink so much as he commanded him. (Sueton.) Alexander killed many of his dear friends in his drunkenness, whom he would have revived again (but could not) with his own heartblood. Once he invited a company to supper, and provided a crown of 180 pounds to be given to those that drank most. One and forty killed themselves with drinking to get that crown. Mr Samuel Ward in his Woe to Drunkards maketh mention of many brought by this swinish sin to untimely shameful ends in a brutish and bestial manner; among the rest, one of Aylesham in Norfolk, a notorious drunkard, drowned in a shallow brook of water with his horse by him. The like whereunto has occured in the place where I now live, this instant November 14th, A. D. 1650. At a blind clandestine alehouse, a company of odious drunkards having drunk all the three outs (that is, ale out of the pot, money out of the purse, and wit out of the head), one of them, making homeward, was drowned in a shallow ditch, his body not yet buried: upon his soul I pass no definitive sentence; but what hope can we comfortably conceive of such? Another of the same crew (rebuked by his father at the same time for his ill husbandry) swore he would hang himself; which also he did presently, and had perished by his own hands, had not his father come seasonably and cut the halter. Oh, these ale houses! the pest houses of our nation, the very sinks and sources of all villany.