In my period of wealth and prosperity, I have entertained thousands of men, have seen thousands drinking and drunken at my table--and under it; but I never touched a drop of my own wine or of the wine of others. I have paid a great deal of money for the purchase of all sorts of tobacco, and for all sorts of pipes--narghiles, hookas, chibouks--as presents for others; but never touched tobacco myself in any way. I have been in every rat-hole of the world--but I never touched the rats. It is for these reasons that I am seventy-three years young, and am hale and strong to-day, and living my life over again like a youth once more.
Years afterward, when I was lecturing, my cousin, George Pickering Bemis, ex-Mayor of Omaha, and my aunt Abbie and my cousin Abbie attended the one I delivered in Omaha, and all of them felt a little hurt by my allusions to the old Methodists, and to my grandmother and her father. Bemis wrote to me that they were horrified. But they forgot that what I said of the Methodists and of my ancestors was in their praise. I was not ridiculing them, but extolling them. I told of these incidents of my childhood, because I was speaking of my childhood, and these were facts. One of the strictest commandments of old Methodism was to tell the truth. They were not satisfied with the mild negative of the Sinaitic commandment, "Thou shalt not lie." They added a positive decree, "Thou shalt speak the truth." That was all I was doing. I was telling the truth about my childhood and boyhood. I have never spoken anything but the truth in all my life. This, too, I owe to the early training in Methodist virtues and precepts, and to the example and counsel of my dear old grandmother.
I could not join the Bible class, at the urgent request of the grocer, Mr. Holmes, because I could not see the necessity of God, and no one could ever explain to me the reason why there should be, or is, a God. I could never recognize the necessity. Morality and ethics I could see the necessity of, and the high and authoritative reason for; but religion never appealed to my intelligence or to my emotions. The story of the Prodigal Son only taught me that to be a Christian one must do something to be forgiven for, to repent of; and I could not see the strength of such an argument. The plain and sound "ethics" of Methodism, outside of "faith" and "belief," always seemed to me to be higher and better than this.