<TITLE>08. Par 24-27</TITLE>L-24 My, I remember how that back in those days, going to school, I remember brother and I, the one next to me (He's in glory too), and how we went to school together. We'd go to school, and we were about the poorest kids there was. We'd come across the river from Kentucky, and the Indiana people are just a little more wealthy than they are down in the mountain part of Kentucky, anyhow, where I was borned at. And--and I, being the only Kentuckian among them, I sure had a hard way to go; I mean I did. They just teased me all the time about being a corn cracker.
And so, I talk real funny, you know. I... It even... I didn't talk plain, maybe not yet, but I... little better job out of it. So I was kind of tongue-tied like, you know, and I'd talk funny, and they'd laugh at me. And oh, I had an awful time. And ragged, oh, my.

L-25 And I remember, there's one thing about my dad, he would... Now, if he owed a grocery bill, he'd go pay that bill. But if he had ten cents left over, he'd drink it. Everything he had, he drank up. And that's the reason today I'm so firmly against drinking. The reason I'm so firmly against that stuff is because I knew it ruined my home, and spoiled me from a love that... I always wanted to be loved, if somebody to love me. And even my people in that...?... while, I was... I--I it just didn't have it. And we went to school half naked. And what a horrible life we had all because of drink. My daddy was a--was a real man, if he just hadn't have had that habit of drinking.
And I know that it is one of the curses of the nation, and I'm against the thing. You say, "Will a little beer hurt you?" You just get borned again and just go ahead and drink all the beer you want to, after you get born again. That's right. You can just drink all you want after you get borned again. But you get borned again first, and that--that's all you have to do.

L-26 So then I remember in school one day when I seen, reading in my history, I was looking there, and no one was sitting there, and kiddies laughing at me, being so ragged, my hair hanging down my neck. They'd laugh at me. And I was reading a book where Abraham Lincoln got off of a boat down in New Orleans, and he was... He--he seen a colored man being auctioned off. He said, "That's wrong." He said, "That's wrong. And someday I will hit that. If it takes my life, I will hit it." And he did, and it took his life, exactly. And I scooted my geography book, not mine, but one I had borrowed, I didn't have any of my own. I pushed it back, and I said, "And drinking is wrong, and someday I will hit if it takes my life." Against it? Yes, sir.

L-27 And I say this in regards right now, that any person that's really had a touch of Jesus Christ is finished with drinking. That's right.
I got my first Bible. People used to say, "Is it wrong to do this? Wrong to smoke? Wrong to drink?" I made... put a little slogan in the back of my Bible. I picked it up here a few days ago, and was looking at it, a little bitty old Bible. I said,
Don't ask me foolish questions,
Just make this up in your mind,
If you love the Lord with all your heart,
You don't smoke, chew, or drink any shine.
And that's right. That's still the thing to do and that's been twenty years ago since I wrote it in there. A man that's born again has no use for the stuff. Now, look what it's hatched out here in America. You can see whether there's any harm to it or not.


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