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culably greater than it was a few years ago. When, by the gradual power of this moral enterprise, enlisting the whole nation among the number who totally abstain, the poison we have so long been drinking shall have passed from our veins, then will the hand of this nation be steady, its eye clear, its courage cool, its judgment unperverted, its union strengthened, its intellect powerful, and its spirituality increased, beyond example. This vice will not pass away alone. Even now may be seen retreating in unwilling and sullen array a mighty train of crimes and diseases, that, through the influence of ardent spirit, have lived and rioted among us. Intemperance stalks at their head. Behind him follow, with unwilling pace, murder, theft, obscenity, consumption, fever, apoplexy, epilepsy, delirium tremens, gout, rheumatism, palsy, pleurisy, cholera, and a host of haggard inferior diseases attendant on

domestic gin, apple brandy and peach brandy, made a variety which recommended itself to the variety of individual tastes. Commonly at meals, and at other times by laborers, particularly in the middle of the forenoon and afternoon, these substances were taken simply diluted with more or less water. On other occasions, they made a part of more or less artificial compounds, in which fruit of various kinds, eggs, spices, herbs and sugar were leading ingredients. A fashion at the south was to take a draught of whiskey flavored with mint soon after waking; and so conducive to health was this nostrum esteemed, that neither sex, and scarcely any age, was exempt from its application. At eleven o'clock, while mixtures, under various peculiar names,-sling, toddy, flip, &c.,-solicited the appetite at the bar of the common tippling shop, the office of professional men, and the counting room, dismissed their occupants for a half hour to regale themselves at a neighbor's, or a coffee-house, with punch, hot or iced, according to the season; and females and valetudinarians courted an appetite with medicated rum disguised under the chaste name of Huxham's tincture, or Stoughton's elixir. The dinner hour arrived, according to the different customs of different districts of the country, whiskey and water, curiously flavored with apples, or brandy and water, introduced the feast; whiskey, or brandy, with water, helped it through, and whiskey or brandy, without water, often secured its safe digestion, not again to be used in any more formal manner than for the relief of occasional thirst, or for the entertainment of a friend, until the last appeal should be made to them to secure a sound night's sleep. Rum seasoned with cherries protected against the cold; rum made astringent with peach-nuts concluded the repast at the confectioner's; rum made nutritious with milk prepared for the maternal office; and, under the Greek name of paregoric, rum doubly poisoned with opium quieted the infants cries. No doubt there were numbers who did not use ardent spirits; but it was not because they were not perpetually in their way. They were an established article of diet, almost as much as bread, and, with very many, they were in much more frequent use. The friend who did not testify his welcome with them, and the master who did not provide bountifully of them for his servants, were held niggardly; and there was no social meeting, not even of the most formal or sacred kind, where it was considered indecorous, scarcely any where it was not thought necessary, to produce them. The consequence was, that what the great majority used without scruple, large numbers indulged in without restraint. Sots were common, of both sexes, various ages, and all conditions.-Encyclopædia Americana.

the progress of this horrid army.

Such a train as once

appeared to Adam, the predicted consequence of intemperance in meats and drinks.

Diseases dire, of which a monstrous crew

Before thee shall appear; that thou may'st know
What misery the inabstinence of Eve
Shall bring on man. Immediately a place
Before his eyes appeared, sad, noisome, dark:
A lazar-house it seemed; wherein were laid
Numbers of all diseased; all maladies
Of ghastly spasm, a racking torture, qualms
Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds,
Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs,
Intestine stone and ulcer, colic-pangs,
Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy,
And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy,
Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence,
Dropsies and asthmas, and joint-racking rheums.
Dire was the tossing, deep the groans; Despair
Tended the sick busiest from couch to couch;
And over them triumphant Death his dart
Shook, but delayed to strike.

Paradise Lost, B. xi.

Self

This moral enterprise is removing one of the most dreadful obstacles ever yet opposed to the spread of the gospel. denying and holy men have almost fruitlessly devoted their lives to this blessed object, because along with every supply of that word which conveys the gift of eternal life, there has been sent to the perishing nations the gift of intoxication, the sure producer of death temporal and eternal. Preach to the heathen that spiritual gospel which commands the denying ungodliness and every earthly lust, and at the same time place in their hands and put to their lips the provocation to every sort of crime that can be named! Appeal to the reason and the conscience, and at the same time give them to drink what debases reason, and stupifies the conscience, and makes the whole being earthly, sensual, devilish! Let the temperance reformation go hand in hand with the Bible, and the Sabbath school, and the tract in its distribution among the poor and wretched, and truth will have power, and the world's regeneration will be speedily accomplished.

Any attempt to enumerate and compute the evils of the use of ardent spirit, is at once baffled by their extent. Intemperance is a grand cause of all the wretchedness that exists on earth. It has filled the creditor's book with bad debts, and the gaols with poor debtors; the law docket with criminal cases, and the prisons with criminals. It has dam

med up the channels of legislation, corrupted its very fountains, and contributed not unfrequently to make it a system of perplexity, chicanery and abuse. It has mingled with the reasoning of the pleader at the bar, and corrupted the decision of the judge upon the bench. It has obstructed the progress of business, and crippled the energies of commercial enterprise. It has impeded the growth of new settlements, or mingled death with their youthful life, and it has degraded the whole character of the oldest towns. It has filled the streets with brawlers and begging impostors, the alms house with paupers, the hospitals with wo. To detect its influence in religion, and show in how many ways it has opposed, prevented, or blasted its power, would of itself demand a volume. It is the natural ally of infidelity, scoffing profaneness, and resistance to the Holy Spirit. It has entered the social prayer-meeting, disturbed the worship of the Sabbath, stupified the conscience of the hearer, destroyed the convictions of the inquirer, and mingled its damning influence even in the sermons of the preacher. It has turned houses of gentleness into habitations of anger, scenes of domestic bliss into tragedies of anguish, the cheerful fireside into a place of gloom and wretchedness. The house where that demon enters is no longer a home. He sits at the fireside, and the fire goes out on the hearth. He sits at the table, and want and contention preside at the board. He enters by day, and there are sunken eyes, and dreadful faces, and oaths and poverty, and filth and raggedness. He enters at night, and there are moaning infants, and broken-hearted mothers, and sleeplessness, and shivering, and cold, and hunger, and nakedness. The storm whistles through broken windows, patched with rags; but there is worse strife within, than that of the elements without. He makes home hell, and there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in every part of it.

Wherever man has set foot upon earth, this curse has been found. It is the grand source of murders, robberies, rapes, riots, mutinies, profaneness, impiety, lying, stealing, Sabbath breaking, and crimes of every description; of conflagrations, shipwrecks, and dreadful accidents by sea and land; of wasted fortunes and broken hearts; of disgrace, poverty, want, disease and death, in this world and forever. More than one half, probably three fourths of all cases of insanity are produced by drinking ardent spirit. More than eight hundred out of every thousand

prosecutions for crimes, may be traced to its use.

There are

more than 200 murders annually in the United States; more than four-fifths of them produced by ardent spirit. In London alone, last year, 31,314 persons were taken into custody, in a state of intoxication. Sir Matthew Hale, Lord Chief Justice of England, said, two hundred years ago, that "if the murders, man-slaughters, burglaries, robberies, riots, tumults, and other great enormities that have happened during the twenty years, were divided into five parts, four have resulted from excessive drinking." The following gentlemen being written to in relation to the proportion of criminal cases which have come under their notice, and supposed to result from the use of ardent spirit, gave in answer the proportion opposite their names, viz.-judge Hickney, threefourths; judge Brodnax, three-fourths; M'Lean, threefourths; Simmons, nine-tenths; William Grund, four-fifths; judge Boker, seven-tenths; judge Robbins, nine-tenths; judge Shackleford, ninety-nine-one-hundredths.

More than 94,000,000 dollars have been annually lost to the United States by its use. The amount annually lost to the country is computed by judge Cranch, to be more than sufficient to buy up all the houses, lands, and slaves, in the United States, once in every twenty years. But it is worse than lost, being expended in the perpetual production of crime, misery, and death. Probably more than 40,000 persons have died every year from the use of ardent spirit, and to this number we may add 40,000 more, who die of diseases, induced or aggravated, and rendered mortal by its use. If there were a great engine fixed above us in the sky, which, by a perpetual motion, pointing successively to every habitation in the United States, and shooting poisoned arrows, killed 40,000 people every year, with what horror should we regard our situation! We should esteem the sands of Africa, or the snows of Spitzbergen, a better habitation. But ardent spirit kills not for time only, but for eternity. "There is reason to believe that thousands and tens of thousands are now impenitent, unbelieving, and on their way to the second. death, who, had it not been for the sale and use of ardent spirit, had been ripening for glory, honor, and immortality; and that hundreds of thousands more have passed the boundaries of hope, and are lost; who, otherwise, might have been in heaven." On the holy Sabbath, the distilleries, those black forges of Satan, keep their fires glowing, and

How is the Sabbath

send up the smoke of their torment. desecrated, and the mercy of God thwarted, in regard to multitudes, who, though perhaps they hear the word of life, are sure, through the influence of ardent spirit, to be heirs of endless misery. The drunkard shall not inherit the kingdom of God. The man who uses ardent spirit habitually, has a chain fastened about both soul and body, and one end is linked to the fires in hell, and every day it is shortening, and bringing him with a fatal certainty and increasing speed, to the awful end of his career. He cherishes an appetite that is consuming his system like living fiery vipers, and if he obtains a momentary respite when he steeps it in the draught of fire, it is only to have it return, and eat, as if it were a file rasping his vitals. In such a state, the man's free agency is almost destroyed; his mind is brought into utter subjection to his body; his soul is so entirely imbruted and mastered, that, except for the purpose of remorse, it scarcely seems to exist. He has been known to declare that if a loaded cannon were placed between him and the liquid poison, he would advance towards it, though sure that the attempt would send him to eternity. This ferocious appetite has mastered even the most gigantic intellects; what, then, must be its influence over the common multitude of individuals who have fostered it. The poet Coleridge, might have used it as the ruling demon in his Eclogue of Fire, Famine, and Slaughter; a demon, whose mentioned name would make a holiday in hell; and Fire, personified, might say,—

Myself I named him once below,

And all the souls that damned be,

Leaped up at once in anarchy,

Clapped their hands, and danced for glee;

They no longer heeded me,

But laughed to hear hell's burning rafters,
Unwillingly re-echo laughters.

The

The fire kindled by the drunkard, in this world, is only an emblem of that which awaits him in the world to come. misery in which intemperance shrouds this life, and all things connected with it, would be nothing, if it did not put the seal of eternal fire upon the undying soul. If, while it bloats and burns the body, and turns it to a mass of disease, it burned away the gangrene of sin from the immortal spirit, we would hail it as we would a fiery chariot of glory. The purification of the soul, though purchased by the destruction of all

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