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jury. Yet nothing is more common, than for the lover of strong drinks to violate every sacred obligation that he entered into, in the presence of angels and men. The tears of deserted, starving, wretched, and dying women, whose misery must be attributed solely to the drinking habits of their husbands, flow in torrents in every part of the country. The men that are thus dead to every human feeling, and every religious bond, have been robbed of a heart by the intoxicating cup. Once they loved their wives, but they were persuaded to drink, and the liquor that has captivated their taste, has alienated their affections from their own flesh, and their own homes.

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The Scriptures tell us, that men should "love their wives as their own flesh," or rather "as Christ loved the church;" but intoxication prevents the possibility of complying with such an injunction, and thus alike bids defiance to the laws of Heaven, and the duties of humanity. Well has it been said, that “intoxicating drinks have visited the earth with a second curse," and on none has it alighted with such tremendous fury, as on the unhappy wives of tipplers. The history of these broken-hearted women, like Ezekiel's roll, is written within, with "lamentations, and weeping, and wo.” Compelled, day after day, to toil for an infant family, to subsist on the coarsest and scantiest food, to hear her children cry for bread, without having any to give them, to be herself and her children clothed in rags, with neither bed nor furniture to repose on, or give comfort to the family; to have to endure all this, while the husband is spending in the ale-house what might make all of them comfortable, is to the mother a bitter cup of affliction, and to the father a crime of no ordinary magnitude.

But this is not all. Mothers themselves, from having acquired a taste for strong drinks, pawn their own and their children's clothes, rob them of almost every morsel of bread, and often desert them, or with their own hands put them to death. The lioness, the she-bear, the tigress, the vulture, and the adder, nurse and protect their young, and study their safety; but alcoholic liquors change human females into monsters, for which the vocabulary of earth, or even the abyss beneath, cannot find a name, nor the world of savage or venomous creatures produce a

parallel. "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, she may forget;" but the question of the prophet, and the phraseology he employs, show that the occurrence then was rare; had he, however, lived in these days, he would have seen, that for parents to starve their children, for mothers to forsake their offspring, was far from being uncommon. Such is the transforming

influence of the drunkard's cup.

The conduct of Medea has been deemed too atrocious to be true, but the history of the effects of the Circean bowl of Christian Britain has more than realized the cruelties of the fable. The sorceress alluded to, killed her children at once, but baptized women in England, by a slow and cruel process, bring their own children to the grave through neglect, starvation, and disease. Horace intimates, that Rome, at a period which nourished a Nero, could not bear to see Medea fictitiously practise her cruelties on the stage; what then shall we say for the morality of the nineteenth century of our redemption, when these execrable deeds are practised in the open day, and he who abstains from the accursed bowl, which has changed mothers into monsters, is deemed a madman, or persecuted for such folly? Proof this, indeed, that the drunkard is not the only person who is besotted by these drinks; the accursed cup has robbed us all of our humanity, and rendered us deaf to the piercing cries that salute us from every quarter. Were we not infatuated by the sorceries of alcohol, we should arise as one man, and banish the pest from the land.

The crime of parents in forsaking, starving, and destroying their children, is not all. For want of clothes, thousands of the rising generation are kept from the Sunday-school on the Sabbath, and from our charitable day-schools in the week; they are therefore educated in vice, and perfected in depravity in the drunkard's school; and consequently, we have a race of Vandals, trained to worse than barbarism in a Christian country, and under the very shadow of the mercy-seat. We have what is still worse; we have children, whom our schools have civilized, re-transformed into worse than savages. The alehouse and the gin-shop, in one short day, can undo all that we have done by

the labors of years, and render those whom we have taught, the worse for our training. We may be told, "Human nature of itself is bad;” we grant it, and therefore conclude, that there is no need of making it worse by the depraving influence of inebriating poisons. Man, we allow, can, without drunkenness, be as vile as one could suppose a fiend could wish; consequently, it is altogether superfluous to add to his nature the inspirations of the drunkard's cup, and thus finish his character as an incarnate demon. He can commit murders, adulteries, and thefts, if left to himself, but he can sin with less remorse, and with much more recklessness, when a moderate glass or two have inflamed his passions.

In countries in which paganism did the work of alcohol, and added every depraved stimulus to his nature, the inspiriting bowl was not needed to arm human beings for desperate acts of cruelty and iniquity; but in a country in which Christianity has awakened reason and conscience to their proper sphere in the soul, men find a difficulty in violating the most sacred ties of nature and religion, until they have first destroyed their moral sensibility by the benumbing influence of the tankard or the bottle. Hence, as already observed, in our country crimes are committed at which heathens would blush, and these are perpetrated in the broad light of the gospel. Strange to say, but we have in our land the two extremes of morality and immorality. We have the purest religion that ever shone upon man, and the blackest vices that ever darkened his character; and these existing the one in the presence of the other, and what is still more awful, the latter, in thousands of instances, neutralizing the instructions of the former.

Now, whatever other agencies may be at work, we all know full well, that there is not a power which demons can command, which can so effectually resist and withstand the gospel, as the cup of the drunkard. Rome, in the lowest state of pagan degradation and sensuality, could not boast that her prisons were crowded with juvenile culprits, and that some of her infant thieves merited, at the age of nine years, the epithet "incorrigible," or that mothers were base enough to train their children for this guilty distinction. It was reserved for Christian Britain

to present to the god of thieves whole hecatombs of youthful offenders, and to do this in an age more renowned than any other for the multiplicity of schools, in which science and religion were brought down to the capacities of infants, and their blessings placed within the reach of the poorest cotter in the land. And to this scene of juvenile delinquency we have been brought by drinking. The superintendents of police, the jailors, the judges, and the chaplains of prisons, ay, and the teachers of Sunday-schools, are all unanimous in attributing the increase of youthful criminality to the accursed influence of strong drinks. Thus, our intoxicating stimuli have opened a new page in the history of crime. We all knew the capacities of adult offenders for works of iniquity, but depraved humanity itself stands aghast when the child of nine years is discovered to have surpassed the oldest criminals of ancient times in the crafty and precocious turpitude of his offences.

This premature adroitness in iniquity, Christian, has been obtained from the influence of that cup, which the Total Abstinence Society implores you to abandon! And is it too much to ask you, as a patriot, and a professed follower of Him who died for our redemption, to give up a beverage which has already begun to poison society at its fountain head? If infants, trained in the drunkard's school, learn to commit crimes at which veteran culprits would blush, then what, think ye, will be the manhood and the maturity of this early ripeness in depravity? Will not your own sons and daughters become more sinful, from associations which you will find it difficult to prevent? These juvenile culprits will become a pest to society, and will be the decoys of those who have been subjected to better training. "One sinner destroyeth much good," and the ingenuous heart of youth is especially open to the contaminations of vice, because less aware of its consequences, and less vigorous and firm to resist.

Surely the scene of husbands practising cruelties towards their wives more heinous than murder; of mothers deserting their own offspring, or training them for every vice; of children matured in infancy for debauch, sensuality, and dishonesty; of the sighs and prayers of godly parents neutralized; of the pious instruction of years in Christian families or Sunday schools, turned

in one short day into a curse, and an instrument of cunning in depravity; and more than this, the body prematurely doomed to disease and the grave, and perhaps the soul to perdition, ought to address us in language more awful than the thunder, and more thrilling than the groans of the lost, to abstain from a beverage which has been the occasion of such an amount of misery and ungodliness. If we refuse to make a sacrifice, which, as

shall hereafter be shown, could be done with such manifest advantage to our own health and happiness, the indignant Judge of all will exclaim to us, "When ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear your hands are full of blood." 6. Under the head of crime occasioned by these drinks, we must not pass over the fact, that so many professors of religion and ministers of the gospel, have fallen and lost their reputation in consequence of drinking. In these, more than in any other instances, we have an exemplification of the great danger of what is ambiguously called "moderate drinking." Many of these "who have erred through wine" and strong drink, we have good reason to believe were partakers of divine grace, and therefore had supernatural power to withstand temptation, and yet they have been betrayed. Nor is this to be wondered at, if we consider the nature and insidious character of inebriating liquors.

The liquid fire which exists in all of them produces thirst, and the inspiriting poison acts immediately upon the stomach, the nerves, and the brain, and through these upon the intellect; but as the stimulus is neither nutritive nor permanently strengthening to the body, nor morally or intellectually invigorating to the mind, the material part of our nature is exhausted by the excitement, and the soul is prompted to vigorous action without a moral motive as its source, or mental vigor as its guide; nothing therefore is more easy than to fly again to the glass as a remedy for this unnatural thirst and debility; and under the unhallowed inspirations that are felt, to commit crimes at which the sober reason, and conscience of the professor would have been shocked. Thousands have thus fallen before they have been aware; and when a crime has been once committed, nothing is more easy than its repetition, especially if, as in this

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