The Vow of the Nazarite.

Auckland Star, Volume VIII, Issue 2403, 1 December 1877, Page 6

The Vow of the Nazarite.

A Sermox, by the Rev Frederic W. FAHEAR, D.D., F.R.S., Canon of Westminister, Chaplain in Ordinary to • the Queen, and late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Preached before the University of Cambridge, at the Church of St. Mary the Great, March 11, 1577.

" And I raised up yom 1 sons for prophets, and of your young man for Nazarites. Isjit not even thus, O ye children of Israel, saith the Lord? But ye gave the Nazarites wine to drink, and commanded the prophets, saying, Prophesy nor."—Amos ii. 11,12.

Amos was called from very lowly toils to preach God's word to the kingdom of Israel, at a time when, in spite of one last gleam of delusive splendour under Jeroboam 11., it was fast sinking into that condition of degradation and decrepitude which ended —as do the crimes of all impenitent nations —in its total and irremediable extinction. Poor he was, and ignorant, as were the anostles after him, and as a curb for false

scorn and fastidious intellectualism, it is vrell for us to remember that such have many of God's grandest champions been. Bat though Amos was neither a prophet nor a prophet's son. but a rough herdsman and unlettered gatherer of sycamore leaves, he was one of those masculine, indignant natures, which burst like imprisoned flame through the white ashes of social hypocrisy. Prepared, like the Maccabees of old, to die in hiti simplicity, he was not afraid to roll God's message of thunder over apostate nations, and hurl the flash of His threatening^ against guilty kings. Like Samuel before Saul, like Elijah before Ahab, like John the Baptist before Herod, like Paul before Felix, like John Huss before Sigisnmnd, like Luther before Charles V., like John Knox before Mary Stuart, like the .saints of God in all ages whose characteristic has ever been the battle-brunt, which— " Through a cloud Not of war only, but, detractions rude, Guided bj faith and matchless fortitude To peace and truth its glorious way hath ploughed; And on The uoclc o! crowned fortune proud, Hath res,red. God's trophies, and his work pursued—" as Amos testified undaunted before the idolatry of courts and priests. Now, one crime of that bad period —the crime of all bad periods, and the type of a hundred other" crimes to which, alike in its origin and its developments, it is allied—was luxury and intemperance. And in this verse the prophet confronts Israel with the high appeal of God, whether He had not put the fire of the Spirit into the heart of some of their sons, and they had quenched that fire by their blandishments and conventionalities : and whether he had not inspired some of their youths to take the vow of abstinence, and they, with the deliberate cynicism of worldlings, had tempted them to scorn and break that vow ? Translated into strictly modern language, the verse would run : '"To protest against the effeminacies of self-indulgence I give you preachers ; to rouse you from the surfeit of intemperance I enrolled your _ sons as abstainers : My preachers you silenced by your godless sophisms ; my young abstainers you seduced by your ensnaring wiles."

That tins is a strict paraphrase you can judge for yourselves by reading in the sixth chapter of Numbers the vow of the Nazarite. You will see there that the very essenceof it was self-dedication. The young Nazarite consecrated himself to God; he offered himself, his soul aud body, a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice. His long hair, on which razor never passed, was a symbol of his ioyal service. In sign of spotless purity, he was never to touch a dead body, were it even his father's corpse. Asa mark of the tranquil sovereignty of his will over the lower appetites and passions of his nature, he was to separate himself so absolutely from all wine or strong drink — nay, from all semblance of fermented liquor (which, of God, is a product not of life but death, not of nature but of corruption, not of composition, but of decomposition)— that he was to taste nothing made from the vine tree, from the kernel even to the husk; and from this passage of Amos, as well as from the taunt of the Pharisees against John the Baptist that "he had a devil," we see that the Nazarite was a marked man ; and that because his vow was regarded as a tacit condemnation of thepopularself-indulgence, lie was exposed to the sneers of the worldly and the temptations of the base. Nevertheless, wisdom was justified of her children. Let Mm who will spread and shift the silken sail of cowardice to woo every veering breeze of applause and popularity ; but may every young man amongst you who hears me, every youth who wishes to be worth his salt, make up his mind that insolent detraction is very often in this world the noblest testimonial to worth; and that the coarse dispraise of corrupted worldlings and professional slanderers is the very loftiest of eulogies. The best men, and the bravest men, and the least conventional men in this world have been ever the most loudly and the most scornfully abused; and while the world givers to its pestilent and trailing brambles' the sovereignty over its forests trees, gladly and proudly may brave souls leave the bespatterment _of profane approval to the shrinking caution tliat love.s to trudge on the sunny side along the beaten track of selfishness, over the dull, dead levels of conventionality and comfort. Little recked the true Nazarite of muttered sarcasm and bitter hate—little as recks the sea of the foolish wild birds that scream above it. Health, strength, physical beauty, wholesoineness of life, tranquillity of soul, serene dominion over evil passions, followed in the path of early and life-long abstinence. Not theirs to wail, "Vino forma perit, vino consumitur aetas,"as wailed the young Roman poet, who, like better men than he, have degraded themselves into premature decrepitude ; but, as Jeremiah sang about the days of Zion in her glory, " Her Nazaritss were purer than snow, they were whiter than milk, they were more ruddy in body than rubies, their polishing was of sapphires." Not theirs the tottering gait of the drunkard, nor the shaking hand of the debauchee; not theirs the brazen impudence of the shameless, nor the hang-dog misery of the remorseful; but theirs the strength which is the child of temperance, and the beauty which is the sacrament of goodness. Such was Joseph, twice in the Hebrew called a Nazarite, who, to strengthen for ever the high purpose of the young and tempted, uttered the glowing protest of youthful innocence, " How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God ?" Such was Samuel, for a nation's deliverance consecrated from childhood to hallowed service. Such was Elijah, the lord of hair, the mid _ Bedawy prophet, who made Jezebel quail before him for all her painted face and bloody Lands. Such was John the Baptist, merging from the wilderness where his soul Lad caught a touch of flame, to make the Pharisee blush under his broad phylactery, and shake the pulses of the tyrant on his throne. Such was James, the first bishop of Jerusalem, with his robe of fine white linen, and knees hard with kneeling, and prayers which seemed to the people to open and shut the doors of heaven. Such in varying degrees were Antony, Boniface, Bernard, Francis of Assissi, Milton, Wesley, Licordaire. Triere seems to be a spec,ial strength, a special blessing, above all a special power of swaying the souls of others for thair good, which is imparted to wise and voluntary abstinence. The hands of invisible conscration overshadow, the fire of a spiritual unction crowns, the head of him whojin early youth has learnttosay with his whole heart, <;Iu strong warfare, in holy self-denial, I dedicate my youth to God." And such we want : Aye want them among you, the youth of England ; and in proportion as we get them will England sink or rise. We want very specially just now this almost scornful rejection of selfindulgence, this deliberate determination to plain living and high thinking in the young. We do not want those whom they call the glided youth—-the fluttering butterflies of the season—the dandies and the gossipers, and the pleasure-seekers, who make their lives deservedly wretched because they

make them deliberately base, and to whom we might say, in the words of the poet—

All. what avails to understand The merits of a spotless shirt, A dapper boot, a little hand If half the little soul be dirt.

Nor do we want the beardless atheists, who, with the crude smatterings of a second-hand scepticism, Gan not only demolish with one flash of their splendid intellects, and set aside with one wave of their contemptuous hand, the truths which till yesterday a Faraday and a Whewell preached, but who, wiser than the aged in their own conceit, even revel in. the airs of disdain with which they can insult as dupes or hypocrites the saints of God, the very latchet of whose shoes they are not worthy to stoop down and unloose. Nor, again, do we want the youths of coarse fibre and vacant heart, who, in the first treasons of a spurious liberty, court the temptations which theyjshould shun like tho pestilence; and, knowing well God's doom on drunkenness and lust, yet go as an ox to the slaughter, and as a fool to the correction of the stocks. Nor do we want any, be they men or be they women, who do but take their license'in the fields of time, heedless of the degradation that follows them, heedless that they are but adding blackness, to the earth's darkuess by their wasted lives. This age wants, England wants, the Church of Christ wants, God wants, those who, selfdedicated, like the ideal Nazarite, to noble ends, have not lost the natural grace and bloom of youthful modesty. We do want natures strong, and sweet, and simple, to whom lifers no poor collection of fragments, its first volume an obscene and noisy_ jestbook, its last a grim tragedy or a despicable farce ; but those to whom, however small the stage, their life is a regal drama, played out before God and men. We do want souls fresh and virginal, dowered with the hate of hate and scorn of scorn against oppression and selfishness, and the love of love for all that is pure, and generous, and true ; souls that shall say, seeing that life is shorthand the fame of virtue immortal,—l choose—God helping me—l choose the narrow, uphillward path, up which before me my Siaviour bore the Cross ; and, not wishing to change for one of earth's cankered roses its hallowed thorns,—let false friends discountenance, let the worldly persecute, let fools deride, —but "mutare ant timere sperno," I scorn either to change

or fear. Well, then, in one word, we want the spirit of willing Nazarites; and since total abstinence was the central conception of the vow of the Nazarite, while I am not at all astonished that selfish Sadducces or corrupted Holenisers should hate and scoff at it, it is to me amazing and portentous that even some good and true men should represent such self-denial as Manichsean, as unscriptural, as a mark of inferiority—as I know not what. I have no time, and in this pulpit it should be surely needless, to shatter each of these sophisms to atoms, and dash it indignantly aside as one more instance in which—as in order to defend polygamy, and the Inquisisition, and pauperism, and the slave trade, and the suppression of science, and the obstacles to discovery, and the deification of ignorance, and the right divine of kings to govern wrong—the Devil, substituting the fetish worship of the dead letter for the fire of. the living spirit, has—as though man should use a'medicine as a poison, and the light of the Pharos for a wreckers' reef—quoted Scripture for his purpose., and made it the cloak of superstition and the shield of wrong. Yet let me say at once that lam not going to b«a guilty of the dictatorial Pharisaism which says to any one, " You are committing a sin if you do not take to total abstinence." That Ido not say ; and even in this age of bronze lacquer, and impudent personalities, in which nothing is more common than wilful calumny, let no one attribute to me that language :—but what I do say to every one of you, and if the subject be entirely new to this pulpit, I say it all the more —and most of all do I say it if it shall shock in any that epicurean self-satisfaction which is utterly fatal to all noble life—l do say to every one of you, and I say it fearlessly, and downrightly, in God's name, that you are bound in the best way yoit can—bound in the sight of God, bound as a Christian, bound as a patriot, bound as an ordinarily good man—to go up every one of you before the tribunal of your own consciences, and whethcrjyoube familiar with them or unfamiliar, to lay very solemnly to heart the stern facts which I shall try to brand iipon your memories today. The Universities, thank God, have awakened from the dead sensual sleep of the eighteenth century. The old type of college Fellows vegetating for life in vapid and useless luxury is utterly extinct. Even from among undcr-graduates—though there be perhaps among them less of the modesty and respect for elders, and gratitude for kindness, which were virtues which still existed in the days of their fathers, there has yet, I hope, utterly vanished the old coarse type of ignorant and dissolute idlers. It was but the other day (a tiling which even ten years ago would have been utterly impossible) that at Oxford the Sheldonian Theatre was used, and the Vice Chancellor presided at a thing once deemed so vulgar and plebeian as a temperance meeting, at which some of the leading professors spoke ; and Cambridge is taking her part, and taking it right nobly, in the great battle between Ebal and Gerizim, light and darkness, heaven aud hell; and hundreds, I hope and believe, of her manly youths are daily learning more and more, in the light of shining examples, t» scorn delights and love labours, in the high endeavour " to make earth like heaven and every man like God." And if there be but one here who cares only to sleep and feed, and steep himself in the gross mudhoney of a sensual life, if there be but one who does not care to do God's work, or to help His children, or to make better this sindevastated world, to him I speak not; but to all you, the rest, I say that, acknowledging as you do the law of charity, is it not charity merely to toss to human suffering the crumbs of your superfluity, but to probe its causes, to anticipate, to avert them ?

It is a characteristic —a very fine and redeeming characteristic—of this age, that all who dare to call themselves Christians are thoroughly in earnest (thoroughly and more Avisely, and more systematically, and less despairiugly in earr est than of old) in the work of social amelioration; but yet,— mainly because there is here, there is at outdoors, there is in the very midst of us, an evil, colossal and horrible—an evil with which, to its utter shame, the State has not yet dared to grapple—the evil, I mean, of universal drinking and universal drunkenness—not only has much of ail this vast charitable effort been wholly ingf™^ cant for good, but some ~ ° been absolutely powerful

increasing the evils which it wished to alleviate, and perpetuating the miseries which it desired to relieye. And in the hearing of some of you, in whose hands shall be the future of England, who will live to fill her pulpits, to write her literature, to make her laws, and who will, I hope, be eager to help in tearing away this poisoned robe which has been maddening the blood of our country ; I say, with all the emphasis of a conviction not hastily or rashly formed, that not only are our best agencies of mercy neutralised by this one vice of intemperance, but that all these agencies concentrated into their most effective vigour would do lesa— infinitely less—good than would be done by the expulsion of this one preventable cause of .sin and misery. Called by the Providence of God from the brightness of a life spent at our great public schools; to face the repellant squalor of London pauperism, that has been brought home to me by vivid personal experience. " I speak that which I know, and testify that which I have seen. But Ido not ask you—you in your learned culture and cloistered calm — I who am Lufc a London clergyman, Avith no leisure whatever to be a student—l do not ask you for one moment to accept on my poor authority a dictum for which, if time permitted, I could simply overwhelm you with irresistible evidence ; evidence which, in spite of disdain, and in spite of struggle, should arrest your attention, and

fetter and rivet to the rock of conviction 1 even him among you to whom this topic is most disiasteful. ''Every day's experience tends more and more to confirm me in the opinion that the temperauce cause lies at the foundation of all social and political reorm." These are 3 not mine, but the weighty words of the calm, wise statesman, Kichard Cobden. " Every benevolent institution uttprs the same complaint. A monster obstaale is in the way—strong drink; by whatever name the demon is styled, in whatever way it presents itself, this, this prevents our success. Remove this one obstable, and our course will be onwards, and our labours will be blessed." These words are not mine, they are the massive eloquence of Mr John Bright. " We are convinced that if a statesman, who desired to do the utmost for his country, were thoughtfully to inquire which of the topics of tho day deserved the most intense force of his attention, the true reply—the reply which would be exacted by due deliberation—would be that he should study the means by which this worst of plagues should be stayed." Those are the words of the late thoughtful and lamented Charles Buxton. "Profligacy, vice, and immorality, are not thundering at our gates like a besieging army, but they are undermining the very ground on which we stand." Those words so deep in their pathos, are yet the utterance of the genial and' beloved Lord Palmerston. "Let us crush these artists inhuman slaughter, A'ho have reconciled their country to sickness and ruin, and spread over the pitfalls of debauchery such 1 a bait asnannotbe resisted." In such stern words spoke, more than a hundred years ago, the worldly and polished Chesterfield. Are not such statements from such men— undeniable, un contradicted, nay, even unchallenged as they are —at legist enough to waken tne deep slumbers of a decided opinion, even if they bo not enough to break down the clenched antagonism of an invincible prejudice, or to dispel the stupid selfishness of an incurable frivolity ? They are not the words of men at whom you can sneer as crochety politicians or temperance fanatics, or whom the very best of you all, in his own estimation, can set aside with a disparagement or demolish with a gibe. The very cleverest of youthful graduates, —or even of undergraduates, —cannot quite stab these men with an epigram- or refute them, as fops refuted Berkeley, with a grin. To sneer at these would be to condemn yourselves as incapable ; these not to know would argue yourselves unknown. And yet these are but a few of many such warnings littered by some of the best, greatest wisest in the land, and you ought not, you must not. you surely dare not, ignore them. But if these be not enough I will add something more. Taking alcohol as a convenient generic name for the specific element in all kinds of intoxicating drink, I will ask you to look with me for a moment at what it is not and what it is, and at what it costs. It used to bo believed that alcohol was a food ; it is now conclusively demonstrated (and when I say "conclusively demonstrated" I ask you to believe that I mean in the m°st literal sense conclusively demonstrated) tuat it contains not one single element—whether nitro-genous or hydrocarbonic —of food ; and that, as one of the first modern chemists has said, there is in nine quarts of alcohol less food than can be spread on the end of a table-knife.^ Nor is it a source of strength, for alike in Africa and India, in the Arctic and in the Antarctic, and by great labour employers in the temperate zones, and by distinct experiments with navvies in gangs and soldiers on the march, it is matter of proof that those can labour best, both physically and mentally, in whom the cold is not intensified by the weakening reaction from artificial stimulant, and in whom the sun's fierceness has "no alcoholic ally within the brain." Nor is it a source of health ; for the lives of total abstainers are now known to be more valuable in an insurance than other lives ; and not a few very eminent living physicians have testified that "the daily use of it, even in quantities conventionally deemed moderate, not only causes some of the most fearful and dangerous maladies, but even injures the body, and diminishes the mental powers to an extent of which few people are aware." Least of all, then, is ifc a necessity, seeing that it has been happily unknown to whole races, and prohibited by immense religions; and in England alone, three millions of total abstainers, of whom very few have ever repented, can testify that since they abandoned it, they, like the Nazarite of oIJ, have been clearer of brain, more strong of limb, more vigorous in health, and more calm in happiness. I might go on to any extent with such evidence ; and on the faith of it, and on the yet stronger faith of daily experience, I again assert, not as a dubious theory, but as an established fact, that to men in ordinary health alcohol is not a food nor a necessity, nor a source of health, nor a source of warmth, nor of physical strength, least of all of mental power ; but, that when it is not a potent medicine, it is a mere luxury—a luxury which is at the best harmless, but which is frequently dangerous, sometimes fatal, always quite superfluous, never particularly noble. Let us understand then well, my brethren, alcohol is a luxury, and nothing but a luxury ; and if, being healthy, we indulge in it' at all, it is not because we need it, but because we like it. Well, a nd this being so, what does the luxury cost ? At what expense does the nation, as a nation, gratify its liking ? I will tell you. It costs us in tillage the waste of millions of acres of soil; in food, the destruction of millions of tons of grain; in hard cash, it is the absorption of millions of pounds of money. It is beyond all question the one main, if not the sole, cause of the squalid, degrading, and dangerous pauperism, against which some of you have to struggle hereafter in the streets of London and other great cities; and in the middle classes, who have often _ to strive so hard, you would be surprised U I could show you how much they might yearly save by this abstinence alone. And though that is something, though it is a consideration not to be despised by youths who will soon have to make their way with daily increasing difficulty amid the the hard competitions of an over-crowded population—and though it Avill help them very materially in the stern battle of life, to have acquired simple and self-denying habits, yet all this saving to individuals, all this saving to the nation of yearly increasing of millions of pounds, which would make it not only more wealthy, but also more prosperous by incalculable advantages, is the least important point. '' Tanto opere, tanto labore et impendio constat, quod hominis memtem mutet ac f urorem giguat millibus huic sceleri deditis," said the elder Pliny nearly 2,000 years a.<^o, and it is now more true a thousand times. In any other connection you would think this vast expenditure, this colossal waste, a consideration of overwhelming importance, yet in this it is the smallest element in the question. Of far deeper, of far more awful significance. is what it costs in disease, what it costs in crime, what it costs in misery, Avhat it costs to the glory of England now, aud the hopes of English generations for year- to come. I should have no time, I have no heart, to tell you all that could be told under this head." I entreat you not to turn impatiently from it, nay—l tell you plainly you have no right to turn impatiently from it. For the drinking of some means inevitably, as things are, the drunkenness of many ; and these who sin, these who suffer, these who die, are our own flesh and blood. I believe that there is scarcely one family in England which has not suffered from this hideous plague, scarcely a house in England where there is not one dead. And oh !"is it nothing to you all, ye that pass by ?" You have heard what drink costs to the nation in money, what does if costs in disease and accident ? Ask the d reary page of statistics, and you^will ) "ad that in socalled accidents, but acc^ lents perfectly preventable, it costs us bi :en limits, and shipwrecked vessels, and b .nt houses, and shattered railway trains, n:..l the deaths of

children, overlaid by drunken mothers, or J £ beaten savagely by drunken fathers ; and , to tell you what it costs in disease I should have to take you, not in fancy, but in hard fact, to what the poet saw asthe result of intemperance in meats and drinks. A lazarliouse it seemed, wherein weie laid Numbers of all diseased ; all maladies Of ghastly spasm, and racking torture ; qualm Of heartsick aejony—all feverous kinds— Dropsies, and asthmas, and heart-racking rheums, Dire was the tossing, deep the groans ; despair Tended the sick, busiest from couch to coucn; And over them triumphant Death his dart Shook—but delayed to strike. This is what those who claim a right to speak with authority tell us it costsin sheer disease ; and which of you is so ignorant Of English history, of English literature, of English life, as not to know, further, of noblest reputations stained, of glorious intellects ruined, of great souls embittered, ot invaluable lives cut short ? And wbat does it cost in crime ? I will tell jou, not as a surmise of my own, but on the recorded testimony, on the emphatic evidence of almost every judge and magistrate and recorder on the English bench. Remember ' that those arrested for drunkenness do not furnish one tithe of the drunkards, and then shudder to hear that in one year alone 203,989 were arrested for crimes in which drunkenness was entered as a part of the charge ; and that last year 5,131 womenonly think of that, and of all the hideous degradation, all the unspeakable horror, which it implies—were arrested for drunkenness in Middlesex alone, and charged before the Middlesex justices. In every province, in every country, in every great city of the United' Kingdom, it has been stated from the seat of justice again and again that but for drunkenness there would not be in England one-tenth of the existing crime. It is getting a hideous common-place of judges. Only a few days ago Lord Coleridge said at Durham that but for drink we might shut up nine-tenths of our gaols. Last week was brought up before Mr Justice Manisty, at Manchester, a wretched creature in man's semblance, who, as though he were worse than a natural brute beast made to be taken and destroyed, had brutally kicked to death a wife far advanced in pregnancy, and the judge, in sentencing him to the gallows, said, " You have been found guilty of the crime of wilful murder, your victim being your own wife. You are a sad, sad instance of the consequences of indulging in drink, which has brought you to this fearful condition. It is only owing to God's mercy that this has not brought many more into a similar case. I am afraid if this vice continues to be indulged in as it now is, that many more will stand in a like position to you. Oh, that we could by administering the law put an end to it." Ah, he might well say that; but dare you blink such testimony? Do you think that they say these things rashly ? And if you will not listen to the reiterated warnings of the judges in their ermine, will you listen to the noble-hearted missionaries, who tell us what drink costs to the glory of England in the execration of her name over whole continents, and the ruin of her eiforts among whole populations ? Could I summon the Maoris of New Zealand —once so healthy that you might smite a man with a broad axe, and in a few days he would be well ; now, in the language of a high Government official, " almost as bad as the English, polluted and contaminated by their drink," —what would they say ? If I could summon the Indians of North America, once not unhappy, noAV degraded, maddened, exterminated by our accursed fire-water, what would they say "i .They have said that because of it, they spit at the name of a Christian. If we ask the Mahometans, what do they say ? Is there a Christian in England with conscience so dead, with heart so rough, with cheek so brazen, as not to blush when he hears that if they see one of their number drunk, they have been heard to say : " He has left Mahomet, and gone to Jesus." If we ask the Hindoos, what do they say ? They have said by the lips of their eloquent representative, Keshub Chunder Sen, that all the splendid benefits of our] English rule in India have been nullified and counter-balanced by our teaching them the use of beer and brandy ; that the wailing of widows rends the air of India with curses against the British Government for having introduced this thing. And again, from the Southern Seas, the voice or yet another missionary says to us, "If you love missions, help, help to dethrone this demon of intemperance —our reproof before the heathen, the blight of our infant churches." And oh, sirs, when you hear such things, are we not—we, the sons of proud, glorious, free England—are we not to our burning infamy what one has called us, the drunken Helots of the world. So much, then, for monoy, and disease, and crime and civilisation ; and what docs drink cost in human misery ? Have you hearts ? If you have, I might say— " Sit you down, And I will wring your heart, for so I shall. If it be made of penetrable stuff, If damned custom hath not brazed it so That it is proof and bulwark against sense." But, ah ! I have no tongue to utter, no imagination to couceive, no calculus to measure, the immensity of this national curse, this national calamity. It would require the vision of the Angels of Record, if they can gaze on it with oyes unblinded by such uears as angels weep, to tell of those miseries of millions for centuries—"to pass, as it were, from chamber to chamber of the prophet's vision of abomination, and to mark the crime in every form, the vice in every shape, the disease in every aspec that can make disease horrible," that ha been caused by the corrupted fruit of thi tree of the knowledge of evil. He alone whose ears are open to the lion's roar and the raven's cry can catch the numberless accents of that wail of incurable anguish and uncontrollable despair which has streamed upwards for generations, till the vault of heaven has become "one vast whispering gallery," to prolong and reverberate the groans of those who have slain their own peace by this voluntary imprisonment. He alone by whom the hairs of our head are all numbered can count the widows who are widows because of drink; the madmen who are mad because of it; the grey heads that it has made grey ; the sad hearts that it has crushed with sadness ; the ruined famalies that it has ruined; the brilliant minds which it has quenched; the unfolding promise that it has cankered ; the bright and happy boys and girls whom it has blasted into shame ' and misery; the young and the gifted whom it has hurried headlong into dishonored and nameless graves. Is it not Shakespere himself who says, by the mouth of the disgraced and ruined Cassio, " O thou invisible sjsirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee Devil !" What does drink cost in human misery ? Ah, how can I tell you ? Can I count the leaves of the forest, or the sands upon the shore? And the sounds of this misery are like the sighing of the leaves of illimitable forests, and the plashing on the : shores of unfathomable seas. He alone whose car is open to the cry of the poor and destitute can hear the Availing of that multitude of miserable, miserable women, who, taking in despair to the drink which their , husbands have taught them, get degradingly , content with the starving squalor which they call their homes ; can hear the poor wretch who has vainly followed her drunken tyrant to the public-house moan, in agonies of entreaty, " Come home ! come home !" or see her watching and waiting in that foul mockery of a home till the sot reels hack at midnight, and, with his brain all on fire with that vitriol madness, lifts against her unprotected ; womanhood his cowardly and brutal hand, " till the filthy bye-lane rings to the yells of the trampled Av'ife." Ah, I cannot go on, and you—you cannot bear to hear of these things. Yet these things are, and worse— if there be worse —than these ; and though you may, if you please, lay a nattering unction to your conscience, and call this rhetoric, or call it exaggeration, it is just the plain, bare, hideous truth. And Avhile you shrink from these things in Avords, are your sympathies so slothful that you do not

shrink from them in reality ? Oh, that

could harrow up into a little manliness thos delicate sensiblities ! Oh, that I coald thrill through horror into action those tastes, like that of an insect, which feels the shaking of the table, but does not feel the thunder." For it is a horrible fact that the drink, whic h we, as a nation, are drinking, not from the necessities of thirst, but from the mere luxuries of appetite—drink often adulterated with the vilest and most maddening ingredients—yes, this rubied and Circean cup which we sip, and smile while it is converting thousands of our brethren into swine—this subtle, serpentine, insidious thing whi&h Aye cherish in our bosoms, and laugh and play with its brightness, while it is stinging" thousands of our brothers into raging madness—costs us, as I have shown, millions of money, myriads of criminals, thousands of paupers, thousands of ruined women, hundreds and thousands of men and women goaded by misery into suicide and madness, with every blossom in what might have been the garland of their , lives, blighted as by a fury's breath. And again I say, "is it nothing to you all ye that pass by ?" Is it nothing to you young men who, if you be worth anything at all, better than to cumber the barren ground of wasted and useless lives, will be called upon, a year or two hence, to take up your cross, and, the mirth and bright- j ness of youth being ended, to take your j happy and holy part where God shall place you in the ranks of the great battle between . sin and death ? Shall it be nothing to you j that the blood of your brothers and sisters i in the great family of God is being daily j poured upon the altars of this deadlier i Moloch of a Tophet more awful than that of Hinnon's vale, while in discovering that you are your brother's keeper you become his ] Cain ? Aye, and are we to go on for another : generation with our 8,500 public-houses in London alone, and see another generation : of our country's children grow up amid the same dangers and the same tempta- ] tions, exposed like a defenceless prey to j these evil spirits ; nay, even transmitting . that awful hereditary craving which shall leave to yet another generation for all their : lives the reality of intense temptation, ; the possibilities of terrible catastrophe? i Even if every one of you be indeed really i safe (whereas, what I feel sure of is, that j without the grace of God sought in earnest ' prayer not one of us is safe at any time, ■ not one of us is safe from anything), but even if yon be quite sure that you will never fall unawares in love with this tamed viper, which may seem a bright and harmless creature of God, until, a?, alas ! too many of the strong and the gifted and the noble who have been wounded by it can testify, at some moment of deep misery of crushing disappointment, it slides into the soul with tempting whispers, or fixes in the heart its envenomed fang ; even if you be personally safe from this destroyer of all health and virtue, this breeder of all disease and sin ;—will you do nothing for, will you think nothing of, those myriads and multitudes to whom this drink means brutality and degradation, disease and death ? If so, if you hear with callous indifference, nay, with open disliko, nay, with angry repugnance what you have heard to-day, as though forsooth some rude untutored roice broke in upon your balanced serenity, then by all means, as far as I am concerned, insult the speaker to your heart's content; eat, drink, and be merry; go up to Rarnoth Gilead and prosper. But if, indeed, you don t care to do anything, not even to lift one finger to save this England from this living death, then stand aside from among us, and do not call yourself a philanthropist; do not call yourself a Christian. It may not be your duty—l have not said, I do not say, that it is—to take any pledge of total abstinence as the amulet of a hallowed purpose or the safeguard of a strengthened youth, or the outward sign that you too, will take your part, now and hereafter, in this great struggle between heaven and hell; but if you do not feel called upon to do this, at least respect and honor the motive* of those who, m special positions, and because of special duties, think that in doing it, they have obeyed gtheir country's and their Saviour's bidding ; and that in the strength of heaven, and for the sake of Christ, and Christ's perishing little ones, they have been called upon to act in the spirit of the high language of St Paul: " I will neither eat flesh, nor drink wine, nor anything whereby my brothor atumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak.