Temperance Notes

Southland Times, Issue 11439, 25 April 1890, Page 2

Temperance Notes

(Inserted by arrangement with the Southland Branch of the Women's Christian Temperance Union.) ARCHDEACON FARRAR'S TESTIMONY Among others whom I have seen cast down by the devil have been not a few clergymen. Once they were full of hope in the thought of honourable, useful, and consecrated lives ; now they herd in the vilest dens of the wretched and the criminal, and have gone down step by step into the lowest abysm of misery. One such figure stands mentally before me now. He has disgusted his friends, he has alienated his family, he has lost his living, he has destroyed his usefulness. He was once a scholar and a gentleman. If you would seek him now, it must be iv the slums and lodging-houses, where the glittering wave of modern civilisation leaves its useless and congregated scum. And such cases, too, must be multiplied by tens of thousands. Drink is the worst obstacle to the spread of Christ's kiugdom. It defaces the page of history and retards the progress of the world. A QUESTION FOR STATESMEN. 'What could be the use of sowing a little seed here, and plucking up a weed there, if these beershops are to be continued to sow the seeds of immorality broadcast over the land, germinating the most frightful produce that ever has been allowed to grow up in a civilized country, and, he was ashamed to add, under the fostering care of Parliament !' —Lord Brougham. It don't pay to have the mothers and children of twenty families dressed in rags and starved into the semblance of emaciated scarecrows and living in hovels in order that the saloon-keeper's wife may dress in satin, and her children grow fat aud hearty, and live in a bay-window parlour.