e to be wise. Others, it may be,
have ventured a little way. My message to you is, turn away from it,
another step may make retreat impossible. As you value the things that
rightly enter into life for attainment and possession--honest
enterprise, true success, worthy ambition, upright character, peace of
mind, and hopefulness of outlook--bind these words about your neck,
write them upon the table of your heart: "He that getteth riches, and
not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end
shall be a fool."

And once more, we may defile the temple of the body by Drunkenness. Or
if this term, and the state it connotes, be unduly aggressive, let me
say by an intemperate use of strong drink.

There are those who tell us that any use which passes it through the
lips is intemperate. If I offer a word of criticism on this position,
it is because I want the assent of your reason in the few things I have
to say about this part of the subject before us. The first condition
of permanent reform is, that it shall be founded on truth. The
peculiar temptation, it has been said, of the ardent reformer is to
exaggerate. Intense feeling is apt to build upon a half-truth--the
unsafest of all foundations. It is one thing to insist upon the evils
that are inseparable from an intemperate indulgence in strong drink, it
is quite another thing to assert that it is evil, and evil only, to
touch it at all. The latter order of polemic is always liable to bring
about a reaction which is terribly prejudicial to the good we desire to
accomplish.

I have no warrant to question a man's loyalty to the forward movements
of our time, who conscientiously for the sake of health, as he thinks,
or social arrangements, cannot recognize it as his duty to forswear
drink altogether. When a man claims his liberty to be the arbiter of
his habits in his home, or in society, for me to arrogate the right to
censure him may be impertinence; and, so far as I am concerned, to read
him out of Christian consistency may be to make myself, as St. James
puts it, a judge of evil thoughts. When a man has reached fifty years
of age, and has worked hard and lived sparingly, if he should consider
it advisable to relax somewhat the severities of earlier years, I have
nothing to say to him unless it be to remind him of the example he owes
to others, and of the need there always is to keep before us the
warning: "Let him that thinketh he standeth,