ashore, John, the elder, went to the public house, and it
was his invariable rule never to return home until his wife fetched him.
Often, when Mrs. Ellerthorpe was in a feeble state of health, and amid
the howling winds and drenching rains of a winter's night, would she go
in search of her drunken husband, and by her winning ways and kind
entreaties induce him to return home. She was known to be a God-fearing
woman, and often on the occasion of these visits, her husband's
companions--some of whom were 'tippling professors' of religion--would
try to entangle her in religious conversation, but to every entreaty she
had one reply, 'If you want to talk with me about religion come to my
house. I will not speak of it here; for I am determined never to fight
the devil on his own ground.'

[Sidenote: IMITATES HIS FATHER.]

And was this Christian woman wrong in calling the public house the
devil's ground? We have 140,000 of these houses in our land, and are
they not so many reservoirs from whence the devil floods our country
with crime, wretchedness, and woe? Is it not there that his deluded
victims, in thousands of instances, destroy their fortune, ruin their
health, and form those habits which wither the beauty, scatter the
comforts, blast the reputation, and bury once happy families in the tomb
of disgrace? And is it not at the public house that the sounds of
blasphemy, cursing, and swearing, sedition, uncleanness, laciviousness,
hatred, quarrels, murders, gambling, revelling, and such like, are
begun? And you might as reasonably expect to preserve your health in a
pest-house, your modesty in a brothel, and high-souled principles
amongst gamesters, as to expect to preserve your religious character
undamaged amid the impure atmosphere of a public house. Can a man go
upon hot coals and his feet not be burnt? One hour spent around the
drunkard's table has often done an amount of harm to the cause of God
and the souls of men which the devotion of years could not undo.

[Sidenote: BECOMES A DRUNKARD.]

A youth, on being urged to take the pledge, said, 'My father drinks, and
I don't want to be better than my father.' And, alas! for our friend, he
early imbibed the tastes and followed the example of his father, for
drink got the mastery of him. Speaking of his boyhood, he says, 'I
remember a man saying to my father, "Your son is a sharp lad, and he
will make a clever man, if only you set him a good example, and keep him
from dri