ing.

We do not know why some families do not get on. There is something
mysterious about them. The opium habit is so stealthy, it is so
deceitful, and it is so deathful, you can cure a hundred men of
strong drink where you can cure one opium-eater.

I have knelt down in this very church by those who were elegant in
apparel, and elegant in appearance, and from the depths of their souls
and from the depths of my soul, we cried out for God's rescue. Somehow
it did not come. In many a household only the physician and pastor
know it--the physician called in for physical relief, the pastor
called in for spiritual relief, and they both fail. The physician
confesses his defeat, the minister of religion confesses his defeat,
for somehow God does not seem to hear a prayer offered for an
opium-eater. His grace is infinite, and I have been told there are
cases of reformation. I never saw one. I say this not to wound the
feelings of any who may feel this awful grip, but to utter a potent
warning that you stand back from that gate of hell. Oh, man, oh,
woman, tampering with this great evil, have you fallen back on this as
a permanent resource because of some physical distress or mental
anguish? Better stop. The ecstasies do not pay for the horrors. The
Paradise is followed too soon by the Pandemonium. Morphia, a blessing
of God for the relief of sudden pang and of acute dementia,
misappropriated and never intended for permanent use.

It is not merely the barbaric fanatics that are taken down by it. Did
you ever read De Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium-Eater?" He says
that during the first ten years the habit handed to him all the keys
of Paradise, but it would take something as mighty as De Quincey's pen
to describe the consequent horrors. There is nothing that I have ever
read about the tortures of the damned that seemed more horrible than
those which De Quincey says he suffered. Samuel Taylor Coleridge first
conquered the world with his exquisite pen, and then was conquered by
opium. The most brilliant, the most eloquent lawyer of the nineteenth
century went down under its power, and there is a vast multitude of
men and women--but more women than men--who are going into the dungeon
of that awful incarceration.

The worst thing about it is, it takes advantage of one's weakness. De
Quincey says: "I got to be an opium-eater on account of my
rheumatism." Coleridge says: "I got to be an opium-eater on account of
my sleeplessness