: intemperance destroys two hundred a week. Shipwrecks
destroy suddenly, and the country groans when forty or fifty human
beings are suddenly engulfed in the ocean; but more than half of all the
sudden deaths occur in fits of intoxication. It needed not a fable to
award the prize of greatest ingenuity in malice and murder to the demon
who invented brandy, over the demon who invented war.

Look at its murder of souls.

Not satisfied with filling jails, and hospitals, and graveyards, it must
people hell. Every moral and religious principle is dissipated before
it. The heart becomes, under its influence, harder than the nether
mill-stone. It has gone into the pulpit and made a Judas of the minister
of Christ. It has insinuated itself into the church, and bred
putrefaction and death among the holy. It has entered the anxious room
in seasons of revival, and quenched conviction in the breast of the
distressed sinner, or sent him, exhilarated with a false hope, to
profess religion, and be a curse to the church. It has accompanied men,
Sabbath after Sabbath, to the house of God, and made them insensible as
blocks of marble to all the thunders of Sinai and sweet strains of Zion.
It has led to lying, profane swearing, Sabbath-breaking, tale-bearing,
contention; and raised up an army, I may almost say, in every village,
who wish for no Sabbath, and no Bible, and no Saviour, and who cry out
with stammering tongues, "Away with him, crucify him." It has, without
doubt, been the most potent of all the emissaries of Satan, to
obliterate the fear of the Lord, turn men away from the Sabbath and the
sanctuary, steel them against the word, the providence, and grace of
God, stupefy the conscience, bring into action every dark and vile
passion, and fill up with immortal souls the dark caverns of eternal
night. Let a man, day by day, hover around a dram-shop, and sip and sip
at his bottle, and the devil is sure of him. No ministers, no Sabbaths,
no prayers, no tears from broken-hearted and bleeding relatives, can
avail to save him. He holds that man by a chain which nothing but
Omnipotence can break.

And look, too, at its waste of human happiness.

Yes, look--look for yourselves. The woes of drunkenness mock all
description. Some tell of the happiness of drinking. O, if there is a
wretched being on earth, it is the drunkard. His property wasted, his
character gone, his body loathsome, his passions wild, his appetite
craving the poison th