t, as a drink, is not useful.

It is _hurtful_. Its whole influence is injurious to the body and the
mind for this world and the world to come.

1. It forms an _unnecessary, artificial, and very dangerous appetite_;
which, by gratification, like the desire for sinning, in the man who
sins, tends continually to increase. No man can form this appetite
without increasing his danger of dying a drunkard, and exerting an
influence which tends to perpetuate drunkenness, and all its
abominations, to the end of the world. Its very formation, therefore, is
a violation of the will of God. It is, in its nature, an immorality, and
springs from an inordinate desire of a kind or degree of bodily
enjoyment--animal gratification, which God has shown to be inconsistent
with his glory, and the highest good of man. It shows that the person
who forms it is not satisfied with the proper gratification of those
appetites and passions which God has given him, or with that kind and
degree of bodily enjoyment which infinite wisdom and goodness have
prescribed as the utmost that can be possessed consistently with a
person's highest happiness and usefulness, the glory of his Maker, and
the good of the universe. That person covets more animal enjoyment; to
obtain it he forms a new appetite, and in doing this he rebels against
God.

That desire for increased animal enjoyment from which rebellion springs
is sin, and all the evils which follow in its train are only so many
voices by which Jehovah declares "the way of transgressors is hard." The
person who has formed an appetite for ardent spirit, and feels uneasy if
he does not gratify it, has violated the divine arrangement, disregarded
the divine will, and if he understands the nature of what he has done,
and approves of it, and continues in it, it will ruin him. He will show
that there is one thing in which he will not have God to reign over him.
And should he keep the whole law, and yet continue knowingly,
habitually, wilfully, and perseveringly to offend in that one point, he
will perish. Then, and then only, according to the Bible, can any man be
saved, when he has respect to all the known will of God, and is disposed
to be governed by it. He must carry out into practice, with regard to
the body and the soul, "Not my will, but thine be done." His grand
object must be, to know the will of God, and when he knows it, to be
governed by it, and with regard to all things. This, the man who is not
co