the effect of spirituous liquor upon the minds and hearts of men. The
latter tends directly and powerfully to counteract the former. It tends
to make men feel in a manner which Jesus Christ hates, rich spiritually,
increased in goods, and in need of nothing; while it tends for ever to
prevent them from feeling, as sinners must feel, to buy of him gold
tried in the fire, that they may be rich. Those who use it, therefore,
are taking the direct course to destroy their own souls; and those who
furnish it, are taking the course to destroy the souls of their
fellow-men.

In one town, more than twenty times as many, in proportion to the
number, professed the religion of Christ during the past year, of those
who did not use ardent spirit, as of those who did; and in another town
more than thirty times as many. In other towns, in which from one-third
to two-thirds of the people did not use it, and from twenty to forty
made a profession of religion, they were all from the same class. What,
then, are those men doing who furnish it, but taking the course which is
adapted to keep men stupid in sin till they sink into the agonies of the
second death? And is not this an immorality of a high and aggravated
description? and one which ought to mark every man who understands its
nature and effects, and yet continues to live in it, as a notoriously
immoral man? What though he does not live in other immoralities--is not
this enough? Suppose he should manufacture poisonous miasma, and cause
the cholera in our dwellings; sell, knowingly, the cause of disease, and
increase more than one-fifth over wide regions of country the number of
adult deaths, would he not be a murderer? "I know," says the learned
Judge Crunch, "that the cup" which contains ardent spirit "is poisoned;
I know that it may cause death, that it may cause more than death, that
it may lead to crime, to sin, to the tortures of everlasting remorse. Am
I not, then, a murderer? worse than a murderer? as much worse as the
soul is better than the body? If ardent spirits were nothing worse than
a deadly poison--if they did not excite and inflame all the evil
passions--if they did not dim that heavenly light which the Almighty has
implanted in our bosoms to guide us through the obscure passages of our
pilgrimage--if they did not quench the Holy Spirit in our hearts, they
would be comparatively harmless. It is their moral effect--it is the
ruin of the _soul_ which they produce, that r