SECTION I.

INTEMPERANCE CONSIDERED IN ITSELF.

THE Creator was pleased to make man a rational and moral being, while he endowed him with animal appetites and instincts; and it is from his intellectual and moral nature he derives his chief dignity, and not from any peculiarity of physical organization, nor from any of his animal powers and sensibilities.

In every sense it is the mind which is the standard of the man,—and never did the Almighty more fully display his wisdom and benevolence, than when he bestowed upon his creatures those rational and moral faculties, which are the sources of the highest felicity, and which place them in an intimate relationship to himself, as the infinite and self-existing Mind of the universe, and the fountain of all holiness and truth.

Now intemperance, in itself, is nothing less than the voluntary, and entire subjection of the rational and moral part of man, to his animal nature; and must, therefore, be an evil which bears a strict propor

tion to the divine wisdom and benevolence displayed in his being constituted a rational and moral creature. It is said of Esau that he despised his birthright, and, the circumstance is recorded, to his everlasting infamy on the page of inspiration. His sin consisted in undervaluing and rejecting temporal blessings, which derived their importance from their being the especial gifts of the Most High: 'but this sin was as innocence itself, compared with the sin of intemperance. The drunkard is guilty of despising his own soul, the noblest and richest boon of his creator. He is not merely guilty of endeavouring to efface the image of God from his soul, and to impress it with the image of a brute, but he endeavours to destroy every attribute of his intellectual nature. He as much as says to the Almighty, "I had rather have been a swine, and have wallowed in the mire, than have been created what I am,-though in a state but a little lower than the angels, and like them capable of engaging in the noblest exercises, and of realizing the purest enjoyments." Other sins are, no doubt, offensive to God, and dishonourable to those who commit them; but there is no sin which involves so much of the baseness of ingratitude, of the guilt of impiety, of the folly of self-immolation, as the sin of drunkenness. In its relationship to God, it is the most criminal disregard to one of the highest exercises of his wisdom and goodness; and in its relationship to the drunkard himself, it not only involves the guilt of self-destruction, but also of the most degrading self-abasement of which he is capable.

I can imagine a company of fallen angels, while filled with enmity against their Maker, and animated

by the most intense anxiety to destroy the happiness of man, yet standing proudly erect, and still glorying in their intellectual powers; but when I imagine a company of drunkards, I have before me only a number of beings, who might have been feasting on the purest of rational and spiritual enjoyments, and who might have occupied positions the most exalted, reduced, by their own folly, to a condition, in which nothing can be found to mitigate its painful and abject wretchedness. Whether the unhappy victim of intemperance be reeling from the effects of the poison he has taken, or be subject to sottish insensibilitywhether he be uttering the incoherent ravings of a maniac, or be pouring forth the expressions suggested by a profane, and lewd imagination, we see nothing to relieve the deep and awful gloom of his condition. The murderer, in the very act of taking away the life of a fellow creature, the libertine, while contriving schemes for the ruin of his victim, is still a thinking being, his passions may be all on fire, his appetites may be depraved, but he is capable of feeling the power of truth because capable of perceiving the beauty of it; and, consequently, in the very act of transgression may be brought to repentance; but the drunkard, in his state of inebriation, alas! he is not only morally indisposed to yield obedience to the dictates of virtue, but is intellectually incapable of being brought under their influence. He is either an idiot or a madman; and as his idiotism, or his madness, is the result of his own criminality, he is justly held responsible, by both God and man, for all its consequences.

SECTION II.

THE INTEMPERATE, IN THEIR SOBER SEASONS, LESS LIKELY TO BE REFORMED THAN OTHER

VICIOUS CHARACTERS.

IT may be said that when the fit of intoxication is over, the reason of the drunkard returns; and that he may then be directed into the paths of virtue and happiness. The truth of this is readily admitted; but it may with equal truth be contended, that it is in the very nature of the liquors by which drunkenness is produced, to create in those, who have become addicted to the intemperate use of them, such a constant, and insatiable appetite for them, that we can rarely find an individual, whose frequent fits of inebriety have entitled him to the appellation of a drunkard, in such a state of perfect soberness, as is necessary to the proper influence of moral principles upon the heart. Nor is this the only obstacle in the way of the reformation of the intemperate. It has been demonstrated by the experience of ages, that nothing tends more powerfully, than intoxicating liquor, to enfeeble the mind, and, by putting the animal pas