Dehortations from the use of strong liquors have been the favourite topic of sober declaimers in all ages, and have been received with applause by water-drinking critics. But with the patient himself, the man that is to be cured, unfortuheir sound has seldom prevailed. Yet the evil is aowledged, the remedy simple. Abstain. No force oblige a man to raise his glass to his head against his will. Tis as easy as not to steal, not to tell lies.
Alas! The hand to pilfer, and the too bear false witness, have no stitutional tendency. These are as indifferent to them. At the first instance of the reformed will, they be brought off without a murmur. The itg finger is but a figure in speech, and the tongue of the liar with the same natural delight give forth useful truths with which it has been aced to scatter their pernicious traries. But when a man has itted sot-----
Oh pause, thou sturdy moralist, thou person of stout nerves and a strong head, whose liver is happily untouched, ahy ge riseth at the name which I have written, first learn what the thing is; how much of passion, how much of human allowahou mayest virtuously mih thy disapprobation. Trample not on the ruins of a ma not, under so terrible a penalty as infamy, a resuscitation from a state of death almost as real as that from which Lazarus rose not but by a miracle.
Begin a reformation, and will make it easy. But what if the beginning be dreadful, the first steps not like climbing a mountain but going through fire? what if the whole system must undergo a ge violent as that which we ceive of the mutation of form in some is? what if a process parable to flaying alive be to be gohrough? is the weakhat sinks under such struggles to be founded with the pertinacity which gs to other vices, which have induo stitutional y, no e of the whole victim, body and soul?
I have known one in that state, when he has tried to abstain but for one evening,-- though the poisonous potion had long ceased t back its first entments, though he was sure it would rather deepen his gloom than brighten it,-- in the violence of the struggle, and the y he has felt of getting rid of the preseion at any rate, I have known him to scream out, or cry aloud, for the anguish and pain of the strife within him.
Why should I hesitate to declare, that the man of whom I speak is myself? I have no ;puling apology to make to mankind. I see then all in one way or another deviating from the pure reason. It is to my own nature alone I am atable for the woe that I have brought upon it.
I believe that there are stitutions, robust heads and iron insides, whom scary excesses hurt; whom brandy (I have seen them drink it like wine), at all events whom wiaken in ever so plentiful a measure, do no worse injury than just to muddle their faculties, perhaps never very pellucid. On them his discourse is wasted. They would but laugh at a weak brother, wh his strength with them, and ing off foiled from the test, would fain persuade them hat such agonistic exercises are dangerous. It is to a very different description of persons I speak. It is to the weak, the nervous; to those who feel the want of some artificial aid to raise their spirits in society to what is no more than the ordinary pitch of all around them without it. This is the secret of our drinking. Such must fly the vivial board in the first instance, if they do not mean to sell themselves for term of life.
Twelve years ago I had pleted my