He was no advocate of temperance; that is, the temperate use of anything
hurtful. Did not believe that anything vicious could be tampered with,
without harm coming from it. He argued to a final and satisfactory
conclusion, that in the use of alcoholic beverages there could be no such
thing as temperance; that the man who took a drink now and then would make
it convenient to take more drinks now than he would then, and in the end
would as surely fill a drunkard's grave as the man who persistently abused
the beverage in its use. His description of the two paths through life was
a most beautiful word picture. That of sobriety leading through bright
green fields, over flowery plains, by pleasant rivulets, where all was
peace and harmony, and over which the spirit of heaven itself seemed to
brood and watch; and that of drunkenness, in which all the miseries and
tortures of the imaginary hell were concentrated in a living death; of
blighted hopes, of wasted life, of ruined homes, of broken hearts, of a
conscience goaded to an insanity--to a madness--to fairly wallow in the
Lethean draft, that memory might be robbed of its poignant goadings; that
the poor, helpless, and degraded victim might escape its horrors in
oblivion.
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