Religious and educational aspects of temperance / by various authors.

Date:
[1874?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Religious and educational aspects of temperance / by various authors. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    banes of those who begin by indulging in its moderate nse, that they must resort to it as if it were a support. (Cheers.) Now, all this is unnecessary, and this taste is unnecessary. If I were to take you through the whole world of life from the first development of life in the minute amceba floating simply in its fluid, onward through the whole range of animallife up to man,andif I were to expound to you the organi- sation of all that life, I should show you that Nature, in her supreme and divine wisdom, has arranged for no form or kind of fluid support for living organisation except water. (Cheers.) Further, I should show you that when anything else is introduced, immediately the organisation begins to change. Therefore, when a man introduces alcohol to take the place of water for the building up of his body, for the constitution of his organic parts, for the arrangement of his thoughts and actions, he becomes a new organisation—an alcoholic organisation, differing in temper, in power, in mode of thought, in characteristics of the most important kind, from that which he would be if he let nature have her supreme control. (Cheers.) Once more, this system of moderate drinking is, to my mind, injurious in that it keeps up in the minds of those who indulge in it one persistent course of self-deception. I am quite sure there is not a man or woman who indulges in alcohol, even slightly, who, if he or she retires, shuts out the world, locks up the senses, and lets no passion enter to warp the reason—I say there is not one who thinks over the matter in this way who remains unconvinced in his own inner soul that he can do perfectly well without strong drink, and that whenever he indulges in it for the sake of the support it is reputed to give, or for any other reason what- ever, heis simply deceiving himself, and is taking that which he knows to be of no service whatever. (Cheers.) It cannot be good that this system of self-deception should go on, and we, in opposing its beginnings, are doing the greatest work towards the conversion of man to sober anil wholesome thought. To sum up, ladies and gentlemen, I say that the agent which employs and carries with it a false necessity, a false idea of happiness, false action, false organisation, false belief in self, self-decep- tion, is a bad agent. (Hear, hear.) No priest, no physician, no poet, no painter, ever clothed the devil in more telling attributes of evil. 17e are sometimes told it is fanatical, it is unpractical, it is contrary to the interests of individual men, or classes of men, to speak these things and oppose alcohol. Be it so. In another age it will be a wonder that s uch arguments as those which we are obliged to use were ever necessary to convert an unwilling world. (Cheers.) In the meantime, undeterred by a^y of those specious pleas, it is our duty, whether it be called fanatical or philosophical, practical or unpractical, advantageous to class interests or opposed to them, to unite, body and mind, heart and e'ofil, in suppressing this evil at its root, and in endeavouring to make this earth something nearer heaven, by pulling down from his high place the demon who still reigns so triumphantly in the sphere in which we live. (Loud and prolonged applause.)