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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    ns too weak to rise,’ and, in spite of ourselves, a voice answers to our consciences, ‘ If I made thee too weak by thine own power to rise out of the gulf, it was because I made thee amply strong enough never to have fallen into it.’ ” (Cheers.) Oh ! do not let any of us be so proud as to think we should be safe. If men of the highest genius have fallen under this temptation, if even an Addison, a Burns, a Hartley Coleridge, and hundreds of others, had been tempted by the excess of their intellectual work to rekindle the vestal flame upon the altar of Genius, by the un- hallowed fires of alcohol, I, for one, will not be the man to abstain from saying to anyone,—Let him that thinketh he standeth—however superior he may think himself from the same possibility of temptation—still let him beware lest he fall. (Cheers.) These, then, seem to me to be sufficient reasons, both on the grounds of public example and personal security, why everyone of us might, with perfect rectitude and perfect honour, and without any fanaticism or any folly, try an experiment which can do us no harm, which may do us great good, and which, at any rate, may be the means of enabling us to do good by our example to thousands of others. (Cheers.) Our leading journal told us the other day that speeches on education were tiresome to fatuity. Be it so. It is not possible without persistence and without enthusiasm to carry on a battle like this. (Cheers.) Let our speeches be tiresome and fatuous so long as they be in the slightest degree neces- sary to the permanence of the glory of England and the preservation oi thousands of her sons ; however dull our speeches may be, I take it that they are not by a long way so dull as the monotonous wail of misery that rises from thousands of homes which drunkenness has made as in- tolerable as a wild beast’s lair; and however wearisome our speeches may be, I am quite sure that they are not one tithe so wearisome as the pauperism, and crime, and degradation which are handed on from generation to generation, and against which we seem to strive in vain. It may seem to be in vain, but it will not be in vain. (Cheers.) The rock which shatters and flings back the assault of the billows, is gradually undermined by the flowing wave, and as long as we hear the incessant lapping of the water on the crag, we may believe that the tide of public opinion is rising and rising—rising by these very means, rising by these very meetings, rising by these tedious and fatuous speeches—until I venture to prophesy it shall have risen so high, that before another twenty years is over it will have resistlesslv swept away the strong rock of opposing interests. It will have risen so high, that it will have utterly overwhelmed, under lathoms of national shame and national indignation, that sunken reef of vice on which we are now suffering so many a gallant and noble vessel to crash, and to be irremediably shipwrecked. (Prolonged cheering.) MR. E. BAINES’ SPEECH. Mr. Edward Baines : Sir Henry Thompson, ladies and gentlemen, the judicious officers of the National Temperance League have wisely determined that you should not be detained to a late hour, and they have done so by intimating to the speakers very delicately how long a time