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.

    92/172 (page 88)
    HOW IS ENGLAND TO BE SAVED 1 nence from the fashionable indulgence, you will find test and discipline enough to secure you from becoming moral weak- lings ; and you will have the incalculable advantage, in addition, over those who conform, that you will be left freer than they, and will become stronger than they, for the necessary conflicts and the legitimate labour of life. II. I cannot deal at all with the second point on which I had intended to address you—the high service which your strength may render. Let me say, in one sentence, that England cannot con- tinue to carry the burden of its drunkenness and at the same time hold the leadership of the civilised world. It cannot long continue to harbour this shameful vice and be, at the same time, a great and wholesome power among the people of the earth. The drunkenness of England is at this moment preying upon its vitals, weakening it and crippling it. Great nations in the past—the greatest—have perished. How 1 Largely by the development of luxury, by the rank growth of vice, by the passionate excesses of their sons. England is in this peril! I say deliberately, England is in this peril, not by her free use of strong drink alone, but by an abounding luxury of which this is a prominent feature. How is England to be saved ! By the self-denial of her own sons : the honour may be won by the young men of to- day. Young men, I summon you to the enterprise. Let the future record that after England had weakened her strength and dishonoured her name, and brought her high place among the nations into peril by her intemperance, there sprung up a generation towards the end of the nine- teenth century, begotten of her better self, who entered into a holy league for her deliverance, and from that day she began to shake herself free from the base subjection in which she had been held, nor looked back until she crowned her political greatness with the glory in which she now shines as the patron and example of liberty, righteousness, tempe- rance, charity, and pure religion for all the nations of the earth. May God commend His truth to all our hearts and con- sciences !