Spirit Of The Age

Moderate Drinker—doubtless you are ready to say that you stand in no danger from intemperance! So have numbers before you thought, whose last days were days of anguish and wretchedness—the ark of whose ruined fortunes has floated upon a sea of tears, shed by a broken-hearted and sorrowing wife, or by an aged father and mother, whose gray hairs had been brought to the grave in mourning and grief. Can there be any moderate and safe use of ardent spirits? You might as well talk of carrying a torch into a magazine of powder, where a single spark would rend the earth. Suppose as many lives were lost by the cars on our Rail roads, as are lost by intemperance yearly, in the State, who would step aboard a single one of them? Why, you would call him a madman who would dare place his foot upon one of them; yet you think nothing of entering the Car of Intemperance, whose boilers are every day bursting, scattering death and misery in all directions. Remember that small beginnings lead to great results. Stephen Girard was once a penniless vagabond; the small stream in the snowy climes of the north becomes the mighty Mississippi, when it reaches the sunny borders of the south. The drop of ardent spirits taken in youth, swells to the giant in mature age; the temperate drinker in the morn of life, becomes the ruined inebriate in the end.—Exchange.