Nay, have not some of you, in your own bodies, felt the power of this habit?  You think that you could stop?  Are you sure you could?  Go on a little further, and I am sure you cannot.  I think, if some of you should try to break away, you would find a chain on the right wrist, and one on the left; one on the right foot, and another on the left.  This serpent does not begin to hurt until it has wound around and round.  Then it begins to tighten, and strangle, and crush until the bones crack, and the blood trickles, and the eyes start from their sockets, and the mangled wretch cries “O God!  O God!  Help!  Help!” But it is too late; and nothing but the fires of woe can melt the chain when once it is fully fastened.

The child of a drunkard died.  My friend, a minister of the Gospel, sat in a carriage with the drunkard, and the coffin of the little child.  On the way to the grave, the drunkard put his hand on the lid of his child’s coffin and swore that he never would drink again.  Before the next morning had come he was dead drunk!

I spread out before you the starvation, the cruelty, the ghastliness, the woes, the terror, the anguish, the perdition of this evil, and then ask, Are you ready, fully and forever, to surrender our churches, our homes, our civilization, our glorious Christianity?  One or the other must surrender.  It can be no “drawn battle.”

But how are we to contend?

First, by getting our children right on this subject.  Let them grow up with an utter aversion to strong drink.  Take care how you administer it even as medicine.  If you find that they have a natural love for it, as some have, put in a glass of it some horrid stuff and make it utterly nauseous.  Teach them as faithfully as you do the catechism, that rum is a fiend.  Take them to the alms-house and show them the wreck and ruin it works.  Walk with them into the homes that have been scourged by it.  If a drunkard hath fallen into a ditch, take them right up where they can see his face, bruised, savage and swollen, and say, “Look, my son:  Rum did that!”

Looking out of your window at some one who, intoxicated to madness, goes through the street, brandishing his fist, blaspheming God,—­a howling, defying, shouting, reeling, raving and foaming maniac,—­say to your son, “Look; that man was once a child like you.”  As you go by the grog-shop, let your boy know that that is the place where men are slain, and their wives made paupers, and their children slaves.  Hold out to your children all warnings, all rewards, all counsels, lest in after days they break your heart, and curse your gray hairs.

A man laughed at my father for his scrupulous temperance principles, and said—­“I am more liberal than you.  I always give my children the sugar in the glass after we have been taking a drink.”

Three of his sons have died drunkards; and the fourth is imbecile through intemperate habits.

Again, we will battle this evil at the ballot-box.  How many men are there who can rise above the feelings of partisanship, and demand that our officials shall be sober men?