WHO ARE RECEIVED INTO “THE FRANKLIN HOME.”

As in other institutions, the managers of this one have had to gain wisdom from experience.  They have learned that there is a class of drinking men for whom efforts at recovery are almost useless; and from this class they rarely now take any one into the Home.  Men of known vicious or criminal lives are not received.  Nor are the friends of such as indulge in an occasional drunken debauch permitted to send them there for temporary seclusion.  None are admitted but men of good character, in all but intemperance; and these must be sincere and earnest in their purpose to reform.  The capacity of an institution in which the care, and service, and protection of a home can be given, is too small for mere experiment or waste of effort.  There are too many who are anxious, through the means offered in a place like this, to break the chains of a debasing habit, and get back their lost manhood once more, to waste effort on the evil-minded and morally depraved, who only seek a temporary asylum and the opportunity for partial recovery, but with no purpose of becoming better men and better citizens.  Apart from the fruitlessness of all attempts to permanently restore such men to sobriety, it has been found that their presence in the Home has had an injurious effect; some having been retarded in recovery through their influence, and others led away into vicious courses.

There is a chapel in the building, capable of holding over two hundred persons.  In this, Divine worship is held every Sunday afternoon.  A minister from some one of the churches is usually in attendance to preach and conduct the services.  It rarely happens that the chapel is not well filled with present and former inmates of the Home, their wives, children and friends.  Every evening, at half-past nine o’clock, there is family prayer in the chapel, and every Sunday afternoon the president, Mr. S.P.  Godwin, has a class for Bible study and instruction in the same place.  On Tuesday evenings there is a conversational temperance meeting; and on Thursday evening of each week the Godwin Association, organized for mutual help and encouragement, holds a meeting in the chapel.

USE OF TOBACCO DISCOURAGED.

The attending physician, Dr. Robert P. Harris, having given much thought and observation to the effects of tobacco on the physical system, and its connection with inebriety, discourages its use among the inmates, doing all in his power, by advice and admonition, to lead them to abandon a habit that not only disturbs and weakens the nervous forces, but too often produces that very condition of nervous exhaustion which leads the sufferer to resort to stimulation.  In many cases where men, after leaving the “Home,” have stood firm for a longer or shorter period of time, and then, relapsing into intemperance, have again sought its help in a new effort at reformation, he has been able to find the cause of their fall in an excessive use of tobacco.