said Mr. Briggs, “I’ll never wear a collar again if you will stop drinking.”  “Agreed,” said the other.  They joined hands in a pledge that they kept for twenty years—­kept until death.  That is magnificent.  That is Gospel, practical Gospel, worthy of George Briggs, worthy of you.  Self-denial for others.  Subtraction from our advantage that there may be an addition to somebody else’s advantage.

But what I have said has been chiefly appropriate for men.  Now my subject widens and shall be appropriate for both sexes.  In all ages of the world there has been a search for some herb or flower that would stimulate lethargy and compose grief.  Among the ancient Greeks and Egyptians they found something they called nepenthe, and the Theban women knew how to compound it.  If a person should chew a few of those leaves his grief would be immediately whelmed with hilarity.  Nepenthe passed out from the consideration of the world and then came hasheesh, which is from the Indian hemp.  It is manufactured from the flowers at the top.  The workman with leathern apparel walks through the field and the exudation of the plants adheres to the leathern garments, and then the man comes out and scrapes off this exudation, and it is mixed with aromatics and becomes an intoxicant that has brutalized whole nations.  Its first effect is sight, spectacle glorious and grand beyond all description, but afterward it pulls down body, mind, and soul into anguish.

I knew one of the most brilliant men of our time.  His appearance in a newspaper column, or a book, or a magazine was an enchantment.  In the course of a half hour he could produce more wit and more valuable information than any man I ever heard talk.  But he chewed hasheesh.  He first took it out of curiosity to see whether the power said to be attached really existed.  He took it.  He got under the power of it.  He tried to break loose.  He put his hand in the cockatrice’s den to see whether it would bite, and he found out to his own undoing.  His friends gathered around and tried to save him, but he could not be saved.  The father, a minister of the Gospel, prayed with him and counseled him, and out of a comparatively small salary employed the first medical advice of New York, Philadelphia, Edinburgh, Paris, London, and Berlin, for he was his only son.  No help came.  First his body gave way in pangs and convulsions of suffering.  Then his mind gave way and he became a raving maniac.  Then his soul went out blaspheming God into a starless eternity.  He died at thirty years of age.  Behold the work of accursed hasheesh.

But I must put my emphasis upon the use of opium.  It is made from the white poppy.  It is not a new discovery.  Three hundred years before Christ we read of it; but it was not until the seventh century that it took up its march of death, and, passing out of the curative and the medicinal, through smoking and mastication it has become the curse of nations.  In 1861 there were imported into this country one hundred and seven thousand pounds of opium.  In 1880, nineteen years after, there were imported five hundred and thirty thousand pounds of opium.  In 1876 there were in this country two hundred and twenty-five thousand opium-consumers.  Now, it is estimated there are in the United States to-day six hundred thousand victims of opium.  It is appalling.