We do not know why some families do not get on.  There is something mysterious about them.  The opium habit is so stealthy, it is so deceitful, and it is so deathful, you can cure a hundred men of strong drink where you can cure one opium-eater.

I have knelt down in this very church by those who were elegant in apparel, and elegant in appearance, and from the depths of their souls and from the depths of my soul, we cried out for God’s rescue.  Somehow it did not come.  In many a household only the physician and pastor know it—­the physician called in for physical relief, the pastor called in for spiritual relief, and they both fail.  The physician confesses his defeat, the minister of religion confesses his defeat, for somehow God does not seem to hear a prayer offered for an opium-eater.  His grace is infinite, and I have been told there are cases of reformation.  I never saw one.  I say this not to wound the feelings of any who may feel this awful grip, but to utter a potent warning that you stand back from that gate of hell.  Oh, man, oh, woman, tampering with this great evil, have you fallen back on this as a permanent resource because of some physical distress or mental anguish?  Better stop.  The ecstasies do not pay for the horrors.  The Paradise is followed too soon by the Pandemonium.  Morphia, a blessing of God for the relief of sudden pang and of acute dementia, misappropriated and never intended for permanent use.

It is not merely the barbaric fanatics that are taken down by it.  Did you ever read De Quincey’s “Confessions of an Opium-Eater?” He says that during the first ten years the habit handed to him all the keys of Paradise, but it would take something as mighty as De Quincey’s pen to describe the consequent horrors.  There is nothing that I have ever read about the tortures of the damned that seemed more horrible than those which De Quincey says he suffered.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge first conquered the world with his exquisite pen, and then was conquered by opium.  The most brilliant, the most eloquent lawyer of the nineteenth century went down under its power, and there is a vast multitude of men and women—­but more women than men—­who are going into the dungeon of that awful incarceration.

The worst thing about it is, it takes advantage of one’s weakness.  De Quincey says:  “I got to be an opium-eater on account of my rheumatism.”  Coleridge says:  “I got to be an opium-eater on account of my sleeplessness.”  For what are you taking it?  For God’s sake do not take it long.  The wealthiest, the grandest families going down under its power.  Twenty-five thousand victims of opium in Chicago.  Twenty-five thousand victims of opium in St. Louis, and, according to that average, seventy-five thousand victims of opium in New York and Brooklyn.