Mrs. Greenlaw,—­although Mr. Stellato, as Chief of the Progressive Gladiators, had called in person to demand a public destruction of that accursed instrument for the ruin of men.  The Deacon defied the moral sentiment of the town.  Doctor Dastick sturdily maintained that tea and coffee were not injurious, and had got hold of the preventing-waste-of-tissue theory in respect to more potent beverages.  The old-fashioned hospitable soul of Colonel Prowley took cognizance of the fact that the Odes of Horace made no unkindly mention of ripe Falernian, and that the most admirable heroes of Plutarch do not appear to have been teetotalers.  Mrs. Widesworth, good lady, rode like a cork upon the deep unrest of society:  she thought the whole business infidel as well as absurd, and, so thinking, did not trouble herself much about it.  Mr. Clifton had preached a sermon in which he took the ground that morality could be best promoted by regulating, instead of extirpating, human propensities.

Then the rising tide of reform beat heavily upon the church-doors.  By stiff, inexorable logic, those clergymen who refused to join the popular charge against the outworks of Evil were declared to be in intimate alliance with its very Essence.  Although the Bible, as a whole, was held in little regard by the leading reformers, they were wonderfully expert in plucking out texts here and there, and dove-tailing them into scaffolding to sustain their platform.  The grand denunciations of Jeremiah were shown to have been shot point-blank at our poor little New-England meeting-houses.  It was their fasts and their new moons which the prophet (his prophetic claims were here generously admitted) aimed at.  Some churches stood the shock of the angry elements.  But many young ministers were borne away before the storm, and carried their side-aisles and galleries along with them.  What! had a theological simulacrum of Satan excited their fathers to doughty deeds,—­and should they hold back, when challenged to meet him in proper person, hand to hand?  Thus persuading themselves, these ardent divines caught up bitter words which had drifted out of the dictionary, and laid about them with a spirit not wholly removed from the old ecclesiastical rancor which would kill where it could not convince.  And taking it for granted that it is the mission of the intellect to rectify what is wrong in the world, fruition seemed to answer their efforts.  Society was put to its purgation in very plausible fashion.  Songs about Temperance and various desirable perfections of the outward man were shouted in bar-rooms hired for the purpose at considerable expense.  Then there was dimly seen a further “progress,” of which certain movers of the people were the warm advocates.  Having got the machinery well to work, might it not be twitched and pulled to effect a wider purification?  It began to be hinted that the use of wine in the sacred offices of religion could not be countenanced,