a most powerful moral effort.  In such an undertaking he needs every moral support and influence that can possibly be brought to his aid and thrown around him.  And not only so, but every moral prop should be taken from whatever argument might rise in his mind to lure him to his backsliding.  When he casts his eyes around him, he should be able to see all that he respects, all that he admires, all that he loves, kindly and anxiously pointing him onward, and none beckoning him back to his former miserable “wallowing in the mire.”

But it is said by some that men will think and act for themselves; that none will disuse spirits or anything else because his neighbors do; and that moral influence is not that powerful engine contended for.  Let us examine this.  Let me ask the man who could maintain this position most stiffly, what compensation he will accept to go to church some Sunday and sit during the sermon with his wife’s bonnet upon his head?  Not a trifle, I’ll venture.  And why not?  There would be nothing irreligious in it, nothing immoral, nothing uncomfortable—­then why not?  Is it not because there would be something egregiously unfashionable in it?  Then it is the influence of fashion; and what is the influence of fashion but the influence that other people’s actions have on our actions—­the strong inclination each of us feels to do as we see all our neighbors do?  Nor is the influence of fashion confined to any particular thing or class of things; it is just as strong on one subject as another.  Let us make it as unfashionable to withhold our names from the temperance cause as for husbands to wear their wives’ bonnets to church, and instances will be just as rare in the one case as the other.

“But,” say some, “we are no drunkards, and we shall not acknowledge ourselves such by joining a reformed drunkard’s society, whatever our influence might be.”  Surely no Christian will adhere to this objection.  If they believe as they profess, that Omnipotence condescended to take on himself the form of sinful man, and as such to die an ignominious death for their sakes, surely they will not refuse submission to the infinitely lesser condescension, for the temporal, and perhaps eternal, salvation of a large, erring, and unfortunate class of their fellow-creatures.  Nor is the condescension very great.  In my judgment such of us as have never fallen victims have been spared more by the absence of appetite than from any mental or moral superiority over those who have.  Indeed, I believe if we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class.  There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant and warm-blooded to fall into this vice—­the demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and of generosity.  What one of us but can call to mind some relative, more promising in youth than all his fellows, who has fallen a sacrifice to