Page:Sermon on malt.pdf/5

 public journals ; what trepidation throughout the land, what horror of the evil, what multiplied proposals of remedy ! And yet what is one or what are both these scourges, in their widest and most unsparing havoc, in comparison with intemperance ? In one week distilled spirits fill more graves than all the cases of hydrophobia in the history of the disease. In the midst of this cruel destruction, the friends of Temperance have looked in vain for some prospect of deliverance. The devouring flood has burst over all the barriers which the pulpit, the press, and the voice of warning have raised in its way, and the year 1829 shows the abounding increase of four millions of gallons of ardent spirits above the preceding year. Something must be done, then, more than has been done already, for it is notoriously evident that the exertions which have been hitherto employed for the suppression of intemperance, have been to a melancholy extent unavailing.

Temperance Societies offer to public consideration no utopian project, but a simple, easily applied system, which has been in operation with such unparalleled success for three years in the United States of America, that though it commenced on a population drinking on an average eight gallons a man, annually, the consumption of ardent spirits has been diminished three-fourths even in some of the largest towns, and 1,200 drunkards have been reformed. I have before me private letters from different parts of the