The bases of the temperance reform: an exposition and appeal./ With replies to numerous objections. By Rev. Dawson Burns.

88 Food Dcstroycd in PI-oduzction of Stro'ii Drinik.
society, and (in the Christian heart) the thankful sense
of God's faithful love. With strong drink come growing
want, premature decay, a capacity and love of evil-doing
unknown before, offences against the social peace, a
defiance of the Mlost High, and a hideous development
of all that is bestial and infernal. The transformation is
complete; it could not be more disastrous and revolting
to our apprehension; how inconceivably odious, there fore, in his eyes who is too pure to look upon sin! Let
no one allege that this is the language of exaggeration
because all use of strong drink is not attended with these
results. What arises from small quantities of food or
strong drink is not the subject-of description; the general issues alone are open to observation; and no lover
of truth can deny that, in the sum of their respective
effects, the corn which is used as food, and the drink
which is made by waste of corn, differ as widely as sweet
and bitter, as light and darkness, as life and death. It
seems impertinent to enquire whether the will of God
can be done on earth while this threefold violation of
that will is in progress, sanctioned and carried out-be it
sorrowfully said-by myriads of those who profess a profound reverence for that will, and who, in many other
respects, are found to render to it a cheerful and enlightened obedience. And on man himself descends the penalty of the violation. The corn which, if ground into
flour and baked into bread, would feed and strengthen a
nation, is diverted from this end, and disappears in the
processes which issue in a stream of intoxicating drink,
flowing annually at the rate of nine hundred million gallons, sixty millions of which consist of a narcotic-acrid
poison fatal to the bloom and beauty of life, physical,
mental, and spiritual.* A quantity of breadstuff which
* It has been estimated that this amount of alcoholized fluid (9goo,ooo,ooo0
gallons) consumed every year in the United Kingdom, would form, if collected, a lake nineteen feet deep, half a mile broad, and a mile long. -
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