THE AMERICAN

NATIONAL PREACHER.

No. 2, Vol. XXIX.] FEBRUARY, 1855.

[Whole No. 338.

SERMON DCXLII.

BY REV. JOHN MARSH, D.D.,

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY OF THE AMERICAN TEMPERANCE UNION.

THE TRIUMPHS OF TEMPERANCE.

"The Lord hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad."-Ps. cxxvi. 3.

The restoration of Israel from their seventy years' captivity, and their elevation in the land of their fathers to all the rich privileges of an independent nation, and the enjoyment of their Temple worship and religious consolations, forms one of the most affecting incidents in human history. To it all, they were not insensible. The law of gratitude was engraven upon their hearts. And, as by the rivers of Babylon they sat down and wept when they remembered Zion; as they once exclaimed in the bitterness of grief, "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning; if I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth," so, with correspondent emotions, when the Lord brought back the captivity of Zion, they were like them that dream. The reality seemed to surpass all their fondest hopes. Their minds wandered over regions of delight, as those who sleep. But when they found there was no delusion; that they were once more in their father land, with Abraham's God for their protector, and the rich blessings of the covenant sealed and confirmed to them, then was their mouth filled with laughter; and, lifting up their hearts in gratitude, they exclaimed, "The Lord hath done great things for us. The Lord hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad."

Signal deliverances from existing or impending evils, demand from us, both as individuals and members of the community, grateful acknowledgments. The proud Atheistic heart may say in its folly, "Is not this great Babylon that I have built for the honor of my majesty ?"-" my power and the might of my hand hath gathered me all this wealth," or

that

"my wisdom and skill have extricated me from difficulties and perils, or warded off the pestilence that walketh in darkness;" but this is not the language of nature. The poor heathen, in their blindness, cry every man unto his god when distress comes upon them, and in the hour of deliverance, sing peans to that imaginary Deity which has interposed for their relief. A marked, but very erroneous judgment, however, of divine interpositions, is not unfrequently noticed even among those observant of the hand of God; for in some, so direct is the divine agency it is next to impossible for any but the most stupid to refrain from gratitude and praise; while, in others, so much do they seem to be the result of human foresight and prudence, and the vigor of man's arm, and the perseverance of a spirit determined to conquer, that, with many, God's agency is almost a nullity, and man has all the glory; whereas, could we sift such deliverances to the bottom, we should often find that here there was most of the hand of God; that here, in employing human instrumentality; in bringing thousands who meant not so, to accomplish his purposes; in making the wrath of man to praise him, and restraining what would disturb the order of God's government, there was present, far more than in all others, of his all-controlling wisdom and power. which class of merciful providences the temperance reformation, of whose triumphs it is my purpose to speak, belongs, it is not necessary to determine; as, it is presumed, there are none present who will not accord with the language of the text: "THE LORD HATH DONE GREAT THINGS FOR US; WHEREOF WE ARE GLAD."

I am aware that when we speak of the evils of Intemperance, and of what has been accomplished in our own land, to say nothing of other lands, we are accused of exaggeration. This is not surprising. Indeed, how can men who have taken no gauge of this vice, who look abroad upon society, and observe only its lovely exterior, its outward order, its happy homes, its charities, its commerce, its arts, and its efficient government, see cause for that representation of intemperance which is so constantly rung in their ears? Man, free himself from trouble and basking in the sunshine of prosperity, can easily believe there is no sorrow to soothe, no evil to eradicate. The evils of intemperance cannot be exaggerated. Had they come upon us in any other way than through the delusive gratification of appetite or pecuniary gain, the land would have been covered with sackcloth. A blast, or a tempest, which for ten successive years should sweep away fifty millions of property, would be viewed as the ruin of the nation. But intemperance costs us annually an hundred millions. A foul spirit let loose from the pit, with power to destroy the sober judgments of men, and excite to the commission of every abomination and crime; or a dire disease sweeping over the land, not like the frightful cholera, extinguishing man's life almost without warning, but first crippling all the physical, intellectual and moral energies of five hundred thousand of our citizens, turning some into idiots, some into maniacs, and some into fiends to be the torment of their families, nuisances in society, accursed of God and man; living only to make a god of their belly; and then dying amid the horrors of an anticipated hell, to enter on one where hope never comes, but torture without end, with shame and everlasting contempt, would have caused us to feel that earth was forsaken of its kind benefactor and all the curses of the pit were let loose

upon us. And yet these, for years on years, have been the entailments of intemperance. Under its prevalence, crime has trod on crime and blood touched blood. At a low calculation, in the last fifty years, as many million years of human probation have, in this land, been cut off; more than 1,500,000 persons have sunk into drunkards' graves; five thousand million dollars have been uselessly expended; ten thousand murders, with conflagrations and shipwrecks unnumbered, have been caused, and procession after procession has gone to the poor-house, the jail, the madhouse, and the orphan's home. In Great Britain it appears, from statistics published by the British Parliament, that while the annual expense for bread was 130,000,000 of dollars, the immediate cost of the liquor consumed was 250,000,000; resulting in an amount of squalid poverty, vice, profligacy, and crime, of which no mind but the mind of God can have adequate conceptions, and sending sixty thousand human beings, in a land of the very brightest gospel light, to the drunkard's grave and the drunkard's eternity. You ask of those who cause this evil, what intemperance is, and you are told it is only a slight irregularity; a little undue excitement of the nervous system, through a pleasant, though, perhaps, a dangerous beverage; a habit of social life which had perhaps better not be formed, but, being formed, must be indulged; and all indicative of good rather than vicious and evil feelings, and to be pitied rather than condemned. No; No. That is not intemperance. That is the language of the father of lies. Intemperance is this broad stream of woe, and wounds, and madness, and deaths, bearing onward to eternal despair the brightest hopes and joys of earth; inflicting its curse, not now and then, after interludes, like war, and famine, and pestilence; but never ceasing; never softening; ever crying, give, give; consuming the world, and laughing at its ruins. No! Intemperance admits not of exaggeration. What worse can you say of a man, than to call him a drunkard? To say nothing of his physical condition, loathsome to a proverb, go over the whole catalogue of vices enumerated in the first chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans, and find one, if you can, that does not belong to him"filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity, haters of God, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful." What curse like this can come into a family? What evil like a drunken father or a drunken mother? What will so bring down a parent's gray hairs with sorrow to the grave as a drunken son? And what will so shut out the light of truth, the light of heaven, and seal up the soul in eternal right, as strong drink? The drunkard curses God, burns his Bible, and damns his own soul. Eternity, eternity alone, reveals his end! And yet, this plague of plagues; this fountain of blasphemy, poverty, and crime; this poison corroding and destroying the life-blood of the nation, has been staunched till we have hope for ourselves and our children. About thirty years ago, a war of extermination commenced against it. It was like David with his sling and stone; but, as we now see the giant in the convulsive agonies of death, we exclaim, What hath God wrought! We raise a song of thanksgiving and praise, saying: "The Lord hath done great things for us! The Lord hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad."

Before I speak of recent occurrences promising to be the crowning ele

ment of our great enterprise, permit me to turn your thoughts back to one or two divine interpositions to which we owe much of what we enjoy.

The first was, the awakening of the country to the existence and enormity of the evil, and leading men, who feared God and loved righteousness, to breast it, be the sacrifice what it might.

It has ever been one of the peculiarities of Intemperance that it sinks men in Lethean slumbers. They who are the guilty cause, and they who are the victims, alike feel that they are innocent in the matter, and that nothing can be done to remedy the evil. If it be an evil, it is an evil of but small extent; and connected with so much necessary to the wellbeing of man, that to attempt its eradication would be like the cutting off a diseased limb which should result in the death of the whole body. Accordingly, in the early part of this century, intemperance sat, as one well expressed it, as a great nightmare upon the breast of the nation. There were horrid sufferings, but every limb was spell-bound. All moral power was broken. Men preferred their sufferings to any disturbance of their delusion. They denied the extent of the evil, and made sport of every attempt at reformation. He who preached on temperance was not merely the song of the drunkard, but of his own church and of every moderate drinker throughout the land. The distillery and the brewery were the fair handmaids of agriculture, and the licensed traffic was the hope of the public treasury. The excise, it was believed, supported the poor, and paid the expenses of the common jail and the lunatic asylum. Neither the farmer could gather his harvest, nor the mechanic endure his toil, nor the physician visit his patient, nor the minister leave his pulpit, nor the traveller prosecute his journey, nor the mariner plough the deep, nor the slightest hospitality be shown, without the intoxicating cup. As well might a man attack, or ridicule, or reason down the whole system of respiration, as the use of intoxicating liquors. But there was a power higher than man. It was the mighty power of God. That awakened the conscience; that broke the delusive charm; that arrayed before a suffering world the horrid demon; that lifted up the veil that blinded the eyes of the nation, and caused them to start back affrighted and lift up their hands to Heaven for deliverance. Never may it be forgotten, how, as the first pioneers of Temperance went forth, clad in the panoply of truth, there was a stirring among all the dry bones of the valley; bone came to his bone; life was infused where there was nothing but death and putrefaction, and the convicted and converted stood upon their feet an exceeding great army. In 1832, more than 4,000 temperance societies had been formed in the United States; more than 1,500,000 persons abstained from the use of ardent spirits; 1,500 distilleries had been stopped; 4,000 merchants had abandoned the traffic, and 4,500 intemperate men had abandoned their cups. It was hailed as one of the most wonderful and glorious triumphs of virtue over vice the world had witnessed; and it was even then felt, that, should the cause prevail throughout the land, "blessings, mighty as her rivers and exhaustless as the soil, would break forth upon the people, and flow down in ever growing richness and variety to all future ages.

At a subsequent period, another special and wonder-working interposition of Divine Providence was seen in the sudden reformation of nearly all the inebriates throughout the nation. That rational, considerate and

religious men should listen to truth and flee from danger at a solemn warning; that those who ascribed all hope of their salvation to the great sacrifice on the cross, should be willing to make sacrifices for others, and resolve that they would "neither eat flesh, nor drink wine, nor any thing which caused a brother to stumble," may seem not so surprising; though apathy and indifference, even in many branches of the Christian Church, awfully prevailed; but that besotted, scathed, peeled, blaspheming, Goddefying, brutalized men, whose God was their belly and who gloried in their shame, should by thousands on thousands, in all parts of the land, awake to a sense of their awful condition, burst the chains that bound them, trample their appetite and all temptation in the dust, and stand forth, reformed from all that which made them so peculiarly odious and vile in the community, was what none could look for in this world of sin and partial retribution. And yet it was to be. And when men beheld it, they exclaimed, "With men it is impossible, but not with God, for with God all things are possible." A miracle it was not; for it occurred in the course of God's providence and as the result of adapted means. For fifteen years an amount of information of which we have little conception, on the evil nature of intoxicating drinks and the doom of the drunkard, had been spread abroad. Thousands and even millions of sober men had abjured the cup. Deep anxiety had settled down on the minds and hearts of broken-hearted wives and parents for drunken husbands and drunken sons; and prayer unceasing was offered that they might in some way be redeemed and saved. The crisis had come. It was to be; and it was to be through the instrumentality of God's truth, that God should have the glory. Four of the six inebriates with whom it commenced went to the house of God to hear one who, in God's name, was to expose the sin of drunkenness and the drunkard's doom. They were pricked in their heart. On their return, the jeers of the bar-room had lost their power. They signed a pledge, and commenced the work of reclaiming every inebriate in the land. Some jeered; others mocked; but many went from their meetings to pray. The conscience of the reclaimed wretch gave God the praise. "It was God," said one, "who saved me: he broke the chains that bound body and soul; he enabled me to stand up in my manliness and be free; my poor heart is full; I am almost blind with the tear in my eye; I brush it away to say, 'Glory to God in the highest.' And if, of the half million of lost men, who, in that great work, of 1840-41, were reclaimed, a no inconsiderable number went back like the dog to his vomit, it derogated nothing from the operation as the wonderful providence of God and the power of sympathy and truth. It only illustrated the debased and unfeeling condition of society which should let them go back; the horrid evil of the traffic, licensed in our midst; and, above all, the folly, then most signally manifest, of relying upon humanity and the strength of man's resolution without help from above or devotedness to the divine service. But it was a wonderful work, for which thousands of families, relieved and redeemed, exclaimed, "The Lord hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad."

Passing by numerous other divine interpositions in this great work of reform-for I believe the hand of God has been in it from its commencement, though many things may have occurred which could not be approved by his omniscient eye, I come to those more recent occurrences