DRUNKENNESS.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume VII, Issue 391, 8 September 1876, Page 3

DRUNKENNESS.

On Bunday eve ring last the Rev. E. Eoyer gave an excellent discourse on the evils of drunkenness in St. Patrick's Church. The rev, gentleman commenced by observing that every man endowed with reason, whether he be 01 be not a christian, must look upon drunkenness and excessive drinking as the most hateful vices which infest the human kind. Drunkenness is either actual or habitual. Just as it is one thing to be drunk, and another to be a drunkard. Drunkenness stultifies and brutalises men, and, as to women, it reduces their condition far below that of the brute. Drunkenness generates diseases innumerable of body and mind ; consuming life like a plague. But these are effects of it which he could scarcely lament, for he thought a drunkard, though unfit to die, was entirely unfit to live, and that, when he will not he reclaimed, his removal from this world was not only a just judgment of the Lord upon himself, but a blessing

to all those whom, byjbis influence or example, he had scandalised. It is not the multiplication of disease, or the waste of human life by drunkenness that he chiefly regretted. ■No ; he did not at all regret that these effects followed after so detestable a vice. 'ihf-.y are the immoral effects of it, which he could not eontenqjlafce without horror. The mischief of drunkenness consisted in the following bad effects :—Hash swearing, profanation of the Lord's Day, blasphemies without number, the poverty, the destitution, the nakedness, the ruin of families, the fraud, the thefts, the robberies, the seduction of innocence, the corruption of virtue, the disobedience of children, the infidelities of servants, tho discord and disunion of those whom the Almighty united. In a word—drunkenness shortens life. Beyond any vice that can be mentioned, drunkenness is apt to draw in others by example. The drinker collects his company or friends ; of those who are drawn within it many become the corrupters and centres of circles of their own, —everyone patronising and emulating the rest, till perhaps a whole town or neighborhood be infected from the contagion of a single example. This account, the rev. gentleman remarked, was confirmed what he had often observed of drunkenness in this Colony. With this observation upon the spreading quality of drunkenness he wished to make a remark. Although the waste of time and of money be of small importance to a drunkard, it may be of the utmost to some one or other whom his society corrupts. Long continued excesses, which hurt not his health, may be fatal to his companion. Although he has neither wife, nor child, nor parent, to lament his absence from home, or expect his return to it with terror, other families, in which husbands and relations have been invited to share in his drunkenness, or encouraged to imitate it, may justly lay their ruin or misery at his door. This will hold good whether the individual be seduced immediately by the drunkard, or the vice of drunkenness be propagated from him to companions through several intermediate examples. The rev. gentleman then enumerated the following diseases, which proceed from drunkenness, showing themselves in the state of the liver, stomach, brains, kidneys, blood and breath, perspiration, eyes, skin, hair; inflammation, gout, tremors, palpitation of the heart, hysteria, epilipsy, sterility, emaciation, corpulency, premature old age, ulcers, melancholy, madness, and delirium tremens. He did not agree with the temperance societies in considering ardent spirits always hurtful in health, or in recommending the instant disuse of liquor in all cases of drunkenness. But he fully admitted that they may often prove eminently useful, and that the cases wherein they may be injurious to those connected with them are not many compared to the good which they are able of effecting. Therefore, the individual who feels the appetite for liquor stealing upon him, cannot adopt a wiser plan than to connect himself with a socifty of temperance, the members of which will keep him in countenance, in sobriety, and, by their example, perhaps wean him away from the bottle, and thus arrest him on the road to ruin.