INEBRIATE WOMEN AND GIRLS.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2102, 23 September 1890, Page 4

INEBRIATE WOMEN AND GIRLS.

Th&t women by nature timid, gentle, and trusting, should come in course of years to drink strong drink, and to love it, to make themselves brutish, foul, unclean and drink-mad —this is one of the most pitiable accompaniments of our modern life and history. That women, we say, should do this is inexpressibly saddening and tragic; but that girls, sometimes mere children, who ought to be pure, and hardly even to know of the existence of drink and drunkenness —that these should find their way into the horrible pit and miry clay of baseness, animalism, and drink-madness —this is a thing that no words can express the pity of. Side by side with these terrible growths of modern city life there are developing agencies full of heroic Christian virtue. Christianity, unlike ancient and even modern philosophy, believes with a sublime confidence that it has got down to the bed-rock of eternal verity in morals. Vice, it says, is bad; illicit passion is bad ; self-indulgence is bad; everything that is opposed to pureness of heart and life, to truthfulness, to due regard for the claims of others —all these are bad. They are not merely inartistic, or unamiable, but they are positively, certainly, scientifically and everlastingly vicious and bad. On the other hand, absolute purity and virtue are right, obligatory, imperative; they are not merely pleasant, beautiful and desirable. Armed with these weapons of scientific precision, of the keenest temper, and of the most enduring quality, Christian men and women first subdue their own spiritual enemies, and then go down into the arena of moral strife to fight with all possible ardor and persistence. Mrs Temple, wife of the Bishop of London, has set herself to do what Bhe can to lift up those of her own sex who have fallen down by the way, worse than dead. "Woman of ample leisure and of liberal means abound on all hands. It cannot but be that many such women, having human hearts, find a life of passion and self-indulgence infinitely wearisome and stale. What a new life is possible for them if they could but be brought to enter upon it. Mrs Temple will surely find many sisters eager to help in her newly-found work. If it should be otherwise, then it will show that English women are made of the stuff that a certain historical Pharisee was made of; and it may prove to be more tolerable in the day of judgment for inebriate women and girls than for them.—The Hospital.