For a human being, transformed by drunken debauch into a fiend, we must look for a truer analogue than can be found among the beasts of prey. He is, as the law rates him, "voluntarius demon"-by his own act a devil. The deed of violence past, he may scarce remember it; and in one sense he may be said to have ceased to be responsible. But he cannot escape the guilt of having induced, wilfully and wantonly, this brutal change; and, as has been well said by Dr. Wilson, in this view drunkenness may be itself regarded as a capital crime. 1. On the individual, the effect of vicious alcoholic indulgence is disease of the body, as we have seen. Sooner or later, it must come. Intemperance cannot dwell in a sound frame; at least, it never does. Disease of mind, too, is not far off. It may be delirium or insanity, temporary or confirmed; or it may stop short of that, resting at senile driveling, and childish folly. The moral sense is blunted, and the better part of man sustains both degradation and decay. The soul is dying; and, if grace restrain not, will soon be dead-for ever. in * One day, at a railway station, when passengers were congregating groups, before the starting of a train, my attention was attracted to a tall, middle-aged man, who was slowly making his way to lean against a pillar. His dress, evidently once black and respetable, was soiled, and torn, and covered with mud. His limbs were bent and tottering; his hands hung loosely by his side, and shook like aspens. His face was haggard and pale; or rather would have looked so, but for the dirt it bore; unwashed, unshaven; a brown rivulet of snuff massing the upper lip, and trickling down the chin; the eyes fixed, and of a glassy stare, with the eyelids half closed; the jaw dropped, the mouth open, and slavering like an idot's. His hat-muddy, and crushed, and awry— was fixed, hard and low, upon his crouching head and shoulders. His shoes were brown and broken. He might be sixty; he might be forty; all too plainly he was a drunkard, seeking a country home, after wallowing for at least one night in the city's mire. Something told me that he was no stranger; many years must have passed since I had seen him; when a few minutes memory carried me through all his antecedents. I remembered him a university student, of almost the same age and standing with myself; the gayest of the gay, in heart and disposition; gentle, loving, kind; studious, too, and talented. I remembered him licensed to preach the gospel; popular, respected, devoted. I remembered him settled down in a country charge; married, the father of a hopeful family, the centre of a loving circle, the pastor of an attached flock. Then came the dark cloud. He had always been of social habits, and he had indulged them; through indulgence the power of drink had crept upon him unawares; and now, with a bound, it took him by the throat, and held him down. I remembered to have heard strange rumors about that manse; there had been surmises, even among his distant friends, * Ultimately, the man becomes a moral idiot. The moral principle is not only lessened, but absolutely extinct- eaten out, as color is by acid. But two days since, in visiting a young man, well born and of high connections, become a drunkard, with one breath he assured me of his being a man of honor and a gentleman, and with the next told me a deliberate falsehood. To such, indeed, lying, cheating, stealing, come quite naturally; they have no perception of either the sin or the shame. of a sad fall there; and news had come one day, like a thu drunkenness, and delirium, and deposition. That was long si sad story had faded greatly from my recollection. But he a fearful proof and concentration of it all. His body that lyzed idiot, at least for the time; his mind sunk to nothingn -and the souls of his people-what of them? Alas, alas, th helpless hands of his are stained with the blood of souls co his care-himself a hopeless castaway. Yes, the power of alcohol, in vice, is terrible. Its burst that of a shell; annihilating the object struck, and in many dealing death and destruction far and near. 2. On the family. What does it here? Dirt, disorder, d its first fruits. Go through that hamlet, and you may tell off en from the sober by attending merely to their outward esta whitewashed window; the ivy, honeysuckle, or woodbine cli its side; the well trained rose, or humble daisy, in the garden door well swept, and the floor all clean; the table shining, an burning bright; the well filled pot boiling apace, or simmering the bed made smooth, and the tidy coverlet without a wrinkle; t wife herself trig, and neat, singing and smiling, and busy her broom or brush-these are no marks of drunkenness. their counterparts, and you will find it there. And with it much other bitter fruit; crimination and recrin scolding, swearing, woe, and weeping; red eyes and black eyes heads, and broken characters; cold, and no fire; hunger, and children, but no comforts -lying, straying, stealing; sickness sympathy; debt, and no credit; disease, death, the grave-and beyond. Poor drunkard! "Your friends avoid you; brutishly transform'd, And what brought this dismal brood of evils into the family bottle. It came, called, "looked in," as a friend. Fathers and m husbands and wives! what think you of a neighbor that, und pretense of friendship, worms himself into your home, and setti by the ears breaks your peace for ever; stealing this, and breakin leaves your floor and walls bare, your hearth empty; blackening character, and burning your self-respect, beggars you; luring y to perpetration of grossest sin, laughs as he see you sell you for nothing; and not done with you yet, sticks to your offspring haunts them through the world as drunkard's brats! His "power" is terrible; resist it with all your might,-andthe secret of success-from the beginning. 3. On the community at large. Taxes and public burdens of all accumulate; penitentiaries and prisons grow full; judges and jailor and in their own person her sons and daughters are parting with both the bulk and the bravery of former times. There is a hale and hearty centre yet, thank God; but it is being sorely pressed and put to. Sober industry must redouble its labor, that drunken sloth may live and fester. And worse remains behind. Nations have no hereafter, and their sin meets its guerdon now. A nation of drunkards may well tremble, knowing that the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth.' VANITY-A VICE DESTRUCTIVE TO SOCIETY.* THAT the love, fear and habitual contemplation of a Being infinitely exalted, or in other words, devotion, is adapted to promote a sober and moderate estimate of our own excellences, is incontestible; nor is it less evident that the exclusion of such sentiments must be favorable to pride. The criminality of pride will, perhaps, be less readily admitted; for though there is no vice so opposite to the spirit of Christianity, yet there is none which, even in the Christian world, has, under various pretenses, been treated with so much indulgence. There is, it will be confessed, a delicate sensibility to character, a sober desire of reputation, a wish to possess the esteem of the wise and good felt by the purest minds, which is at the farthest remove from arrogance or vanity. The humility of a noble mind scarcely dares to approve of itself until it has secured the approbation of others. Very different is that restless desire of distinction, that passion for theatrical display, which inflames the heart and occupies the whole attention of vain men. This, of all the passions, is the most unsocial, avarice itself not excepted. The reason is plain. Property is a kind of good which may be more easily attained, and is capable of more minute subdivisions, than fame. In pursuit of wealth men are led by an attention to their own interest to promote the welfare of each other; their advantages are reciprocal; the benefits which each is anxious to acquire for himself he reaps in the greatest abundance from the union and conjunction of society. The pursuits of vanity are quite contrary. The portion of time and attention mankind are willing to spare from their avocations and pleasures to devote to the admiration of each other is so small, that every successful adventurer is felt to have impaired the common stock. The success of one is the disappointment of multitudes. For though there be many rich, many virtuous, many wise men, fame must necessarily be the portion of but few. Hence every vain man, every man in whom vanity is the ruling passion, regarding his rival as his enemy, is strongly tempted to rejoice in his miscarriage, and repine at his success. Besides, as the passions are seldom seen in a simple, unmixed state, so vanity when it succeeds degenerates into arrogance; when it is disappointed (and it is often disappointed), it is exasperated into malignity, and corrupted into envy. In this stage the vain man commences a determined misanthropist. He detests that excellence which he cannot reach. He detests his species, and longs to be revenged for the unpardonable in * From "Modern Infidelity," by R. Hall. justice he has sustained in their insensibility to his merits. He lives upon the calamities of the world; the vices and miseries of men are his element and his food. Virtues, talents and genius are his natural enemies, which he persecutes with instinctive eagerness and unrelenting hostility. There are who doubt the existence of such a disposition; but it certainly issues out of the dregs of disappointed vanity: a disease which taints and vitiates the whole character wherever it prevails. It forms the heart to such a profound indifference to the welfare of others, that, whatever appearances he may assume, or however wide the circle of his seeming virtues may extend, you will infallibly find the vain man is his own centre. Attentive only to himself, absorbed in contemplation of his own perfections, instead of feeling tenderness for his fellow-creatures as members of the same family, as beings with whom he is appointed to act, to suffer and to sympathize,-he considers life as a stage on which he is performing a part, and mankind in no other light than spectators. Whether he smiles or frowns, whether his path is adorned with the rays of beneficence, or his steps are dyed in blood, an attention to self is the spring of every movement, and the motive to which every action is referred. His apparent good qualities lose all their worth by losing all that is simple, genuine and natural: they are even pressed into the service of vanity, and become the means of enlarging its power. The truly good man is jealous over himself, lest the notoriety of his best actions, by blending itself with their motive, should diminish their value; the vain man performs the same actions for the sake of that notoriety. The good man quietly discharges his duty, and shuns ostentation; the vain man considers every good deed lost that is not publicly displayed. The one is intent upon realities, the other upon semblances: the one aims to be virtuous, the other to appear so. Nor is a mind inflated with vanity more disqualified for right action than just speculation, or better disposed to the pursuit of truth than the practice of virtue. To such a mind the simplicity of truth is disgusting. Careless of the improvement of mankind, and intent only upon astonishing with the appearance of novelty, the glare of paradox will be preferred to the light of truth; opinions will be embraced, not because they are just, but because they are new: the more flagitious, the more subversive of morals, the more alarming to the wise and good, the more welcome to men who estimate their literary powers by the mischief they produce, and who consider the anxiety and terror they impress as the measure of their renown. Truth is simple and uniform, while error may be infinitely varied: and as it is one thing to start paradoxes and another to make discoveries, we need the less wonder at the prodigious increase of modern philosophers. We have been so much accustomed to consider extravagant self-estimation merely as a ridiculous quality, that many will be surprised to find it treated as a vice pregnant with serious mischief to society.. But, to form a judgment of its influences on the manners and happiness of a nation, it is necessary only to look at its effects in a family; for bodies of men are only collections of individuals, and the greatest nation is nothing more than an aggregate of a number of families. Conceive of a domestic circle, in which each member is elated with a most extravagant opinion of himself, and a proportional contempt of every other; is full of little contrivances to catch applause, and whenever he is not praised is sullen and disppointed. What a picture of disnnion disgust and animosity would such a family present! How utterly would domestic affection be extinguished, and all the purposes of domestic society be defeated! The general prevalence of such dispositions must be accompanied by an equal proportion of general misery. The tendency of pride to produce strife and hatred issufficiently apparent from the pains men have been at to construct a system of politeness, which is nathing more than a sort of mimic humility, in which the sentiments of an offensive self-estimation are so far disguised and suppressed as to make them compatable with the spirit of society; such a mode of behavior as would naturally result from an attention to the apostolic iujunction: Let nothing be done through strife or vain glory; but, in lowliness of mind, let each esteem other better than themselves. But if the semblance be of such importance, how much more useful the reality! If the mere garb of humility be of such indispensable necessity that without it society could not subsist, how much better still would the harmony of the world be preserved, were the condescension, deference and respect so studiously displayed a true picture of the heart! AN EXTRAORDINARY CURIOSITY. THE Montreal Gazette says: A wonderful old document is at present in Canada, being nothing less than the skin or parchment signed two hundred and thirty years ago by the Scottish people, and known as the National Covenant of Scotland." The substance of the deed is written in a firm, beautiful hand, almost unique in its kind; the signatures of the noblemen (including the famous Montrose) and many of the others are very distinct, as also are those written in the blood of their subscribers, while the whole parchment is in a good state of preservation. This celebrated old document is, without doubt, a relic of the troublous times which gave it existence. No era of Scotland's history claims more interest or presents greater charms than the memorable year 1638, when on the 1st day of March, its vigorous and high-minded people, oppressed by restrictions on their religous liberty, and roused to resistance by the attempts of the King and his ambitious prelate to violate their consciences by forcing upon them a liturgy utterly opposed to their Presbyterian notion of simple worship, rose up en masse, and with unanimity of views and feelings unparalleled, subscribed the National Covenant of Scotland. The Covenant survived the crisis that called it forth. For the following fifty years, the principles which produced a generation of heroes, found their noblest exponents in the lives and sufferings of their sons. Purified in martyr blood, they triumphed in the cause of freedom, and left a legacy to succeeding generations, which to us was never more sensibly enjoyed than in the present age. For the past seventy years the document has been in the possession of a family of the name of Henderson, into whose grandfather's hands it came when he was the senior Cameronian pastor in Scotland. The existence of the document is well known in the United Kingdom, where in most of the principal towns and places it has been shown. |