sons; a brute is a creature that follows his appetites, but never to excess; a tree is an ornament of the earth and useful to man; but the drunkard, what is he? The drunkard is only a drunkard, with nothing like him in all God's creation. He is not preparing himself for the angels' heaven; instead of reasoning like a man he has buried his rational soul in his flesh, and his very flesh he has sunk lower than the brutes, so as to become a useless, unsightly, dangerous monster. Hence it is that some one has very well said that mankind may be divided into three classes: men, women, and beasts. This accounts, too, for the strange pictures of the wine-god, Bacchus, which the genius of ancient Greece and Rome has handed down to us. They represent him as an unhealthy-looking, bloated youth, bearing aloft the winegoblet, seated on a car drawn by wild beasts, while round about him frantic men and lewd women and monstrous satyrs wrestle and sing and caper in shameful abandon. Oh, those ancient poets well knew that sobriety is wisdom, and the companions of drunkenness, vice, and every kind of folly. This same idea which they tried to picture a later poet attempted to express when he exclaimed: "Oh, thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no other name by which thou mayest be known let us call thee Devil."
Brethren, you will tell me that all this, instead of being a sound argument for total abstinence, is mere high-sounding exaggeration. Is not, you ask, the moderate drinker who never goes to excess a
