So much for explanation: now for the announced contrast. Whoever the people were, whom he had to address himself to,--they had contracted, he found, a bad habit: it was that of _eating and drinking_. Reason is but too apt to be seduced by, and enlisted in the service of her most dangerous enemy--_Appetite_. Not only did they eat and drink; but they had found, as it seemed to them, _reason_ for so doing. They ate and drank--why? because they were to die after it. "Let us eat and drink," said the language we have seen him reproaching them with, 1 Cor. xv. 32. "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." The case is--that, in pleasure, in whatever shape they see her,--all men, to whose ambition supernatural terrors supply an instrument of dominion, behold their most formidable rival. Against such a rival, wonderful indeed it would be, if their hostility were not proportionable. No morality accordingly do they acknowledge, that does not include, with or without other things, hatred,--with or without contempt, of pleasure. Such, too, as is their morality, such is their law. Death is scarce severe enough, for a pleasure, which they either have, or would be thought to have, no relish for. So at least says what they teach: but, teaching how to act is one thing; acting accordingly, another. Thus we all see it is, in so many instances: and thus, without much danger of injustice, we may venture to suppose it may have been, in that of the self-constituted Apostle. Not so Jesus: no harm did he see in eating and drinking, unless with the pleasure it produced greater pain. With this reserve, no harm,--for anything that appears in any one of the four histories we have of him,--no harm did he see in anything that gives pleasure. What every man knows--and what Jesus knew as well as any man--for neither in words nor in acts did he deny it--is,--that happiness, at what time soever experienced,--happiness, to be anything, must be composed of pleasures: and, be the man who he may, of what it is that gives pleasure to him, he alone can be judge.