While drunk the drunkard is insane, and when not drunk he is an abject slave. His appetite controls him, soul and body; he will sacrifice his property, his reputation, and the comfort of wife and children to gratify it. If, gentle reader, you have witnessed the struggles which some have witnessed of men striving earnestly to break loose from that habit, you would not be so ready to pronounce drunkenness always a sin; you would hardly dare thus to judge the poor victim. God alone can realize what he suffers. I ask the intelligent reader, in the light of reason and common sense and of the Word of God, which is the greater sinner, the man who, after he has witnessed all the wretchedness, sorrows, drunkenness, and deaths which we see around us, deliberately takes his first glass of the fluid which has caused this misery, or continues to drink after he has once commenced, while he has the ability in freedom to restrain his appetite, or the man who, by thus drinking, has lost his freedom and reason, and then drinks to drunkenness? If either is a sinner, can there be any doubt as to which is the greatest sinner? A far greater number, die from steady drinking than from drunkenness; they die from an inability to withstand the ordinary causes of disease, or to resist diseased action when attacked, and vast multitudes die from diseases caused by so-called temperate drinking, short of drunkenness. The statistics of insurance companies show that the average duration of adult human lives is shortened from seventeen to twenty-four per cent. Is it no sin to enter upon or to continue such a life? Is such deliberate self-murder no sin? And again, no man living who commences and continues drinking can have any assurance that he will not become a drunkard. I well remember when a young man, perhaps eighteen years old, standing on my native New England hills, working upon the highway with a young man three or four years older than myself. I said to him that I thought it was well to make up our minds never to drink intoxicating drinks during health, and to join a temperance society; he differed from me, and he said that when he was tired, or went out in the cold and wet and got chilled, he thought that a little "cider brandy" did him good. "But," he exclaimed with great energy, "the man who cannot restrain his appetite is a fool! If you ever hear of my getting drunk, tell me, and I will quit drinking." I intimated to him that it then might be too late. Alas! alas for that young man! he became a drunkard; he spent the farm left by his father; his wife died; his children were scattered among friends; and years after, when I returned to my native town, I was told that he was a pauper at the poorhouse.