Let it not be supposed that amidst such active benevolence he neglected his own business. No; Jamie had not learned in vain the apostle's maxim, "Let him labor, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth." It was nothing for him to start off half a dozen miles of an evening after his work was finished, to procure some new tracts, or attend a temperance-meeting, or read and talk kindly to some poor drunkard, whose wife had sent him a hint that her husband would be glad to see him; or else to procure the services of some clergyman to address the next meeting of his Temperance Society. Jamie is one of those who imagine that the business of a minister of the Gospel is not finished when he has preached a couple of discourses on the Sabbath; he really presumes to say, that both minister and layman should be "instant in season and out of season," and like their great Master, going about continually doing good. He does not set up for a preacher, nevertheless, but confines himself to his own proper sphere. He applied to ministers to address his meetings, and though some few of them refused, telling him significantly that they preach the Gospel, even when Jamie did ask in his simplicity, if Paul forgot his resolution to know nothing but Christ and him crucified, when he reasoned of righteousness, _temperance_, and judgment to come; yet to the honor of the ministry around him be it told, that whenever he got up a meeting, a minister was at Jamie's service to address it. Though, as a body, Jamie's Temperance Society was most steady, yet a few, and only a few, fell. It would be harsh to say that some were glad at their fall; at least many temptations were thrown in their way; and when they fell, a shout of triumph was raised against the Temperance Society. Such trials as these only urged Jamie on with fresh vigor. Suppose, he used to say, that every drunkard should return again to drunkenness and ruin; would not this be another proof that truth, and honor, and principle, are all as nothing before the drunken appetite? Would not this be a louder and a stronger call to save the young, to stop young sons and daughters, now safe, from filling the place of drunken parents when they are gone? What ruins these poor wretches? he would ask. Is it the mere _abuse_ of a good and wholesome thing? No. Distilled spirits are tempting, deceitful, and too violently intoxicating to be at all habitually used with safety; and as four hundred of the ablest doctors now living have established, and unnumbered facts prove, they are unwholesome and injurious to body and soul. Let every man, then, for his own sake abstain; and for the sake of others too, especially such as are near and dear to him, O let him abstain for ever.