How many thousand families have been ruined in some such way as this. The father was a drunkard, and the mother--what could she do? She endured, hoping against hope--and for the children's sake bore up against the current; and many a time disguised a sad despairing heart under a joyful countenance, till at length she died of a broken heart, or died by the hands of him who had sworn to protect her. These, and things like these, are the effects of intoxicating liquor--not casual, accidental, but common, natural edicts, seen everywhere, in every town, in every neighborhood, and in every connection. Look which way we will, we see some of these effects. The greatest wretchedness which human nature in this world is called to endure, is connected with the use of inebriating drink. There is nothing else that degrades and debases man like it--nothing so mean that a drunkard will not stoop to it--nothing too base for him to do to obtain his favorite drink. Nothing else so sinks the whole man--so completely destroys not only all moral principle, but all self-respect, all regard to character, all shame, all human feeling. The drunkard can break out from every kind of endearing connection, and break over every kind of restraint; so completely extinct is human feeling, that he can be drunk at the funeral of his dearest relative, and call for drink in the last accents of expiring nature. Now look at a human being, whom God has made for noble purposes, and endowed with noble faculties, degraded, disgraced, polluted, unfit for heaven, and a nuisance on earth. He is the centre of a circle--count up his influence in his family and his neighborhood--the wretchedness he endures, and the wretchedness he causes--count up the tears of a wretched wife who curses the day of her espousals, and of wretched children who curse the day of their birth. To all this positive evil which intoxicating liquor has caused, add the happiness which but for it this family might have enjoyed and communicated. Go through a neighborhood or a town in this way, count up all the misery which follows in the train of intoxicating liquor, and you will be ready to ask, Can the regions of eternal death send forth any thing more deadly? Wherever it goes, the same cry may be heard--lamentation, and mourning, and woe; and whatever things are pure, or lovely, or venerable, or of good report, fall before it. These are its effects. Can any man deny that "the ox is wont to push with his horn?"