Your very daily walks must be misery to you, one would suppose. For how can you put on those fine clothes, and see your children clad in warm coats and caps and shoes, and your wife parading that beautiful new silk dress and expensive jewelry, when you know that they were bought with money that ought to have been used to clothe a family that goes about our streets in destitution and nakedness so pitiable that it makes the heart ache? How can you sit down and ask God's blessing upon your plentifully supplied table, if you ever do it now, when the hand that gave you the money to purchase all these luxuries snatched the piece of bread from the mouths of his starving, hungry children? {84} How can you dare go to sleep in your soft, warm bed, listening to that cutting winter's blast as it goes howling past your windows down the street, and forces its way in the open crevices of the drunkard's shanty, freezing the half-clad forms of his neglected little ones, huddled in the corner upon a filthy wisp of straw? Have you a human heart yet left beating in your bosom? Do you know anything of a husband's affection or of a father's love? Oh! then you must be a miserable man. How do your neighbors speak of you? "Oh! he's a rum-seller." And the tone in which it is spoken is a plain index of the contempt they attach to the name. Your wife is designated as "a rum-seller's wife," and of your children it is remarked, "Their father sells liquor." And it is a common reply of many of the most degraded drunkards, that "although they have drunk pretty hard, they thank God __they__ never sold liquor." Can I ask you to quit it? Yes, I can demand of you to quit it. You admit, and the common sense of the entire community admits, that those low groggeries, in which drunken bacchanalian orgies are of daily and nightly occurrence, ought to be stopped, and that no man who keeps such a place is fit for absolution--that is, none such can claim the right to the sacraments of the Church, living or dying; in a word, cannot save his soul if he be not ready to abandon it. {85} But you tell me that your establishment is not of such a character; you keep a decent house. I would like you to bring me one single liquor-seller who does not say the very same. The business is notoriously vicious and hurtful, and success in it is dependent upon an increase of sin and misery among the people. It is a stumbling-block in the way of the salvation of men addicted to drink, and woe be to that man who dares assume the responsibility for the loss of a soul!