Intemperance is to be pitied and abhorred for its own sake, much more than for its outward consequences. These owe their chief bitterness to their criminal source. We speak of the miseries which the drunkard carries to his family. But take away his own brutality, and how lightened would be these miseries! We talk of his wife and children in rags. Let the rags continue; but suppose them to be the effects of an innocent cause. Suppose his wife and children bound to him by a strong love, which a life of labor for their support, and of unlearned kindness has awakened; suppose them to know that his toils for their welfare had broken down his frame; suppose him able to say, "We are poor in this world's goods, but rich in affection and religious trust. I am going from you; but I leave you to the Father of the fatherless, and to the widow's God." Suppose this; and how changed these rags!--how changed the cold, naked room! The heart's warmth can do much to withstand the winter's cold;--and there is hope, there is honor, in this virtuous indigence. What breaks the heart of the drunkard's wife? It is not that he is poor, but that he is a drunkard. Instead of that bloated face, now distorted with passion, now robbed of every gleam of intelligence, if the wife could look on an affectionate countenance, which had, for years, been the interpreter of a well-principled mind and faithful heart, what an overwhelming load would be lifted from her! It is a husband, whose touch is polluting, whose infirmities are the witness of his guilt, who has blighted all her hopes, who has proved false to the vow which made her his; it is such a husband who makes home a hell,--not one whom toil and disease and Providence have cast on the care of wife and children. We look too much at the consequences of vice,--too little at the vice itself. It is vice which is the chief weight of what we call its consequences,--vice, which is the bitterness in the cup of human woe. W. E. Channing. XIII. INCONSISTENT EXPECTATIONS. This world may be considered as a great mart of commerce, where fortune exposes to our view various commodities,--riches, ease, tranquillity, fame, integrity, knowledge. Everything is marked at a settled price,--our time, our labor, our ingenuity, is so much ready money, which we are to lay out to the best advantage. Examine, compare, choose, reject; but stand to your own judgment, and do not, like children, when you have purchased one thing, repine that you do not possess another which you did not purchase.