The principle upon which such reasoning rests is one against which the Doctor expressed a strong opinion, whenever he heard it introduced. Nothing, he thought, could be more unreasonable than that the use of what is no ways hurtful or unlawful in itself, should be prohibited because it was liable to abuse. If that principle be once admitted, where is it to stop? There was a Persian tyrant, who having committed some horrible atrocity in one of his fits of drunkenness, ordered all the wine in his dominions to be spilt as soon as he became sober, and was conscious of what he had done; and in this he acted rightly, under a sense of duty as well as remorse, for it was enjoining obedience to a law of his religion, and enforcing it in a manner the most effectual. But a Christian government which because drunkenness is a common sin shall prohibit all spirituous liquors, would by so doing subject the far greater and better part of the community to an unjust and hurtful privation, thus punishing the sober, the inoffensive and the industrious, for the sake of the idle, the worthless and the profligate. Jones of Nayland regarded these things with no puritanical feeling. “In joy, and thanksgiving,” says that good and true minister of the Church of England, “the tongue is not content with speaking, it must evoke and utter a song, while the feet are also disposed to dance to the measures of music, as was the custom in sacred celebrities of old among the people of God, before the World and its vanities had engrossed to themselves all the expressions of mirth and festivity. They have now left nothing of that kind to religion; which must sit by in gloomy solemnity, and see the World with the Flesh and the Devil assume to themselves the sole power of distributing social happiness.”