_Stock._ Now, Will, do you really find you unwillingness to drink is so great that you stand in need of all these incentives to provoke you to it? Do you not find temptation strong enough without exciting your inclinations, and whetting your appetites in this manner? Can any thing be more unchristian than to persuade youth by pleasant words, set to the most alluring music, that the pleasures of drinking are so great, that every day in the week, naming them all successively, by way of fixing and enlarging the idea, is equally fit, equally proper, and equally delightful, for what?--for the low and sensual purpose of getting drunk. Tell me, Will, are you so _very_ averse to pleasure? Are you naturally so cold and dead to all passion and temptation, that you really find it necessary to inflame your imagination, and disorder your senses, in order to excite a quicker relish for the pleasure of sin? _Will._ All this is true enough, indeed; but I never saw it in this light before. _Stock._ As I passed by the Grayhound last night, in my way to my evening's walk in the fields, I caught this one verse of a song which the club were singing: "Bring the flask, the music bring, Joy shall quickly find us; Drink, and dance, and laugh, and sing, And cast dull care behind us." When I got into the fields, I could not forbear comparing this song with the second lesson last Sunday evening at church; these were the words: _Take heed lest at any time your heart be overcharged with drunkenness, and so that day come upon you unawares, for as a snare shall it come upon all them that are on the face of the earth._ _Will._ Why, to be sure, if the second lesson was right, the song must be wrong. _Stock._ I ran over in my mind also a comparison between such songs as that which begins with "Drink, and drive care away," with those injunctions of holy writ, _Watch and pray, therefore, that you enter not into temptation_; and again, _Watch and pray that you may escape all these things_. I say I compared this with the song I allude to, "Drink and drive care away, Drink and be merry; You'll ne'er go the faster To the Stygian ferry." I compared this with that awful admonition of Scripture how to pass the time. _Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof._ _Will._ I am afraid then, master, you would not much approve of what I used to think a very pretty song, which begins with, "A plague on those musty old lubbers Who teach us to fast and to think." _Stock._ Will, what would you think of any one who should sit down and write a book or a song to abuse the clergy? _Will._ Why I should think he was a very wicked fellow, and I hope no one would look into such a book, or sing such a song.