therefore, that we do not go against the Scriptures either in abstaining from wine as a beverage ourselves or in endeavoring to lead others to do so. The second thing we have to say is implied in a story we remember to have heard. It is that during the final battle before Vicksburg, when some injudicious person rushed into the presence of General Grant and in the most excited manner called his attention to an incidental matter, the general merely said, with his characteristic calmness: "I am fighting this battle."

Of

We now turn for a moment to the method proposed by Dr. Crosby. It is one of blended prohibition and licenseprohibition of distilled liquors, and license for fermented ones. In adopting this he gives up his argument about manliness, and concedes the principle of prohibition. the right of this there can be no doubt so far as it may be necessary for the protection of rights, and we wish to apply it only so far as may be necessary for that. If we could avoid doing so, and still have our rights, we would in no way interfere legally with what any person should eat or drink. If in manufacturing chemicals a man causes an offensive and poisonous smoke to invade the houses of his neighbors, the law compels him to raise his chimney till the smoke shall pass away, and then, if any one, or even numbers, should be fond of the smoke, and be obliged to climb to the top of the chimney to get a whiff of it, they could not complain that it was the object of the law to make them do so, or to interfere in any way with what they should smell. Let the traffic be so regulated that it shall be responsible for its own results and we are content.

The difficulty of framing laws by which this would be reached we appreciate. We do not wish those that cannot be executed. Prohibition may be wise in one place, or in one degree, and not in another place and to another degree. If laws theoretically the best would not be executed to a reasonable extent, we must get the best we can that will be thus executed. If, which we do not at all believe, the mixed system proposed by Dr. Crosby would approxi

Mean

mate that result most nearly we would accept that. time, we must not fail to recognize the total-abstinence scheme as having aims and methods different from those of legislation, wholly above and beyond them, and if it be really the best, as we think it is, for the peace of families and for the purity and permanence of our institutions, we must not be deterred by opposition or discouraged by obstacles from doing what we can to promote it.

We have now followed the lecture step by step, and what have we? We have, in connection with a claim to a calm view of the temperance question, strong denunciation and a proclamation of war to be carried into Africa. "Carthago delenda est." We have the general statement that the main supports of the total-abstinence scheme are falsehoods and intimidations. The friends of the scheme are allowed to be well-meaning people, some of them even "noble souls," but too fanatical and headlong to be aware of the means they are using. We have the failure of the system attributed, not to anything wrong in itself, but to wrong methods. We have then the statement that this same system is the cause of the growth of drunkenness in our land and of general demoralization. We have mere opinion on certain points branded as moral error, and we have the condemnation of all pledges. All this we have, but we have no recogniza tion of the overwhelming testimony of physicians that the alcoholic element is not needed for our best health, or of the tremendous statistics of intemperance, or of the force of example, or of the great principle, as expounded by the apostle Paul and illustrated by our Saviour himself, of selfsacrifice for the good of others.

This lecture of Dr. Crosby has attracted wide attention. From its subject, the place of its delivery, and the person delivering it, it could not be otherwise. If it had been given by an ordinary man we should not have felt called upon to notice it. But Dr. Crosby is not an ordinary man. From his position as chancellor of the University of New York, from bis eminent scholarship, his high character, his evident sincerity, and the noble efforts he has made and is now

making for the suppression of crime and for moral reform, his words fall with a weight which only makes it the more imperative, if they be, as we think, erroneous and misleading, that we should do what we can that their influence may be counteracted.

Delivered in Tremont Temple, Boston, January 24, 1881, before the Association of the Ministers of the

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Methodist Episcopal Church.

AM to offer you some remarks on a lecture delivered here a fortnight ago by Chancellor Crosby. He denounced the temperance movement as now conducted. The address was not very remarkable for novelty, or weight of argument, or the correctness of its statements. Indeed, it was rather noticeable for the lack of these qualities. And it was so well handled and so fully answered in several of our pulpits that I thought it needed no further notice. But you thought otherwise, and perhaps it does deserve it, considering the source from which it comes. And when the health of the chancellor becomes the standing toast in the grog-shops of our city, and when the journal which publishes these Monday lectures is obliged to print a second and third edition, day after day, to supply that class of customers, it is evident that temperance men have a text on which an effectual temperance sermon can be preached—one that will probably arrest the attention of just those we seek to reach.

Dr. Crosby laments the divisions among temperance men, and lays it down as a principle that we "cannot conscientiously object to the means employed by others, unless they

contain an immorality." I beg leave to dissent from this. We have had sixty years' experience in temperance methods, and certainly may claim to have learned something. Now, when these new converts, these nursling babies of grace, mislead by their crude suggestions the temperance public, obstruct its efforts and waste its means, are we bound to sit silent and make no protest against such waste and recklessness? The treasury of reform is not rich enough to bear such extravagance on the pretence of harmony; much less are we bound to silence when a neighbor's mistake seriously harms and hinders the movement. If Boston lived, as it did in 1806, with no steam fire-engine (only leather buckets hanging in each man's front entry), cheerfully would I stand with Dr. Crosby and a hundred more to pass buckets of water up to the firemen on a burning building. But in 1881 I should not obstruct the engine, and crowd it out of its place, merely that I and Dr. Crosby might have a chance harmoniously to unite in passing empty buckets toward the flames. Life is too short for such false courtesies; too short for us to postpone working on our line until we have educated every new convert up to our level. This might do very well before the Flood, as Sydney Smith suggests, when Methuselah could consult his friends for a hundred and fifty years in relation to an intended enterprise, and even then live to see the working of his plan, and its success or failure, for six or seven centuries afterward.

But life now is limited to an average of seventy years, and practical men must put their hands to the plough in the best way they know, and, if children stand in their way, move them gently but firmly out of the path.

I think before Dr. Crosby spoke he should have studied the history of the temperance movement. If he were as familiar with the literature of our enterprise as he is with that of Greece, he never would have repeated criticisms and suggestions that have been answered over and over again during the last fifty years. As I turn over his essay, and find how tediously familiar we all are with his objections, I am reminded of Johnson's objection to Goldsmith's plan of travelling over Asia in order to bring home valuable im