Numbers vi, 3.—"He shall separate himself from wine and strong drink."
A heathen king, who had been for years confirmed in the sin of drunkenness by the evil practices of white men on the Sandwich Islands, had been led to forsake the dreadful habit. He said lately to a missionary, "suppose you put four thousand dollars in one hand, and a glass of rum in the other; you say, you drink this rum, I give you four thousand dollars, I no drink it; you say you kill me, I no drink it."
489
THE RIGHT ANSWER.
In an address to a temperance society, Admiral Capps told a story which is printed in the New York Tribune.—A man who had ruined his health with alcohol sat looking sadly at his wife, to whom he had made many promises of reform.
"Jenny," he said, "you are a clever woman, a courageous, good woman. You should have married a better man than I am."
She looked at him, thin-limbed and stoop-shouldered, prematurely old, and answered, quietly, "I did, James."
490
Genesis ix, 21—"Noah drank of the wine, and was drunken."
A person in Maryland, who was addicted to drunkenness, hearing a considerable uproar in his kitchen one night, felt the curiosity to step without noise to the door, to know what was the matter; when he found his servants indulging in the most unbounded roars of laughter at a couple of negro boys, who were mimicking himself in his drunken fits!—as how he reeled and staggered—how he looked and nodded—and hiccupped and tumbled. The pictures which these children of nature drew of him, and which had filled the rest with such inexhaustible merriment, struck him with so salutary a disgust, that from that night he became a perfectly sober man, to the great joy of his wife and children.
