This course would also stop the triumphs of Infidelity. This monster subsists on the faults of professors, and his triumphal car is stained with the blood of christian wars. Preach to him the excellences of your faith till the day of doom, and by one single reference, he can silence the most eloquent tongue. He unfolds the long catalogue of sainted crimes, and the christian must be dumb. The christian conduct cannot be vindicated on the christian's principles, and the enemy can be put to silence only by the abstract excellence of the faith which he despises. Between christianity and christians there must be a distinctive line drawn, or they will obscure its brightness and beauty by the association. When they come up in their doings to the high, pure, and stainless criterion of their professed principles, then, and not till then, will Infidelity be put to the blush.
It is high time to commence a reform in the conduct of professors; and no where is this reform more needed than in the principle of the text. I will not stop to argue this point, for no one dares deny it. Look abroad, christians, and see the characters specified in the verse read at the commencement of this discourse, roving up and down the earth. How are they treated? How do you treat them? Who wipes their tears? who gives them a shelter from the rude storms of winter? who gives them a kind look or a civil word? who leads them into the vineyard in the morning and gives them a penny at night? Rather who does not shun them?—insult them?—spurn them from his door?—force them to die in innocence or live by crime? Who dares confront these charges? You that kneel at the altar of Jesus, and commemorate his dying love, are you innocent? Ministers of the everlasting gospel, are your garments clean? Missionary, Tract, Bible and Prison Discipline Societies, how stands your accounts? Christians of every rank and denomination, when have you fed, clothed, ministered to, and visited your hungry, naked, sick, and imprisoned Jesus in the person of his followers? In the name of Jesus Christ, then, and for the honor of his cause, I pray you, in behalf of repentant criminals, to REFORM.
In concluding this Essay, which has cost me many a painful hour, I cannot help remarking the vast difference that exists between the conduct of God and of his creatures, in relation to repentant sinners. He not only pardons, he also forgets; but men do neither. My experience on this subject leads me to results very different from those which the sanguine professions of christians led me to anticipate. Such is the gloomy fact, and I must endure it. From man, even the man of the altar and the desk, I have nothing to hope for. Within the limits of the wide world, and beneath the heavens, my prospects are as dark as the "noon of night;" despair has hung her dreadful curtains round all things, and in its chilling, stiffening shade, the frost of endless blight is fast gathering upon me. I meet at every turn the scorn of every eye, and I have only to bury myself in some distant clime, till my race on earth shall close. "O for a lodge in some vast wilderness!"
But though all earth is dark, and mankind will be my enemies for ever, there is a God who will never desert any that trust in him; and conscious that he loves me, and will defend me, I will endure without a murmur all the evils of life, and wait all the days of my appointed time till my change come; in the humble hope, that, in the grave, I shall not hear the voice of the oppressors, and that the reproaches and scorn of mankind, which is too much for me to bear on earth, will not follow me into the world to come.
Fly swift, ye intervening days,
Lord, send the summons down;
The hand that strikes me to the earth,
Shall raise me to a crown.
THE CONNEXION BETWEEN INTEMPERANCE AND CRIME, AS VISIBLE IN PRISON.
Intemperance is not the cause of every crime that is committed, though it is of very many of them. It is itself one of the greatest of crimes. It is a violation of not one law only, but of many. The drunkard outrages the law of his nature, tramples on the laws of morality, and flings contempt on the law of the Almighty; and it is not at all wonderful that so manifold a sin should meet with a various and adequate retribution. Intemperance unfits its votaries for every thing good, and qualifies them for, and spurs them onward to the commission of every base and sinful work; and it is impossible to estimate the crimes it has committed, or the miseries it has produced. I saw, in the Windsor Prison, many of the criminal votaries of this Moloch of modern idolatry, and my soul was often severely pained in contemplating the certain and lasting misery with which he rewarded his most faithful worshippers. I have not time, in this place, to enter into a full discussion of the connexion of intemperance with the crimes and misery of state prisons; but I will present a few striking illustrations of the subject, which may answer in the place of a volume.
L. N. was a very intemperate drinker. Rum had marked him for her own. He had worshipped his idol in gaols and prisons for a thousand miles round; and he was always punctual and regular in his devotions. The consequence was—the loss of public confidence—a straw pillow for his head, and a grated dungeon for his home—the pollution of his soul, and the ruin of his body—a death in shrieks of agony, and a prison-yard for his grave.
C. C. learned while a youth to drink the poisoned glass. He was well educated, and of a respectable family. His habit of intemperate drinking unfitted him for business, and he became the scoff and scorn of the giddy rabble. He fled his country for a crime, and remained at a distance for years, adding sin to sin. At length he returned home and repeated his former crime, for which he was sent to Windsor.
No one can describe the pain he endured when taken away from the bottle. "Horrors!—Blue horrors!—Ruffled horrors!" were the words in which he expressed the agony of his body and soul, under the cravings of an intemperate thirst for rum. After several years he was pardoned, but he returned to his former habit; and in one of his paroxysms of intoxication he inflicted a mortal wound on a fellow-being, and was sent back to prison, where he now is.