“Ha! ha! we will laugh and quaff; all things delight us. What care we for the future! No man ever saw it. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. We will enjoy life while we may, we will catch pleasure as it flies. This is enjoyment; time enough to steer out of danger when we are sailing swiftly with the current.”
“Young men, ahoy!”
“What is it?”
“Beware! beware! The rapids are below you!”
“Now you see the water foaming all around. See how fast you pass that point! Up with the helm! Now turn! Pull hard! Quick! quick! quick! pull for your lives! pull till the blood starts from your nostrils, and the veins stand like whip-cords upon your brow! Set the mast in the socket! hoist the sail! Ah! ah! it is too late! Shrieking, howling, blaspheming, over they go.”
Thousands go over the rapids of intemperance every year, through the power of habit, crying all the while, “When I find out that it is injuring me, I will give it up!”
WHAT IS A MINORITY?
HAT is a minority? The chosen heroes of this earth have been in a minority. There is not a social, political, or religious privilege that you enjoy to-day that was not bought for you by the blood and tears and patient suffering of the minority. It is the minority that have vindicated humanity in every struggle. It is a minority that have stood in the van of every moral conflict, and achieved all that is noble in the history of the world. You will find that each generation has been always busy in gathering up the scattered ashes of the martyred heroes of the past, to deposit them in the golden urn of a nation’s history. Look at Scotland, where they are erecting monuments—to whom?—to the Covenanters. Ah, they were in a minority. Read their history, if you can, without the blood tingling to the tips of your fingers. These were in the minority, that, through blood, and tears, and bootings and scourgings—dying the waters with their blood, and staining the heather with their gore—fought the glorious battle of religious freedom. Minority! if a man stand up for the right, though the right be on the scaffold, while the wrong sits in the seat of government; if he stand for the right, though he eat, with the right and truth, a wretched crust; if he walk with obloquy and scorn in the by-lanes and streets, while the falsehood and wrong ruffle it in silken attire, let him remember that wherever the right and truth are there are always