Twenty-Third Sunday After Pentecost.
The Vice of Drunkenness.
" For many walk of whom I have told you often, and tell you weeping, that they are enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, and whose glory is their shame" — Phil. iii. 18, 19.
SYNOPSIS.
Ex. : I. Wisdom and drunkenness. II. Drunkard among creatures. III. Bacchus.
I. Objections: 1. Timidity. 2. Liberty. 3. Necessity.
II. Drink affects : 1. Pocket. 2. Self and family. 3. Neighbors.
III. Appeal to: 1. Total abstainers, 2. Moderate drinkers. 3. Drunkards.
Per. : Woman's help, and tableau for young men.
SERMON.
" Brethren, be wise unto sobriety." These words, my dear Brethren, taken from the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, express the relation between common sense and drunkenness, between a drunkard and a wise man. They tell us that on the steep incline of human perfection and human degeneration wisdom is the highest point, drunkenness the very lowest, as far removed the one from the other as is the brute creation from man, as is the basest vice from the noblest virtue, as is hell from heaven itself. So that the more one approaches to perfect sobriety the wiser he becomes, the nearer he comes to habitual drunkenness the greater his folly. For what position in God's fair creation does the drunkard hold? An angel is a pure creature that enjoys God; a man is a creature that thinks and rea-
