September Twelfth.
CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE.
"Take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and cares of this life."—Luke xxi. 34.
THE word Temperance—derived from the Latin tempus, time—properly signifies to time, to regulate, or to confine anything within due limits: and when applied to our passions, our conduct, or our amusements, it means the confinement of these within the limits which revelation commands, and reason shows to be necessary. Among Christian duties and virtues, this should be considered one requiring our attentive observance: for without its regulating influence acts, which would otherwise be blameless, become injurious. Without temperance, eating degenerates into gluttony; drinking into intoxication; amusement into folly and dissipation; charity into profusion and prodigality; and even religion itself becomes beclouded with superstition. Hence, then, temperance may be classed in the catalogue of virtues. And when we consider the nature of man, and the dangers to which we are all exposed, but more particularly the young: when we know how often evil assumes the garb of virtue, how often Satan appears as an angel of light, it becomes doubly necessary that we should be all temperate, and that the young in particular should be exhorted to be sober-minded.
The government of our passions is certainly a hard but not an impossible task; for it must be remembered
