hink you are strong enough to bear what I am going to say,
--I replied,--I will talk to you about this. But mind, now, these
are the things that some foolish people call DANGEROUS subjects,
--as if these vices which burrow into people's souls, as the
Guinea-worm burrows into the naked feet of West-Indian slaves, would
be more mischievous when seen than out of sight. Now the true way to
deal with those obstinate animals, which are a dozen feet long, some
of them, and no bigger than a horse hair, is to get a piece of silk
round their HEADS, and pull them out very cautiously. If you only
break them off, they grow worse than ever, and sometimes kill the
person who has the misfortune to harbor one of them. Whence it is
plain that the first thing to do is to find out where the head lies.

Just so of all the vices, and particularly of this vice of
intemperance. What is the head of it, and where does it lie? For
you may depend upon it, there is not one of these vices that has
not a head of its own,--an intelligence,--a meaning,--a certain
virtue, I was going to say,--but that might, perhaps, sound
paradoxical. I have heard an immense number of moral physicians
lay down the treatment of moral Guinea-worms, and the vast majority
of them would always insist that the creature had no head at all,
but was all body and tail. So I have found a very common result of
their method to be that the string slipped, or that a piece only of
the creature was broken off, and the worm soon grew again, as bad
as ever. The truth is, if the Devil could only appear in church by
attorney, and make the best statement that the facts would bear him
out in doing on behalf of his special virtues, (what we commonly
call vices,) the influence of good teachers would be much greater
than it is. For the arguments by which the Devil prevails are
precisely the ones that the Devil-queller most rarely answers. The
way to argue down a vice is not to tell lies about it,--to say that
it has no attractions, when everybody knows that it has,--but
rather to let it make out its case just as it certainly will in the
moment of temptation, and then meet it with the weapons furnished
by the Divine armory. Ithuriel did not spit the toad on his spear,
you remember, but touched him with it, and the blasted angel took
the sad glories of his true shape. If he had shown fight then, the
fair spirits would have known how to deal with him.

That all spasmodic cerebral ac