age vow, that that
broken-hearted woman is so unlike the roseate young wife that he
married, that her old schoolmates do not recognize her; that his sons
are to be taunted for a life-time by the father's drunkenness, that
the daughters are to pass into life under the scarification of a
disreputable ancestor. He is drinking up their happiness, their
prospects for this life, and, perhaps, for the life to come. Sometimes
an appreciation of what he is doing comes upon him. His nervous system
is all a tangle. From crown of head to sole of foot he is one aching,
rasping, crucifying, damning torture. Where is he? In hell on earth.
Does it reform him?

After awhile he has delirium tremens, with a whole jungle of hissing
reptiles let out on his pillow, and his screams horrify the neighbors
as he dashes out of his bed, crying: "Take these things off me!" As he
sits, pale and convalescent, the doctor says: "Now I want to have a
plain talk with you, my dear fellow. The next attack of this kind you
will have you will be beyond all medical skill, and you will die." He
gets better and goes forth into the same round again. This time
medicine takes no effect. Consultation of physicians agree in saying
there is no hope. Death ends the scene.

That process of inebriation, warning, and dissolution is going on
within stone's throw of this church, going on in all the neighborhoods
of Christendom. Pain does not correct. Suffering does not reform. What
is true in one sense is true in all senses, and will forever be so,
and yet men are expecting in the next world purgatorial rejuvenation.
Take up the printed reports of the prisons of the United States, and
you will find that the vast majority of the incarcerated have been
there before, some of them four, five, six times. With a million
illustrations all working the other way in this world, people are
expecting that distress in the next state will be salvatory. You can
not imagine any worse torture in any other world than that which some
men have suffered here, and without any salutary consequence.

Furthermore, the prospect of a reformation in the next world is more
improbable than a reformation here. In this world the life started
with innocence of infancy. In the case supposed the other life will
open with all the accumulated bad habits of many years upon him.
Surely, it is easier to build a strong ship out of new timber than out
of an old hulk that has been ground up in the breakers. If w