ell; the awakened sinner be drowning conviction at his
bottle; the once fair communicant be disgraced; the once happy
congregation be rent; its ministry be driven from the altar, and its
sanctuary crumble to ruin? Shall our benevolent institutions fail, and
our liberties be sacrificed? Shall God be grieved? Shall wailings from
the bottomless pit hereafter reproach and agonize you as the cause of
the ruin, perhaps of your children and children's children? Methinks one
common pulsation beats in your hearts, and you answer, No--no. Methinks
I see you rising in the majesty of freemen and Christians, in behalf of
an injured country and church, and destroying at once the demon among
you.

ARGUMENT AGAINST THE MANUFACTURE OF
ARDENT SPIRITS:

ADDRESSED TO
THE DISTILLER AND THE FURNISHER OF THE MATERIALS.

BY REV. EDWARD HITCHCOCK, D. D.

A sense of duty impels me to address this portion of my fellow-citizens,
in the hope that I may persuade them to abandon the employment by which
they furnish ardent spirits to the community. I am not about to charge
them as the intentional authors of all the evils our country suffers
from intemperance, nor wholly to clear myself from the guilt; for some
of these men are my neighbors and personal friends, and I know them to
be convinced that the excessive use of ardent spirits is a frightful
evil among us, and that they would cheerfully join in some measures for
its suppression, though not yet satisfied that those now in train are
judicious or necessary. Not long ago, I was in essentially the same
state of mind, and encouraged these men in the manufacture of spirits,
by the purchase and use of them. Now I would fain believe that the minds
of all these individuals are open to conviction, and that the same
arguments which satisfied me that I was wrong, will satisfy them.

In the first place, therefore, I would reason with these men _as a
chemical philosopher_. The distiller is a practical chemist; and
although he may never have studied chemistry in the schools, he cannot
but have often thought of the theory of his operations. And the farmer
who receives at the distillery, in return for his rye, cider, or
molasses, a liquid powerful substance, obtained from them, will very
naturally inquire by what strange transformation these articles have
been made to yield something apparently so very different from their
nature. Probably, some of them may have concluded that the spirits exist
nat