TRACT SOCIETY.

REFORMATION OF DRUNKARDS.

Truly we live in an age of wonders. Under peculiar influences, hundreds
and thousands of once hopeless drunkards are becoming sober men--yet the
work of reform has but commenced. It is computed that there are in the
land no less than five hundred thousand habitual inebriates. The
condition of each individual calls for sympathy and aid, that he may
become a sober man, and through the blessing of God, gain eternal life.

For drunkenness there is and can be no apology; but the condition of the
drunkard is often pitiable in the extreme. However gradual, or
respectable, may have been his progress in the descent called _temperate
drinking_, the appetite now _is formed_ within him--the drunkard's
appetite. Wretched man! He feels what not faintly resembles the gnawing
of "the worm that never dies." He asks for help. There are times when he
would give worlds to be reformed. Every drunkard's life, could it be
written, would tell this in letters of fire. He struggles to resist the
temptation, causes himself to be shut up in prison, throws himself on
board a temperance ship for a distant voyage, seeks new alliances and
new employments, wrestles, agonizes, but all in vain. He rises to-day
but to fall to-morrow; and amid disappointment and reproach, poverty and
degradation, he says, "Let me alone, I cannot live," and plunges
headlong to destruction.

Who will come to his rescue? Who will aid in the deliverance of
thousands of thousands from this debasing thraldom of sin and Satan? Our
aid they must have.

Their _number_ demands it. Half a million, chiefly adults, often heads
of families, having each a wife and children, making miserable a million
and a half of relatives and friends. They pass, too, in rapid
succession. Ten years is the measure of a generation, and if nothing is
done to save them, in the next forty years two millions may be swept
into eternity.

Their personal degradation and suffering require it. What would we not
do to pull a neighbor out of the water, or out of the fire, or to
deliver him from Algerine captivity, or wrest him from the hand of a
pirate or midnight assassin? But what captivity, what pirate, what
murderer so cruel as Alcohol?

Their _families_ plead for it. The innocent and the helpless, the lambs,
in the paw of the tiger, and that tiger a husband and father. Amid
hungering and thirsting, cold and nakedness, humiliation and shame,
sufferings