t the human wrecks along the shore.
Two young men lived near our home. Their parents were well-to-do. The
family grew tired of the farm and moved to town. The boys fell in with
bad company. They did not decline the social glass. Soon they furnished
other young men with drink from their own pocket. This was fifteen years
ago. To-day one of them is a hardened sinner, violent in his passions
and blasphemous against God. The other one, having spent a term in our
Illinois State University at Champaign, married a beautiful neighbor
girl and moved to Missouri. Here he lived off the money of his father's
estate, practicing his early-learned habits of drinking, gambling, and
loafing. He moved from State to State until, finally left in poverty,
he tended bar in a saloon. While visiting with relatives in his old
neighborhood a few years ago he stole a watch and some money from
his own nephew, and was tried in the courts, and sentenced to the
penitentiary for one year. His wife, having carried the burden of
disgrace and want through all these years, with the seven unfortunate
children were released from him to struggle alone. All this we have seen
with our own eyes as the years have come and gone. The downfall and ruin
of this young man, and the unsaved fate of his brother, easily may be
traceable to the "social glass" and the boon companions of the social
glass--tobacco and playing-cards. Last year I met a man who had prided
himself in the fact that he could drink or let it alone, and thought
that it was all right to take a "social glass" occasionally. Election
time came around; he fell in with his friends, and, as one always will
do sooner or later who tampers with it at all, went too far. Before he
knew it he was as low in the gutter as a beast. It was three days before
he was a sober man again. He work had ceased, he had disgusted his
fellow-workmen, disgraced his Christian family, and had humiliated
himself so that he was ashamed to look any man in the face until he had
repented of his sins before God, and had promised Him, by His help, that
he would never drink another glass. What a pleasure it was to hear that
old man, as he is close to sixty years of age, to hear him tell in a
spirited religious service of how he had strayed from his path and had
got lost in the woods, but thanked God that he was out of the woods, and
by His help would remain out. When we become undone in Christ He lifts
us up and starts us on our new way rej