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The Cause of Our Success.

But this it is the spirit foul

Himself has broke among us;
His shade has fallen across our homes
And hearts; his fang has stung us.
His hideous form upon our eyes,
How could we be unheeding?
How, with indifference, see loved ones
Beneath his weapon bleeding?

If we should need a warning voice
To tell us of the danger,

When in our midst-so close ourselves-
What folly could be stranger?

And where's the man in all the land

Who knows it has not found him?
Who says it ne'er has smitten one
To whom affection bound him?

Alas! we one and all must own
'Tis ever coming nearer,

Some it has slain whom we esteemed,
Yea, some that e'en were dearer.
We've watched the fading of the hopes
That all their prospect lighted;

The beauteous lives by drink were quenched,
And all those hopes were blighted;

And how the earnest question comes,
Who next is marked for falling?
What brother's or what sister's shame
Will come, our hearts appalling?
When 'twas the stranger, poor, despised,
Alone, who was the weeper,

Ourselves we did persuade that we

Were not our brother's keeper.

The Saloon.

But now the cry among our own

Is causing our awaking;

By thousands to the conflict we

At last our way are taking.

If loved ones round our hearth must from
The evils be defended,

'Tis ours to oppose with might, the foe,

That myriads have offended.

GEORGE BARRY.

THE SALOON.

WHAT place does Satan like the best?
Where does he sit, and smile, and rest,
And plant the greatest social pest?
At the saloon.

Where does "Old Nick" erect his throne
Of kegs and bottles, blood and bone,
And rule in power all his own?

At the saloon.

What makes the drunkards howl and hoot,
And curse, and swear, and fight, and shoot,
And play the demon and the brute?

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50

Our Platform.

Stand firm, ye friends of truth and right;
Take God's armor, march and fight;

The victory gain, through moral might,
O'er the saloon.

OUR PLATFORM.

If there is any one democratic principle known among men, it is the principle of the right of the people to abate a public nuisance, the right of the people to self-preservation. We claim, therefore, the right of the people in every community on all this continent to suppress, by legislation, the great nursery of crime, pauperism, degradation, immorality, and the destruction of what is, after all, the life-blood of the nation-its brain and its working power. The liquor-traffic has not only drained the pockets and filled the almshouses, but it murders manhood; and, therefore, our American republicanism, as well as our Christianity, rises up in stern indignation, protesting against it, and demanding the right to suppress it wherever the people see fit to exercise that right.

Here are our principles: total abstinence, the reformation of men through the love-power, personal persuasion, and the right to suppress the tippling-houses by law. We welcome to our ranks all who hate drink, and drinking usages, and dram-shops; we widen our platform for all prohibitionists and moral-suasionists, asking each to stand side by side, shoulder to shoulder, and to work in the line God calls them. With God's help, henceforth there shall not be dissensions, bickerings, and alienations in the ranks of this great Christian reform. There is work enough for us all. We claim that no man can work with us efficiently who does not so hate drink that he is willing to put it out of his house and to put it out of his own hand. If he prefers to work in the line of prohibition, so let him work; or in the line of personal persuasion, so let him or her work. We have before us an ideal; we are striving toward it. People say of us teetotalers, You are idealists." We are. This nation would not be what

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it is to-day but for the striving toward a glorious ideal that the Abraham Lincolns and the Charies Sumners kept ever before them as the mark of the prize of their high calling. The Christian Church is a company of idealists striving toward the stature of a perfect man in Christ Jesus. Just imagine a Church drawing up a creed full of compromises! How long would that Church live? Imagine a pulpit striving to preach a piebald morality! No, the temperance cause can not compromise, We can not sink below our ideal, which is as lofty as the Word of God and the welfare of humanity. We believe in touching not and tasting not intoxicating drinks. We believe in all efforts to suppress the dram-shop, and we shall still strive toward that end. The moment we lower the standard, the moment we compromise, the cause is gone, and we are gone with it.

I call upon you, therefore, to stand with us on the platform that to so many seems mere idealism. Paul was an idealist in the estimation of Athens, and Corinth, and Rome. If Paul had abated one jot, or compromised one line, where would the Gospel of Jesus Christ be? Let us put the mark as high as heaven. Let us take our tempted fellow-creatures by the hand, pointing them to that mark, bid them strive toward it, and ask God to help us to help them toward it. This is no hour for retreat. God summons this nation now, as He summoned it years ago, to enter the great conflict against the most terrible enemy of the nation's life and liberty.

"Deeper than thunder on summer's first shower,

On the dome of the sky God is striking the hour;
Shall we falter before what we've pray'd for so long,
When the wrong is so weak and the right is so strong?"

REV. T. L. CUYLER.

THE DESTROYER.

INTEMPERANCE creates in man an ungovernable appetite. Men who have fallen have told us it is not a desire, not an appetite, not a passion; these ordinary words fail to express the

thing. It is more like a raging storm that pervades the entire being; it is a madness that paralyzes the brain, it is a corrosion that gnaws the stomach, it is a storm-fire that courses through the veins; it transgresses every boundary, it fiercely casts aside every barrier, it regards no motive, it silences reason, it stifles conscience, it tramples upon prudence, it overleaps everything that you choose to put in its way, and eternal life and the claims of God are as feathers, which it blows out of its path.

What does it do to man's body? It diseases it; it crazes his brain, it blasts his nerves, it consumes his liver, it destroys his stomach, it inflames his heart, it sends a fiery flood of conflagration through all the tissues; it so saps the recuperative energies of man's body, that oftentimes a little scratch upon a drunkard's skin is a greater injury than a bayonet-thrust through and through the body of a temperate man. It not only does this, but the ruin that it brings into the nervous system often culminates in delirium tremens. Have you ever seen a man under its influence? Have you heard him mutter, and jabber, and leer, and rave like an idiot? Have you heard him moan, cry, shriek, curse, and rave, as he tried to skulk under the bedclothes? Have you looked into his eyes, and seen the horrors of the damned there? Have you witnessed these things? Have you seen the scowl on his face, so that the whole atmosphere was filled with tempest? Have you seen him heave on his bed, as though his body was undulating upon the rolling waves like a fire? If you have, then you know what it does to the body.

It enthralls the will. A man's will ought to be king. The will of the drunkard is an abject slave. The noblest and the mightiest men have been unable to break off the chain when it is once riveted. I verily believe there have been no such wails of despair out of hell itself as have gone up from the lips and heart of the drunkard who knew he never could be recovered.

What does it do to the heart? If a man is made in the image of God's intellect, a woman is made in the image of God's heart. A tender woman is tenderest to her child. Is there anything that can unmother a woman, that can pluck the maternal heart