the Philistine, said David, with a most intelligent and comprehensive trust. The form or pressure of danger or trial is indifferent, so long as the Lord is our helper. Though the pestilence should be poured periodically, and with increasing violence, upon the land, the result would be the same so far as calmness and courage on the part of the Christian are concerned, -and safety too, if He wills it, who hath said, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. And as with the pestilence, so with snares, dangers, and foes, of every form and name and degree-the same lofty Trust lifts the soul above the influence of their power or their rage. They may attack, but they cannot conquer; they may do their worst, but they can neither appal nor harm the sheltered one, for thou, Lord, wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee, because he trusteth in Thee. Therefore comfort one another with these words.

INTEMPERANCE AND WAR.

WAR, Famine, and Pestilence! The direst words in our vocabulary, the bare utterance of which arrays before the mind repulsive pictures of wasting, wounds, mortal agony, death, and desolation, on a scale of terrific magnitude. It were not easy to decide as to which of this grim and remorseless trio is, in itself, the most deadly and appalling. Israel's offending king had his choice between them, but found himself in a "great strait;" unable to come to a decision, and glad to refer the matter to the All-Wise Disposer, content to bear meekly whichever He might inflict. On the whole, however, war must bear the palm on the score of greatest destructiveness. Its visitations are more frequent, and its sway more enduring. The theatre of its operations is wider, and its victims incomparably more numerous. Of the three scourges, war clearly is first, mightiest, deadliest. But there is a fourth evil, which, though not usually enrolled among the others, well deserves to rank with them. It is Intemperance. It has no early written records,

like the others, to set forth its frightful ravages, but an unwritten history it has, and of many bulky volumes too every one of whose lines is traced in tears and blood, or like Ezekiel's vision-scroll" written within and without, with lamentations, mourning, and woe." It towers "in shape and stature proudly eminent," high above the highest, as a desolator of mankind. To make this appear is the purpose of the present parallel.

If we consider these evils in respect to the multitudes of victims falling before them, we shall find intemperance to be vastly the more destructive.

I say falling before them, designing, by the phrase, to limit the comparison to the present age, or at least to the latter ages of the world. It would be rash to assert, that in the earlier ages of the world strong drink has been more destructive than the sword. When drunkenness was produced simply by the use of wine, and before the disastrous ingenuity of modern times furnished to the world so great a variety of intoxicating drinks as now exist to curse the race, the number of deaths from this cause was doubtless far less than at present. Besides, no temperance societies having existed, no records or statistics having been preserved by which the mortality from drunkenness can be seen, it is impossible to draw a just comparison

between the ravages of intemperance and those of war in former times. War, however, has stained and defaced the annals of every age of the world. The records of its ravages have been carefully preserved. Each battle-field has its tale of glory and of woe. Many of the great battle-fields of antiquity, which ran red with human blood, are as familiar to us as the battle-fields of our revolutionary history. Hundreds of thousands, and these multiplied by hundreds of thousands more, have fallen in the countless sanguinary battles of ancient times. So frightful has the carnage been at various periods of time, such incredible multitudes have been offered up to the Moloch of war, that it has been estimated that no fewer than fourteen thousand millions* in all ages of the world, or a tenth part of all the inhabitants of the earth from its creation, have perished from this single cause.

Leaving antiquity, then, out of the question, we are at least competent to present and urge the comparison in reference to the present times. Take the last half century to serve as an example, and it can easily be shown that vastly more victims have been offered up at the shrines of intemperance than at

* See Dick's Philosophy of Religion.

those of war-that more bones of those who have lost life by its dire scourge, during this period, exist, than could be found were all the battle-fields of the last fifty years dug up, and their sad relics exposed to the gaze of the world.

Napoleon was appointed to the command of the army of Italy in 1796. From this period till the battle of Waterloo, in 1815, which closed his brilliant though bloody career, the most frightful scenes of carnage and destruction were enacted. His wars, from his rise to his fall, are said to be the direct or indirect cause of the loss of seven millions of human lives. With his downfall, wars in Europe have ceased, with a few inconsiderable exceptions, down to the present time.* So that if we adopt this estimate as probably near the truth, and add one million more as the number of lives lost by all the other wars of Europe since Waterloo, we shall have eight millions of lives sacrificed to the god of war during a period of fifty years.

Now, I profess not to be thoroughly acquainted with the statistics of intemperance in Europe during this period-but I think that an estimate may be formed upon this subject, which, whatever its literal

• Written in 1848.