1

but surrender themselves willing victims to licentiousness!

Justice is also an essential attribute of a nation's prosperity. Not only should the laws enforce it in all transactions between man and man; but no nation can expect to prosper, which is not as careful to respect the rights of others, as to vindicate their own. The practice then of some states, in our union, of repudiating their honest debts, employing a word in a new sense to designate a new usage, cannot but be reprobated by every honest mind.

Munificence is an important aid in advancing a nation's glory. It not only relieves individual distress, and promotes the comfort of those around us; but, practised on a large scale, it lays the foundation of the greatest blessings to society. It founds Hospitals for the relief of every kind of distress; erects Universities and inferior Seminaries for diffusing throughout the community useful knowledge. It sends the Bible and other means of instruction to the meanest hovels in christian and heathen lands. It provides funds, raises up and qualifies missionaries to send the gospel and all the countless blessings in its train, to the most distant and unenlightened portions of the globe. These preeminent blessings, wholly unknown in the most refined pagan nations of ancient or modern times, owe their origin,

their continuance, their success, under God, to christianity alone.

"That glory may dwell in our land," who does not perceive the absolute necessity of temperance ? It is not only indissolubly connected with the other virtues of the social state; but its violation either occasions or accompanies every vice, which can be named. It may be said, without exaggeration, that intemperance is the prolific parent of greater sin and misery, than all other vices united.. To establish this position it is necessary only to trace the history of every vagabond, who walks the streets, and disturbs the order of our families by clamorous and lying appeals to our charity; to examine the annals of our gaols, penitentiaries, almshouses, hospitals, theatres, houses of ill fame, and establishments for juvenile delinquency; and you will find the triumphs of the monster in almost every form of wretchedness and guilt. As you travel through the country, inquire, what fills places of public resort with idlers; what involves families in poverty and misery; what occasions debts beyond the ability or disposition to discharge them; what is the fruitful source of domestic unhappiness, of quarrels among neighbors, of irreligion under all its forms, of endless and vexatious lawsuits, of neglect of business and its invariable consequences; and you will find, it may be safely asserted, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, that intemperance is nearly or more remotely connected with these accumulated evils.

And yet for a long period, in our national history, and indeed till within a very few years past, temptations to this indulgence were almost universal. Though Alcohol was the invention of a barbarous people, in a barbarous age; yet its free use, or, I might rather say, its ignoble and degrading abuse had been practised by a large portion of all classes in society, even in christian communities. By a strange and unaccountable misapprehension and perversion, it came to be generally employed, as a promoter of comfort, relief from fatigue, an aid to labor, a preventive of the bad effects of the weather, so that its use, among the laboring classes, became as constant and unintermitted, aye, in many cases, even more so, than necessary food. Even they, who would scorn the imputation of intemperance, thought it both harmless and useful to quaff a portion of it, at least twice in every twenty-four hours.

At length it became manifest, that a large portion of these temperate drinkers grew intemperate, and involved themselves and families and friends in all the horrors of inordinate excess. Then the eyes of the more considerate were opened to the causes of these frightful evils; and led to the discovery, that they resulted from grievously erroneous notions of the properties of alcohol. At length it was analyzed by chemists, and pronounced, with remarkable unanimity, an insidious poison, to be taken into the human system, rarely, in any case, and, when so employed, to be used, as other poisons are, under the direction of medical skill.

My hearers, ought we not devoutly to bless God, that such a wonderful improvement, in temperance,* prevails in so large a portion of our land, especially in our country towns? God grant, that it may continue to advance, till alcohol, in all its dangerous forms and combinations, shall be restricted to the use of the arts, or be confined to the phials of the apothecary and the physician, to be dealt out only by medical direction; to be examined, like other poisonous substances, by the curious; to be contemplated by future generations, as the insidious elixir, so deleterious to the human constitution, so grievously perverted by their fathers.

By such a reformation, as much as in any other conceivable way, may "glory" again "dwell in our land."

"That glory may dwell in our land," in its full

effulgence, I am as fully persuaded, as of any christian verity, that we have no right to hope, till slavery, by some dispensation of providence, which I feel wholly incompetent to predict, shall be extirpated, root and branch, from our soil. Its prolonged existence in so many States renders the very first article in our Declaration of Independence no better, than a solemn farce, which proclaims, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." How this reformation is to be accomplished, how it is to be hastened, I hazard no conjecture. Our religion requires us "to do nothing rashly." On this vexed subject, may we not safely join in the apprehension of the third President of the United States, who drafted our Declaration of Independence, and say, "We tremble, when we reflect that God is just."

The Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper, pastor of Brattle square Church, in this city, during the revolutionary war, was a preeminent patriot and a distinguished divine. But for nothing was he more distinguished, than for the pertinence, sublimity, and fluency of his devotional services. On a special occasion, during the gloomiest season of the war, as he was leading in the devotions of an assembly, he