THE LIBERAL PREACHER.

SERMON II.

BY THE REV J. G. PALFREY, OF BOSTON.

ON THE USE OF POISONED DRINKS.

ACTS xiii, 10. O FULL OF ALL SUBTILTY AND ALL MISCHIEF, THOU CHILD OF THE DEVIL, THOU ENEMY OF ALL RIGHTEOUSNESS, WILT THOU NOT CEASE TO PERVERT?

These words of rebuke, addressed by the apostle Paul, in the severity of outraged virtue, to the sorcerer of Cyprus, seem almost as if they had been designed to depict that most guileful and most malignant sorcerer, intemperance, which has drenched our unhappy country so deep in the cup of its abominations. It is a pest, 'full of all subtilty,' of all artifices, by which it wins the honest, and the generous, and the unsuspecting, and the happy, to its execrable sway. It is full of all mischief.' It does not release its poor dupe till it has ruined him, fame and fortune, health and peace, body and soul. It is, if any thing is, a child of the devil,' and the worst deeds of its father it will most dutifully and effectually do. It is the enemy of all righteousness.' It holds no truce with the temper of self-command, or of usefulness, or of spirituality. The drunkard and the christian are radically, and at all points, two different men.

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The subject continues to excite, as it ought to excite, the special attention of the citizens of this community. In different shapes it ought in all places to be brought forward from time to time, and such different views exhibited as occur to different minds. My thoughts on the subject, such as they were, having already been given to the public at some length,

the observations, which I am now further to present upon it, may appear to have little unity, and no completeness of plan; but if they add any thing to the amount of illustrations of an evil so enormous, some little good will not fail to have been done. I shall attempt to gather no flowers of rhetoric. The call is for no such provision. Nor shall I hesitate, as the prosecution of the subject may lead, to descend into the homeliest details, whether of the parlor or the nursery, the distillery or the grog-shop.

What are these distilled spirits, to any use of which,-except as medicine, and then under responsible professional oversight,—many profess to see cause for absolutely objecting? They are liquids composed of alcohol and water, with the addition of a volatile oil of one or another kind, according as they are extracted, for instance, from rye or sugar-cane, from the grape, the juniper-berry, or some other fruit. This latter substance, whichever it be, that gives to each kind of distilled spirits its distinctive flavor and hue, makes but a very small part of the bulk of the compound; and the alcohol, extracted from either, is the same substance, so that in its simple state, taken out of the combination, it cannot be ascertained by the sight or taste from which of them it was procured. The highest proof spirits yield a quantity of alcohol amounting to half their bulk, and the ingredients of the other half are, or ought to be, inoffensive. What then is this alcohol, which is the intoxicating principle in all? It is one of the most active poisons,—I was about to say, in nature, but it is no natural production; God never sent us such a scourge ;—it is one of the most active foes to human vitality which human art in its perverseness has found. It is not called poison, I know. But administer no very large quantity of it to one of the weaker domestic animals, or to a child, and a short time will have passed after the application has come to be made to the nerves of the stomach, before the subject of the experiment has ceased to live, has breathed its last. Poison is an unusual name for it; but from the moment of its introduction we see the healthy system la

boring, with desperate vigor, to rid itself of its baleful presence, by the same instinctive self-preserving powers with which it rejects other foreign substances, hostile to its wellbeing. Received in sufficient quantity to excite the most violent repulsion, the nauseating sense of the digestive orga at once expels it with a convulsive impulse. If, howeve from less provocation, or from long use, the system so far to: erates it, you may see other actions going on, which show hov impatient it is of the presence of its noxious guest. The odor of the tainted air which at each contraction the lungs eject, evinces that they are struggling to discharge it with all their energy. The reddened skin manifests how its pores are irritated while they strive to make way for the odious intruder to escape. The watery eye, with its clogged and angry vessels, shows how that most delicate mechanism, the capillary apparatus, is disturbed and wrenched. We do not call spirits poison. But I see a man with a countenance hideously bloated, and in hue fiery red or deadly pale. His pulse indicates a burning fever, or else the low state of typhous inflammation. He has no more the power of voluntary motion than if he were palsied. His swoln tongue refuses to articulate, or is helplessly protruded from his mouth. His deep and distressed breathing is like that of apoplexy. Will any one give me a definition of the action of poisons, which will explain to me that that man is not poisoned? Will any one make me understand that if he had drugged himself with arsenic or hemlock, he might have been poisoned, but that having only drugged himself with alcohol, he is not so? I see another, consumptive, or paralytic, or dropsical, with no appetite or no digestion, sober enough now perhaps, but along with one or more of these morbid affections, nervous or idiotic at the same time, and I learn that his habit has been to ply himself with the potent agent which has been named. And am I to say, that he is not dying by slow poison, if slow it were, merely because he found it on the inn-keeper's shelves,

and not on the apothecary's? Is that a philosophical, is it so much as a specious discrimination?

No, my friends, it is not rhetorically, but in the strictest soberness of truth, that we call that substance, poison, venom. It will not kill when taken in inconsiderable quantities, but neither will any other agent of the same class; and again, it has this tremendous characteristic among the most formidable of the tribe, that taking it in small quantities leads on, by an impulse as mighty as mysterious, to taking it in quantities fatally large. In pursuance of such a course of remark as was proposed, I have as yet undertaken no more than to glance at some of its mischievous physical effects. There is another of these, however, so exceedingly remarkable, that it ought not to be wholly omitted, especially as it seems to have been scarcely noticed among the popular treatises on the subject. It appears to be well ascertained that the habitual use of ardent spirits so alters the properties of the human muscle, as to render it highly inflammable; and there are authenticated instances in the books, of the bodies of such subjects being burned alive, to the very bones, by spontaneous combustion, as some have maintained, or if not so, by coming in contact with fire. What is more extraordinary still, most, or all of these instances have been of females.-Nor ought I to fail to remark, that, besides alcohol, which is looked for, other noxious ingredients are often detected by chemical analysis, in the compound which is drunk for distilled spirits. It is a proved fact that there are dealers in that article, who disguise its inferior quality by an adulteration, in which, among other things, use is made of turpentine, oil of vitriol, and a solution of lead.

Alcohol is presented in other articles of common consumption, in forms less condensed than that of ardent spirits; and the question occurs, What ground is to be taken in respect to them? Now I have no doubt, that, for an almost universal rule, a man, who from infancy to death, should drink nothing more stimulating than water, and adapt his other diet to this,