Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. It is the institution, not the single glass, we are most afraid of. It is the institution you build up when you take a single glass that makes us warn you with our faithful:
Better not touch it. But, you say, we know good people who handle the elf so completely that he never seems to do them any harm. Yonder is a man of eighty. He says: I have lived and played with the jolly little fellow this seventy years. He never got into my brain. He is my toy, my slave. A man is a fool who is befuddled by such an imp. By the side of the octogenarian stands a minister of the Gospel who takes his wine. The society of which he has always been a member has taken wine. He has a strong will, a particularly vigorous system, and nerves under complete control; and therefore he plays withthe jolly little demon, and is unharmed. There is, he says, no ‘Thus saith the Lord ’ against the use of good wine (onr Lord made good wine at a feast once); and so the octogenarian and middle-aged clergyman drink, wisely, with self-control, as gentlemen in Society, and are standing proofs that wine- drinking is not invariably a damage, nor necessarily a sin, and that only weak and misguided people insist upon total abstinence. While this conversation goes on we watch the two elves in the hands of the two strong advocates of temperance?of temperance in the use of wine. How the little demons wink at each other, and at the other ten elves at the same table ! The position of the two is the strength of the ten. Although the two are not drained nearly as often as the ten, the frequent draining of the ten is because of the cautious handling of the two. There, across the table, is a man whose life-struggle has been, or ought to have been, against appetite. His will is weak. His nerves are sensitive.The …