University of Virginia Library

PREFACE.

The motive which has influenced the editor in the pre
paration of this volume, is to furnish a standard reading book
for the temperance fireside, and the family circle of all who
are interested in the great work of benevolence now going
on among our fellow men. That work has been faithfully
carried forward amid every difficulty. In all parts of our
land where, but a few months since, we might have found the
haggard and wan face, and withered form of a heart-broken
wife, toiling incessantly in a wretched hovel to earn a scanty
morsel of bread for her starving children, we may now discover
the glad hearts and cheerful faces of that wife and
those little ones, gathered round a pleasant fireside, no
longer dreading the return of the father in anticipation of
abuse and outrage, but fondly clinging to him as their protector,
and gratefully blessing his reformation as productive
to all, of health and contentment, peace and plenty.

The victim of intemperance is not now shut out from the
sympathy and kind attentions of his fellow men, as one
stricken with the plague, fit only to die. Kind and sympathizing
hands are every where offered to pour the oil and
wine of pity and hope into his desponding heart; to teach
him to rise above the state into which he has fallen—to
shelter him in the ark of total abstinence, from the flood of

folly and sin that threatens to ingulf him. He is now made
to feel that he has friends who are laboring, hoping, praying
for his repentance and recovery. They teach him, what he
too often forgets or disbelieves, that he is yet a man and has
a man's duty to perform. They show him his faithful wife—
whose love he has so long repaid with slights, and whose
counsels he has spurned—they show her to him, watching for
his return, and praying for his reformation through long and
sleepless nights of sorrow, and teach him how he should
value her devoted love. They remind him of the talents
God has given, and still continues to him, and of his faculties
for the attainment of Heaven, and the use he may still make
of them. They teach him that he can yet be a man, and
they inspire him with the determination to be a good man
and a useful man. He learns to know wherein his danger
lies, and he comes to the Throne of Grace for strength to
resist his temptations. He lives in daily walk with God,
depending continually upon His arm for the salvation which
he knows his own strength cannot effect. He realizes the
frightful nature of the precipice upon the brink of which he
has been standing, and his heart beats with gratitude to his
Preserver for his deliverance. In his gratitude for this,
other mercies rise before him, and the sense of the unthankful
life he has been leading fills him with contrition, and makes
him the more anxious “to bring forth fruits meet for
repentance.” His whole life is changed; he who was but
recently a wretched, worthless drunkard, has become an
attentive husband, a kind parent, a good citizen, and an
exemplary Christian.

Such fruits are produced by the labours of the friends of
Total Abstinence. Truly they have their reward. They
may not live to see the curse of intemperance wholly taken
from the land, yet their cause is a holy and a righteous one,
and it must finally triumph. And every effort they make
for the propagation of its principles among their fellow
men, will react upon their own hearts with a mighty influence
for good. In seeking to bless others, they themselves
are doubly blessed. Let them neither pause nor faint in the
glorious work.

To remind them of past success, and to stimulate them to
renewed and more vigorous efforts in the future, is the object
of this book. Its contributors are found among the most
active and zealous friends of the temperance cause, and at
the same time in the very front rank of the authors of our
times. Their delineations are drawn from nature with
masterly hands, and the pictures they present cannot fail
to be gratifying to every lover of his fellow man, and endearing
to the friends of Temperance. In laying the book
before the public, the editor would say that he will be abundantly
rewarded should it be the humble means of enlisting
but one honest-hearted labourer in the sacred cause of Temperance—should
it cause but one brand to be plucked from
the burning.