Addresses of Rev. Henry W. Bellows, D.D., and Professor Roswell D. Hitchcock : delivered at the Broadway Tabernacle, Nov. 7, 1855, in behalf of the United States Inebriate Asylum : Dr. Turner's address to the Board of Directors.

  • Bellows, Henry W. (Henry Whitney), 1814-1882.
Date:
1855
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Addresses of Rev. Henry W. Bellows, D.D., and Professor Roswell D. Hitchcock : delivered at the Broadway Tabernacle, Nov. 7, 1855, in behalf of the United States Inebriate Asylum : Dr. Turner's address to the Board of Directors. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    yond their strength; are doing two or three men's work, and are tempted to inebriety by their exhaustion, and the necessity of keeping up their spirits to the mark. And then, of course, in this commercial stampede, there are thousands of disappointed competitors in the race, men weaker in the power of enterprise, but often strongest in sweet and noble endowments, who are trampled beneath the hurrying crowd and left to solace themselves with whatever they can find to cheer or drown their sorrows. The drunkenness of this country is almost a part of the national character and policy. It may be almost said to be the measure of the cerebral excitability and working temper of our people. The nation is drunk with youth, the new wine of political freedom and democrat- ic ideas. It is a divine intoxication, having its great providential purpose, and its magnificent results ; but it is attended by a fearful shadow—intemperance of speculation, intemperance of feeling, intem- perance of appetite. Licentiousness and drunkenness are the dreadful weeds that spring up in this hot-house of political and economic ear- nestness and activity. They wreathe around the trunks of the noble and fruit-bearing trees our tropical soil produces, their monstrous poi- son vines, and it is almost impossible to cut these down without level- ling the precious standards that uphold them. We have naturally enough supposed that education and religion would eradicate, or gradually anticipate and displace intemperanec, with their own wholesome excitements. But if there be any thing which our experience ought to teach us, it is, that drunkenness and licentiousness are vices which thrive in educated and Christianized communities, at least as much as elsewhere ; for education and religion, in proportion to the hold they take of communities, are themselves stimulants, and communicate an earnestness, and create a waste of vital energy, which, without special efforts, will drive those who are under their influence to counteracting excitements. The connection between erotic and religious sensibility is too subtle a theme to enter on here. But in regard to the sway of intemperance in educated communities, compare Scotland with France, England with Italy, the United States with any country in the world. The truth is, that in- temperance is usually proportioned to the earnestness of a people's life, to the extent in which any of their passions, high or low, are in-