A PLEA FOR TOTAL ABSTINENCE.
By Dr. Cuyler
THE Almighty God who created our bodies wrote on those bodies a prohibitory law against alcohol. No court, or medical society, or church dares repeal that law. According to that divine law, written on body and mind, the healthy human system regards alcohol instinctively as an enemy. The uprising of the bodily powers against alcohol to expel it, makes the excitement which we call "intoxication." It is an attempt to cast out the invader. The blood seeks to throw it out. The kidneys throw it out. The stomach hurls it off. The skin exudes it. There is not an organ that assimilates it and takes it up, as they take up milk, or water, or bread. Alcohol does not promote digestion. Alcoholic drinks do not nourish, do not warm, do not strengthen. Chemists will tell you that in ten quarts of alcohol there is less food than can be spread on the end of a knife! Captain Brassey reported that of the two gangs of men who worked on the English railroads, the total abstainers worked the best, and Admiral Ingalfield, who explored the arctic region tells us that the man who reached nearest to the pole was a man who went on the expedition without a drop of liquor in his flask. The most heroic explorer of this century was David Livingstone, who opened Africa. He was not only a heroic missionary, but a professional physician and pledged abstainer. He said: "I found I could stand every hardship best without the stimulus of any alcoholic drink, using water, and water only." He says that sometimes the water he drank was putrid with mud and insects, yet he never found the least bad effect from it, and he went as a pledged abstainer through the terrific exposures year after year, and brought a testimonial for total abstinence which ranks with his actual geographical discoveries.— Dr. Cuyler.