THE RESPONSIBILITY OF ONE MAN.
Not long ago there was in a certain colliery an explosion by which four hundred miners were suddenly hurled amid shattered ruins into horrible death. It was caused by a single miner who had opened his safety-lamp to light his pipe. To that pipe of tobacco were sacrificed 400 precious lives of fathers, of husbands, and of sons; and, alas! on the bodies of not a few of those who perished in that fiery blast were found duplicate keys by which, hitherto with impunity, they had done the same. Alas! My brethren, the United States are such a mine; they are full of the explosive fire-damp of intemperance. In all societies it hangs dense around us in the perilous and pestilential air. Do not say that there is none of this flaming peril around you; that you may open your safety-lamp and no harm come of it. It may be so; it may not be so. You could not, you would not, do it if you were sure that there was danger; for that—as you see at once—would be a deadly selfishness and an atrocious crime. But you cannot be sure that there is not danger. Is the gain worth the risk? Is the transient and animal indulgence worth the permanent and eternal peril? No harm may come to you; but if harm comes to others who are reassured by your example, you, even you, will have helped to perpetuate a frightful curse, whose effects, in shattering blast, after shattering blast, shall be flapped in echoes of ruin and of misery, too late for penitence, amid generations yet unborn. The fatal and the fatallly common key of that safety-lamp is what is called, "moderate drinking." If in this particular struggle you would be patriots, if in this matter you would show your true love for your brother men—fling it away. Like the Nazarites of old, like the children of Jonadab the son of Rechab, drink neither wine nor strong drink, so long as by it you make weak or cause to stumble, or tempt into ruin and misery, the soul—the priceless soul—of a brother; the soul of your brother for whom Christ died.