164 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 



which abstinence-leagues, though backed by medicine and chemistry, 

 will find it impossible to intrude. 



Time has not yet perhaps elapsed sufficient to show the ultimate 

 results which follow to those who steadily maintain the abstinence 

 pledge. We can therefore only conjecture that the effect will be, 

 to dry up somewhat of those feelings which give the body an extra- 

 ordinary life when they enter it well. And as these feelings are the 

 horses of our greater power, and when skillfully ridden accomplish 

 times and spaces that are impossible without them, we suppose that 

 the teetotallers will be somewhat pedestrian and prosy, excepting in 

 the first vigorous days of their self-denials. But as human nature 

 contains all wants represented in particular persons, there are pro- 

 bably born abstainers from, as well as born requirers of, wine. And 

 if some of the most ordinary because passionless men are in the 

 former class, they seem to have with them the men of peaceful 

 power and supermundane continence, with whom stimulus is less 

 the law of life than a spiritual tranquillity passing common under- 

 standing. 



The current disadvantages of vowed abstinence, supposing it not 

 to be natural also, appear to us to lie in a certain dilution of the 

 powers ; a certain want of sleep in the faculties ; an unending 

 character in the days, or a want of difference between the evening 

 and the morning ; also in a certain rigidity of reason, and a loss of 

 those spiritual chances which are a part of the empire of clairvoy- 

 ance and Providence in the mind • and in an undue incessant 

 drift towards public, utilitarian, and money-making enterprise, to 

 compensate for the loss of that stimulus of the heart which to the 

 generality is of festive growth. But we would speak modestly in a 

 case involving the experience of others. 



As for temperance, it may range in respect of times from a daily 

 moderation of wine to a single annual glass dropped into the diet. 

 And as to quantity also, instinct and experience are its compass. 

 But whatever the natural regime, the practice of temperance is a 

 divine blessing second only to the use of reason. For temperance 

 is the whetstone of our faculty of observation, and the axe of reform, 

 which is to hew away forever at one vice after another, is nowhere so 

 well sharpened as on its square and eager sides. Temperance again 



