HV5295 Some of the statements in the following pages are derived from the documents of the Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance, and others from various sources. the course of an interrupted week, and are faulty in many respects. But the author has no time to correct them, and if they are capable of doing any thing to open the eyes of the publick to the tremendous scourge under which it is suffering, he would not withhold them, from any sensibility to criticism. If there are any over-statements, he will be most heartily glad to see them disproved. The sermons were prepared in DISCOURSES. JEREMIAH VI. 8. Be thou instructed, O Jerusalem, lest my soul depart from thee; lest I mhke thee desolate, a land not inhabited. THE piety of our ancestors has transmitted to us the usage of assembling year by year, at the opening of the season, to seek, with prayer and fasting, a blessing from the God of harvest. Elsewhere, such a solemnity is considered as appropriate to occasions of great publick distress, and a stranger coming among us, might ask what reason of this kind we could have for observing it. He had found, he would say, a numerous people, living on a bountiful soil, in a temperate climate, with every thing called for by the reasonable wishes of man, within the reach of their industry; with a free and at the |