ter the flood; and it may be, the first punishment that was inflicted upon it, was the best proportioned to the crime; and if it had been ever prosecuted upon the continuance and propagation of it since, it is probable that vice had not flourished in so many ages to this time, when it remains more strong and vigorous, and in more credit and reputation, than it had in its beginning; because it hath not the same penalty inflicted upon it since, which was, a mockery and contempt. Not that mockery which is now so much applied to it, and by which it is cherished and propagated by mirth and laughter, and looking upon it as a commendable, at least a pardonable, effect of good-fellowship it was another kind of mocking which God prescribed, by permitting, when he made the first drunken man (who had been so much in his favour) to become by it ridiculous to his own son, and permitted his own child unnaturally to contemn his father; as if it were but justice, that his own flesh and blood should withdraw the duty due to a parent, who had divested himself of his manhood to become a beast. It was the third part of the world that then manifested this contempt towards that excessive debauchery, and the other two parts did but conceal it: and though the presumption in so near a relation as a son was not excusable, his piety cannot justify such a con

tempt; yet the contempt itself, as it was the first, so it is the best and most sovereign remedy that the wisdom of a state can prescribe for the suppressing and eradicating that enormity, that a dissolute and a drunken man be looked upon with scorn, and as unworthy to be received into the company or employment of honest and virtuous persons; that he who delights to degrade himself from being a reasonable creature, be degraded from the capacity of exercising any office, for the support whereof the use of reason is constantly necessary; and that he be exposed to a universal contempt, who exposes himself to discredit his creation, and to drive that reasonable soul from him that only distinguishes him from a beast. And till this peculiar penalty be, by a general consent of all worthy men as well as magistrates, applied to this race of impudent transgressors, this affect. ed wickedness will never be extirpated, but involve whole nations in the infamy, though particu lar men may be free from the guilt of the excess.

The succeeding stages of the world never found so proper a remedy for this malady, though some. thing was always done to make it odious and terrible to those who affected it. By the Levitical law, if the father and the mother did bring their son before the elders of the city, and say, This our son is a glutton and a drunkard, all the men

of the city shall stone him with stones that he die; yet this severity did not root out that vice from that people, excess of wine still wrought the same effects: and it is probable the severity of the law made men less solicitous for the execution of it; parents chose rather to keep a drunken son than to have no son at all, to have him put to death; and an excess of rigour in the punishment rather makes faults to be carefully concealed, than not to be committed. And this may be the reason that in the time of Solomon, who, amongst his. multitude of vices, we do not find was given to drunkenness, a less severe judgment was denounced against it, yet more like to reform it: "The drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty," says he, (Prov. xxiii. 21.) Let but that be made good, and the cure is wrought; no man ever affected a vice that he believed would inevitably make him a beggar; the gamester, who most naturally falls into it, is very solicitous to avoid it, and plays that he may be rich; and the lustful person, though he may fear diseases, sees no cause to apprehend poverty, by giving satisfaction to his appetite. No vicious man considers Heaven so much, as to foresee the punishment that may fall from thence upon his excesses; and therefore let Solomon pronounce what he will, the drunkard will never be terrified with the fear of beggary,

whilst he sees rich and great men affected with the same pleasure with which he is delighted and Teproached, and to whom it may be he stands 'more commended by his faculty in drinking than he would be by the practice of any particular virtue. Nor can the public laws and penalties of any state execute Solomon's sentence, and reduce those riotous transgressors to poverty, whilst the magistrates and great ministers, without whose influence those dead laws have no vigour, are accustomed to the same excesses, or indulgent to those who are: they are so far from believing that they shall be the poorer by it, that they look upon it as the only antidote that can expel the poison of poverty, and the only remedy that can redeem and buoy them up from the abyss into which the melancholy of want usually casts those who are in distress they think they have a piece of scripture more canonical than Solomon's practice, of the verity whereof they have such real experience in the panegyric they find in Esdras, which, instead of being cast into poverty, raised the poorest amongst them to the state and condition of kings: "Wine maketh the mind of the king and of the fatherless child to be all one, of the bondman and of the free-man, of the poor man and of the rich. It turneth also every thought into jolli ty and mirth, so that a man remembereth neither

sorrow nor debt; and it maketh every heart rich, so that a man remembereth neither king nor governor ; and it maketh to speak all things by talents;" (1 Esdr. iii. 19, 20, 21.) And if in truth this prerogative be confirmed by the condescension of great men to this equality, in prostituting themselves to the same base excess; if this rebellious transportation of jollity, and this pleasant dream of wealth and security, be not awaked by some severe and sensible chastisement, the Apocrypha will be preferred as the truer scripture, and men will not, by the gravity (which they call the morality) of a few sober men, be irreconciled with the vice that brings them into so good company, and in which they enjoy so many pleasant hours.

We may reasonably believe, that in our Saviour's time this unmanly excess was grown to a very great height, by the most terrible judgment denounced against it by St Paul (1 Cor. vi. 10.) "That no drunkard shall inherit the kingdom of God." A man must be in a perpetual drunkenness, that doth not discern the treachery of that wine which raises that mirth and jollity, which makes him forget the King of kings, and this inevitable sentence that he must undergo for that minute of contemptible mirth to which he sacrifices his miserable soul. What remedy can God himself prescribe against