importers, and wholesale liquor dealers in his congregation. In his public discourses elsewhere, he freely expressed his opinions against the entire system of making, selling, and drinking intoxicating liquors. Some of his people, largely engaged in the business, and possessed of immense wealth, resolved to compel

him to vacate his pulpit. Charges were trumped up seriously affecting his character, and the matter, in due form, came before a council. Against these atrocious charges Mr. Pierpont was fully vindicated, and his reputation remained untainted. But the case awakened great attention as an illustration of the malice and vindictiveness of the rum

REV. JOHN PIERPONT

party against a faithful man and earnest spirited minister.

Rev. Thomas P. Hunt was widely known in a large section of the country, chiefly from Pennsylvania southward, as a conspicuous and effective temperance lecturer. A native of Virginia, and a graduate of Hampden Sidney College, he studied theology under Rev. Drs. Moses Hodge and John B. Rice. Dr. Rice was a man of advanced temperance ideas, and persuaded Mr. Hunt, that, when licensed to preach, he would improve all proper occasions to preach against intemperance. When the National Temperance Society was organized, Mr. Hunt was already laboring in this cause. In 1830, he accepted

the offer of Agent for the State Temperance Society of North Carolina. His labors were diversified, but very acceptable and successful until impaired health compelled him to desist. He

was widely known as "The Drunkard's Friend," and "The Liquor Seller's Vexation." To sustain himself in his declaration in regard to the frauds of the liquor traffic, which were incredible to many, and had been pronounced slanderous by the dealers, he sent to London and obtained brewers' guides, distillers' and wine-makers' receipt books, from which he ex

posed with telling effect the secrets of the infernal machinery of drunkard-making.

REV. GEORGE B. CHEEVER, D. D.,

was another able and effective champion of this cause. In 1835, while a young man, pastor of a church in Salem, Mass., he published a "dream," entitled "Deacon Giles' Distillery," which was a masterly exposé of the character and influence of the liquor business. A certain deacon, who was a distiller, and sold Bibles in his distillery, had a relative drowned in one of his vats; and a son, who had been very intemperate, thinking that he was the object of the satire, resorted to a process at law. The personal and legal attacks to which Mr. Cheever was subjected called forth a considerable amount of childish whining from timid men, and scores of apologies from the over-prudent.

It was, nevertheless, one of the most masterly, timely, and effective blows ever inflicted upon the liquor traffic. The ladies of Salem, who felt that Mr. Cheever had championed the cause of their homes and their most precious earthly interests, carpeted his room in the jail, sent him, day by day, choice dinners, and regaled him as though a royal prisoner.

The fact was chronicled by the press throughout the country, that a learned and popular clergyman in Salem was in jail for writing an ingenious and caustic article, exposing the character and influence of the liquor business. Great was the curiosity every-where to see the production which had aroused such an ebullition of rum-wrath, and "Deacon Giles' Distillery" was reproduced all over the country in the columns of the public journals. Thus its truths went every-where. The result was that so far from the press being muzzled in the interest of liquor, it was more widely opened.

On his liberation, in nowise daunted, Mr. Cheever's attention was turned to a brewery, and published a squib "Deacon Jones' Brewery; or, the Distiller Turned Brewer." Demons were represented as dancing around the boiling caldron, and casting in the most noxious and poisonous drugs:

"Round about the caldron go,

In the poisoned entrails throw;
Drugs that in the coldest veins
Shoot incessant pains;

Herbs that, brought from hell's back door,

Do their business slow and sure."

LUCIUS M. SARGENT, ESQ.

Another temperance champion of those days, whose influence was very widely extended through the press, was Lucius M. Sargent, Esq., author of the celebrated "Temperance Tales." Inheriting wealth, receiving a collegiate and a legal education, he never practiced law, but was led by his tastes to the department of literature. He was deeply enlisted in the Temperance Reform, and employed his facile pen in a way

that carried temperance principles, in the form of attractive stories, into numerous social circles. His "John Hodges, the

Blacksmith," "Grog

gery Harbor," "Fritz Hazel," "My Mother's Gold Ring," and other delightful tales, are temperance classics. The last was translated into German as early as 1837, and published by the Hamburg Tract Society. Thousands, prior to 1840, had been converted to the practice of abstinence by the perusal of his writings. The stories were all genuine histories embellished. Not only in the composition of

temperance tales, but in many other ways, did he, by pen and tongue, serve this great cause.

REV. EDWARD T. TAYLOR.

Another notable champion of the reform, for some thirty years after 1826, was Rev. Edward T. Taylor, pastor of the Mariner's Church of Boston. A man of strange idiosyncracies, of vivid imagination, and often of entrancing power over his audiences-an announcement that he would speak always drew a large congregation. His philippics against the rum traffic were terrific, and his wit was of the keenest. His sudden descents from the sublime were sometimes strangely apt and telling, as on the following occasion:

The ladies of Charlestown, Mass., had invited him to speak at a temperance gathering, almost under the very shadow of

the Bunker Hill Monument. In the midst of a powerful appeal, he said:

Your poor-houses are full, and your courts and prisons are filled with victims of this infernal rum traffic, and your houses are full of sorrow, and the hearts of your wives and mothers; and yet the system is tol

erated. Yes! and when we ask some men what is to be done about it, they tell you, you can't stop it! No, you can't stop it! and yet [darting across the platform, and pointing in the direction of the monument, he exclaimed in a voice that pierced one's ears like a trumpet] there is Bunker Hill! and you say you can't stop it-and up yonder is Lexington and Concord, where your fathers fought for the right and bled and died