LECTURES

ON

TEMPERANCE,

BY

ELIPHALET NOTT, D. D., LL. D.,

PRESIDENT OF UNION COLLEGE.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION

BY

TAYLER LEWIS, LL. D.,

PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN UNION COLLEGE.

EDITED BY

AMASA McCOY,

LATE EDITOR OF "THE PROHIBITIONIST."

NEW-YORK:

SHELDON, BLAKEMAN & CO., 115 NASSAU STREET.

BOSTON: GOULD & LINCOLN.

CHICAGO: S. C. GRIGGS & COMPANY.

LONDON: TRUBNER & CO.

1857.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year MDCCCLVII., in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Northern District of NewYork, by SHELDON, BLAKEMAN & Co.

AUG 3 1905

WEED, PARSONS & Co., Printers and Stereotypers,

Albany.

56200

PREFACE.

THE Temperance Reform long since engaged sufficient learn ing and talent in its advocacy to rescue it from contempt. This vast agitation, which for more than a third of a century has stirred the mind and the heart of society, has evolved a literature of its own, which is more than respectable. Yet of the tens of thousands of speeches, sermons, addresses and lectures; the editorials, reports and prize essays; the papers, tracts, pamphlets and volumes which this prolonged and arduous discussion has elicited, there are no productions on this subject which are marked with so much learning, eloquence and wisdom, as these eleven Lectures by President NOTT.

The mature fruits of the orator, who, at the age of thirty, pronounced a discourse on the death of Hamilton, which has made him famous for eloquence ever since-the wise and efficient President, ever since that year (1804), of Union College the beloved and honored preceptor of fifty-three successive classes of collegians, and now a patriarch hardly less of Temperance than of education; the mature fruits of so gifted, so experienced, so profound, so sagacious an intellect; the vivacity and fervor of the author's style; the beautiful truth-seeking spirit which marks his investigations, his tireless patience of research, his unfailing charity and candor to all opponents, his devout deference to the teachings of the Holy Scriptures, and last, but not least, his own great personal renown; these circumstances unite to concentrate upon these Lectures a degree of interest and attention which is commanded by no other volume on this vast social reform; a social reform, let it be added, which, more than all others combined, engrosses the thoughts and the feelings, the hopes and the fears, of this generation of men.