Out from a sheltered, sunshiny home has gone the tender, trusting
daughter, in her glad girlhood, her heart all aglow with true
hallowed love for him, by whose side she has chosen to spend the
coming years. The future has looked so bright, as together they have
thought, and planned, and built their airy castles; but the clouds
have come and passed, and come again and more frequently, till, at
length, the young wife has sat continually in their shadow, the
brightness and the sunshine all gone out of her life, as her husband
has yielded to the influence of strong drink. She has realized that
she was a drunkard's wife, her place by a drunkard's side, and, with
white lips and breaking heart, she has moaned out her prayer to God
for deliverance. And who will say that the fond mother, sitting in
the old bright home, has not felt every pang, every blow that reached
the daughter's heart as she saw all that the dear one in loyalty to
her husband would fain have concealed. This experience comes home to
most of us, and we easily recall not one case but many in which wives
and daughters have suffered at the hands of this cruel destroyer.

Homes have been invaded, not with noise of drums and clash of arms,
but silently as by the stealthy step of death. Their purity and peace
have been destroyed, their idols laid in the dust, and the place that
was designed to be a sanctuary for humanity, a rest from the
weariness of life and a refuge from its storms, has become, instead,
a dreary abode of waiting and watching, of enduring and weeping,
often a very Gethsemane to patient loving souls. In time the domestic
life of families is destroyed by this enemy, so strong, cruel and
determined; in many cases, the elegant abode gives place to a poorer
one; the comfortable dwelling is exchanged for all that is
comfortless and forbidding, and there is no longer a home. Cardinal
Manning, in his address at the temperance congress recently held in