human
To conclude: The first miracle, wonder Divine, Wasn't wine changed to water, but water to wine, That wine of the Kingdom, the water of life Transmuted, with every new excellence rife, The wine to make glad both body and soul, To cheer up the sad, and make the sick whole. And when the Redeemer was seen among men, He drank with the sinners and publicans then, Exemplar of Temperance, yea, to the sot, In use of good wine, but abusing it not! We dare not pretend to do better than He; But follow the Master, as servants made free To touch, taste, and handle, to use, not abuse, All good to receive, but all ill to refuse! It is thus the true Christian with temperance lives, Giving God thanks for the wine that He gives.
gpt
Yes, certainly, drink as much wine made of water as you can. It was a witty quip, but is no reply to that miracle of hospitality. _Apropos_,--I do not know whether or not the following anecdote can be fathered on Mr. Gough, but it is too good to be lost, especially as it bears upon the fate of a poor old friend of mine in past days who was fatally a victim to total abstinence. The story goes that a teetotal lecturer, in order to give his audience ocular proof of the poisonous character of alcohol, first magnifies the horrible denizens of stagnant water by his microscope, and then triumphantly kills them all by a drop or two of brandy! As if this did not prove the wholesomeness of _eau de vie_ in such cases. If, for example, my poor friend above, the eminent Dr. Hodgkin of Bedford Square, had followed his companion's example, the still more eminent Moses Montefiore, by mixing water far too full of life with the brandy that killed them for him, he would not have died miserably in Palestine, eaten of worms as Herod was! Another such instance I may here mention. When I visited the cemetery of Savannah, Florida, in company with an American cousin, I noticed it graven on the marble slab of a relation of ours, a Confederate officer, to the effect that