And here again, there must be the same true antithesis between drunkenness and spiritual fulness.  The propriety of this opposition lies in the intensity of feeling produced in both, cases.  There is one intensity of feeling produced by stimulating the senses, another by vivifying the spiritual life within.  The one commences with impulses from without, the other is guarded by forces from within.  Here then is the similarity, and here the dissimilarity, which constitutes the propriety of the contrast.  One is ruin, the other salvation.  One degrades, the other exalts.  This contrast then is our subject for to-day.

I. The effects are similar.  On the day of Pentecost, when the first influences of the Spirit descended on the early Church, the effects resembled intoxication.  They were full of the Spirit, and mocking bystanders said, “These men are full of new wine;” for they found themselves elevated into the ecstasy of a life higher than their own, possessed of powers which they could not control; they spoke incoherently and irregularly; to the most part of those assembled, unintelligibly.

Now compare with this the impression produced upon savage nations—­suppose those early ages in which the spectacle of intoxication was presented for the first time.  They saw a man under the influence of a force different from and in some respects inferior to, their own.  To them the bacchanal appeared a being half inspired; his frenzy seemed a thing for reverence and awe, rather than for horror and disgust; the spirit which possessed him must be they thought, divine; they deified it, worshipped it under different names as a god; even to a clearer insight the effects are wonderfully similar.  It is almost proverbial among soldiers that the daring produced by wine is easily mistaken for the self-devotion of a brave heart.

The play of imagination in the brain of the opium-eater is as free as that of genius itself, and the creations produced in that state by the pen or pencil are as wildly beautiful as those owed to the nobler influences.  In years gone by, the oratory of the statesman in the senate has been kindled by semi-intoxication, when his noble utterances were set down by his auditors to the inspiration of patriotism.

It is this very resemblance which deceives the drunkard:  he is led on by his feelings as well as by his imagination.  It is not the sensual pleasure of the glutton that fascinates him; it is those fine thoughts and those quickened sensibilities which were excited in that state, which he is powerless to produce out of his own being, or by his own powers, and which he expects to reproduce by the same means.  The experience of our first parent is repeated in him:  at the very moment when he expects to find