Why and how: a hand-book for the use of the W.C.T. unions in Canada | Page 2

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 England, says: "As the foundation they laid deep in the earth was the solid basis of social and political peace, so the domestic life of millions of our people is the foundation of the whole order of our commonwealth. I charge upon this great traffic nine-tenths of the misery and the destroyed and wrecked homes of our joyless people." What is true in England is also true in our young country. The "Boys' Homes" and "Girls' Homes" in our large cities furnish evidence of our destroyed homes. It is safe to say that nine-tenths of the inmates of these institutions are there provided with a home at the expense of the public, because strong drink has robbed them of the love and care of father and mother, or both, and taken from their innocent childhood all the delights and happiness of home life. As women, age after age, beheld their loved ones thus taken from them, and saw their homes in the hands of this destroyer, it was not strange that at last there arose from their hearts a cry almost of despair. It was a cry that entered into the ear of God and brought a dim sense of coming help, a consciousness that God knew and cared and had something better in reserve. The plough of pain had torn up the fallow soil of woman's heart; the harrow of suffering had mellowed, and tears of agony, wept for ages, had moistened it; now the seed of thoughtful and determined purpose was ready to be sown, out of which was to spring the plentiful harvest of action.
Behind were the long dreary wastes of agony, marked with the myriad grave mounds of lost loved ones, over which woman's face had bowed low, while the heart within was breaking; before stretched the wide unknown, full of possibilities. Should it unfold the same sad story of patient, passive' suffering, or grow bright with the burnished armor and glad with the hopeful songs of women gathering to the battle, filed against the fell destroyer of their hopes? As the Spirit of God brooded over the primeval void and brought therefrom order, light, beauty and life, so the spirit of suffering brooded above the torn and saddened heart of womanhood, till at last the angel of awakening appeared, and the heart that had dumbly, patiently endured, stirred to the impulse of defence, and opened to the thought of freedom. The hour had struck, the call had come. The "arrow had been hidden in God's quiver," waiting His time. When His ringers guide to the mark, what can the arrow do but fulfil its mission?

CHAPTER II.
AWAKENING.
In the history of oppressed nations, it has often happened that years of suffering have but kindled the desire for freedom and kept it alive, fanned by every fresh act of cruelty and injustice, until, at last, it has burst forth in a fire, which has destroyed the wrong, illuminated the right, and the oppressed people have gone free.
In individual lives, there are not wanting those who have come through the white heat of affliction, purified and made free from the bitterness and selfishness of earth and crowned with a noble purpose-- to relieve the sufferings of others, to be, in a sense, God's voice, God's messenger to the helpless, and to be in His hands for the deliverance of the oppressed and enslaved. So in this temperance cause. For years women had asked, as Paul had asked, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" and it had seemed that the answer