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The Great Work, and Those Who Can Do It.

By the Rev. Professor Kirk, Edinburgh.

Adapted.

New Zealand Good Templar Tracts, No. 3.

The thoughtful Temperance Reformer, when he looks on the one hand to the comparative smallness of the Temperance forces, and on the other to the vast power on the side of the liquor traffic, naturally asks how that small force is ever to conquer that mighty interest. His question may be satisfactorily answered. But it is not possible to give such answer without pointing out a very great increase of work that must yet be done. . . . One, I think, mast be deeply impressed with the truth that an immense amount of actual personal labour is required in order to ensure the final triumph of our cause. In order to reach this object at all, it is absolutely necessary to point out that gap in our efforts which cannot be filled by anything but the personal work of the Good Templars. The gap is to be filled by workers whom no money can buy, and workers to be found nowhere else than in Good Templar Lodges. We feel most deeply that among the Good Templars the hands are to be found by which by far the most valuable work needed in this great struggle is to be done. Sober thought on the subject cannot fail to direct the minds of all our true men and women in the direction of this Order.

The personal labour to which we are directing attention should be brought into play. It is this which makes us earnestly desire to see those who have place and power in the great movement directing their force, not vaguely toward the general mass of men, but specially to those by whose personal work in the long ran the cause must be victorious. If a man can get twenty or thirty of his fellows to work at his suggestion, or by means of his influence constantly brought to bear on them, it is surely better than if he should do ever so much himself personally. He may thus speak through thirty voices instead of one, or work by sixty hands instead of having only two. Then, if a cause can enlist four or five thousand agents, and bring them all to act in concert, it is surely better than if it secured only one or two at most. Let us suppose that an agent speaks to an average of 500 persons each week—the majority of these are persons already informed on our great subject—say he reaches 100 to whom the question is new. That is putting the case very strongly. A hundred agents, at this rate, would have 10,000 under instruction in a week; they would reach something like 500,000 in a year. Let us assume that our Order numbers 5000 members; that each person of the 5000 shall reach one a week; that is 52 a year, and we have not less than 260,000 brought under instruction by such an agency. This is something like what is demanded of us, and the Good Templar Order is every way adapted to the work. If the leaders of the Temperance movement see it well to throw their hearts into this organisation, so as to take advantage of it to the uttermost, the agency fitted to give them a force of teaching which they have never yet employed is ready to their hand. Where the guidance of the work is in the hands of such as are inexperienced, or too volatile to value the right sort of labour, nothing could be more easy than for the older hands to come and take the helm. But even without this, the power of these Lodges for good is incalculable. There is no lack of willingness for that right kind of effort which is most needed—that is, house to house visitation, with suitable tracts for the information of the mass of the people. In a number of Lodges, in the country especially, this has been undertaken, so that not a person escapes such attention as cannot fail in the end to make those who are indifferent now both earnest and intelligent ere long. It is a great thing to find that we can carry an election because of Temperance sentiment prevailing in an Electoral District, and so add one more to our list at a division in Parliament; but so long as the expenditure of money on the publican aide can carry almost any number of ignorant voters to the poll—men who do not know, even at the booth, what to say till they are prompted by those who take them there—our success is ever precarious. We must have such a general enlightenment of the mass as will make them proof against all such treatment, and we may have this by a sufficient system of personal dealing, such as the Good Templar Order is ready to supply.