The Drunkard's Funeral Sermon: the Substance of an Address Before an Annual Union Temperance Meeting

The Drunkard's Funeral Sermon: The Substance Of An Address Before An Annual Union Temperance Meeting. A Massachusetts clergyman presents a funeral sermon delivered at a temperance gathering, contrasting the virtuous life with the ruin wrought by alcohol and detailing the impact of intemperance on a widow and her children. The work uses a mock obituary and vivid, moralizing rhetoric to condemn drinking, describe the dangers, and urge public reform. It characterizes alcohol as the most fatal invention and employs biblical and apocalyptic imagery to exhort listeners to abstain, support the afflicted, and join the temperance movement. Though framed as guidance for the living, the text serves as a window into early 19th-century reform rhetoric and its social costs. Originally published in 1840 in Massachusetts (Woburn) by J. V. Pierce.