Temperance Institute.
13 October 1845

Sir,
You are requested to attend a meeting of the members, of the Institute Academy Street, on Tuesday Evening at 8 o'Clock; to a soiree by invitation of Very Rev T. MathewMathew, Theobald

Regarded in Ireland as the “Apostle of Temperance,“ Father Theobald Mathew (1790–1856) was born in County Tipperary to a family related to the local landed gentry. He was a Franciscan friar of the Capuchin Order and, after his ordination in 1814, was assigned to a mission in Cork, where he became popular for his charitable activities in behalf of the Catholic poor. In April 1838, after his conversion to temperance, he founded the Total Abstinence Society of Cork, which discountenanced the use of spirits except for medicinal purposes. It is said that Mathew personally converted six million of the Irish people to teetotalism. Douglass witnessed one ceremony where one thousand postulants took the pledge from Mathew. As famine ravaged southern Ireland in the 1840s, Mathew devoted most of his energy to feeding and caring for the destitute. After Mathew’s death the Irish temperance movement faded rapidly. Rogers, Theobald Mathew, James Bermingham, A Memoir of the Very Rev. Theobald Mathew, with an Account of the Rise and Progress of Temperance in Ireland (New York, 1841), 15–114; Harrison, Drink and the Victorians. 103, 126, 165–68, 130, 211, 334, 390; Douglass to Garrison, 16 September 1845, in Lib., 10 October 1845. President J. Russell Hon. Sec.
NB Mr F^r Douglass will attend

R & J Armstrong, Printers, Cork.

I send two tickets for friends
You will please to wear your Collar