Church Action on Temperance [pp. 595-632]

on Temperance.
it was good for everything. As it is wrong for any man to
take poison as a beverage, so it is a sin to drink any wine or
cider, if they in any and every quantity are poisons. IHence
inevitably emerged what is known historically as the " Wine
Question," which is the third stage of this movement, and in
some of its aspects remains a quceastio vexata to this present.
The effect of this was not to arrest the tendency to make total
abstinence from all intoxicating drinks the common basis of
aggressive temperance movements, but to divide its adherents
into two classes, between whom earnest controversies have
hitherto been waged, because the principles involved are deemed
on both sides vital and fundamental. If alcohol, in any and
every combination, form, and degree of it, is poison, and all
drinking of any liquor as a beverage containing any portion
of it is sin, it follows that either the wine permitted, in its
moderate or sparing use in Scripture, and made by our Lord for
a wedding in his first miracle, is unfermented and unintoxicating,
or the Bible sanctions sin, our Saviour committed sin, and has
made a poison one of the elements to be imbibed by His people
at the sacrament of His love, in order to show forth His death
till He come. The second horn of this dilemma of course was
repudiated by all but infidels. But a small proportion of
Christian believers have been able to accept the former, or to
admit that the wine allowed in Scripture was unfermented; or,
taken in excess, unintoxicating, for reasons given in our last article, which need not be repeated here. The more judicious friends
of total abstinence, therefore, have not dared to put it in an attitude of antagonism to the Word of God, and which, by necessary implication, impeaches its morality, or that of our Lord,
or which sets it against the nearly universal historical belief
and the present scholarship of Christendom. By this they do
not mean to charge those who hold that the wines made by our
Lord, and allowed in Scripture, are unintoxicating, or that it is
sinful to drink intoxicating wine, intend to impeach His morality
or that of the Bible. It seems strange that it should be neces sary to say this, and yet it is needful to cut off occasion from
those who seek occasion to parry the force of argument by such
petty perversions and insinuations. All that we mean is, that,
on the supposition that the wine made and drank by Christ,
1871.]
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