Church Action on Temperance [pp. 595-632]

on Temperance.
an evil so enormous as the intemperance which begins with
moderate drinking, unless all drinking, making, and vending
intoxicating liquors be treated as a sin in its own nature; or, at
any rate, disciplinable, if not as a sin per se, yet as always
tempting men to sin. This ground most of them perceive
cannot be taken, so long as the wines of Scripture made by
Christ, and by Him constituted the sacramental symbol of His
blood, and not forbidden as to their moderate use, were intoxicating. Hence the persistent efforts of exegetical ingenuity to
worm another meaning out of them. They have first concluded
that wine which taken in excess may intoxicate is so abominable a thing, that the Saviour never could have made it, used
it, or allowed it in any circumstances; and that if He did, no
sufficient motive could be brought to bear upon men to abstain
from it under altered circumstances. They even speak of it as
an abomination and a marvel for any Christian minister to hold
what ninety-nine hundredths of all ministers and Christians do
believe and have believed on this subject. And then they set
themselves to find out some exegetical process that shall grind
that meaning out of the Scripture. This is one way. It is
another, and far more exellent, to take the Word of God
in its plain and obvious sense, and to trust and conform to it,
even if it confound us by its mysteries.
Dr. Herrick Johnson declares, that "the doctrine of Christian
expediency in its application to the wine question (on the hypothesis that Christ made fermented wine at Cana), is not worth a
puff of empty air." * Perhaps this is so with reference to Dr.
Johnson's view of this question. St. Paul, however, made another
deliverance: "It is good neither to eat meat, nor DRINK WINE,
nor anything whereby thy brother stumblethl, or is offended, or
is made weak." Tens and hundreds of thousands of Christians
have been swayed by it, and felt it good for this reason not to
drink wine, without undertakilng to judge those who think and
do otherwise as to its temperate use. Nearly all abstinence
firom intoxicating drinks in Christian society is practised on this
ground. If there were no other difference between our present
circumstances and those of our Saviour's day, there is not only
* New York Evangedit of April 20.
1871.]
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