Church Action on Temperance [pp. 595-632]

on Temperance.
by its own constitution, that does not involve disobedience to
and rebellion against God. The only sphere in which the
framing and administering of law in the premises devolve in
any degree directly upon us is in the Faculty of the College of
New Jersey. With all our associates in authority here we join
in enactments prohibiting the use of intoxicating drinks, as
likewise of fire-arms and other like things in that institution.
This creates an obligation on the part of the students to refrain
from them as prohibited by competent authority.
For the same reason it is clear that the mere doing or not doing a thing indifferent cannot be erected into a test of piety, a
term of communion, or ground of Church discipline. It is only
articulating more definitely and expressly vlwhat has already been
said. He that eateth and he that eateth not are not to judge
one another. They are to receive whom God has received,
however weak in the faith, and not to refuse or cast out those
whom Christ does not cast out, or to make that a bar to coinmnunion which He does not.
Here we reach what we deem the weak point in the argument of the deliverance of the 0. S. Assembly of'65, an able,
extended, and elaborate paper, arguing some of the most intricate questions of Christian casuistry, which have long tasked
and perplexed the masters in this department; issuing them
with little or no opportunity for debate, in an assembly greatly
reduced at the heel of the session, impatient to leave, the doubting or opposed members preferring, in the hurry and impatience
of the moment, to let the paper pass, with this most convenient
sort of go-by, to showing their hand in opposition when there
was no opportunity to show their reasons, and no alternative
consequently but to reap the usual reward of fidelity to truthl
in such cases-being held up to opprobrium by ultraists, as allies
of tipplers and tippling-shops. If this course is not most courageous, it is very common in such cases. And of the reaffirmation of it in subsequent General Assemblies, the same thiiing, for
substance may be said.
But to the distinguishing point of this paper: it agrees.
with the maturer declarations of previous 0. S. Assemblies,
that the making and selling of intoxicating drinks is not,
in its own nature, and hence as such, in all circumstances
1871.]
615