Church Action on Temperance [pp. 595-632]

Church Action
very end of giving cavillers their chance, and testing their fairness or perverseness; as he himself declares, "that seeing
they mnight not see, and hearing they might not understand."
Luke viii. 10. We can barely touch this great and difficult
subject. Our only object is to call attention to its difficulties
and the exceeding danger of any hasty or heedless disposition of
it; to caution against definitions of temptation that by logical
consequence would make God and Christ tempters to,in, not
in this matter merely, but in the whole course of administration in the realms of Nature, Providence, and Grace; against
laying down terms of membership in the Church which would
bar out the Head of the Church, and especially to show the necessity and safety of those deliverances of past Assemblies which,
refusing to say that the making, selling, or use of intoxicating
liquors as such in all circumstances is a disciplinable offence because it tempts men to sin, direct the various church courts to deal
with each separate case according to its own circumnstanceg, and
judge whether it evinces a guilty complicity with the promotion
of intemperance or not.
These views will be confirmed if we consider how far our
definitions of what constitutes guilty and disciplinable tempting, if good and sound, will hold in application to other departments of human conduct, as well as what respects intoxicating
drinks. We will specify an instance or two: 1. We reproduce what we said in a former number (July,
1869, pp. 413, 414) on the enormity of the social and domestic
sins to which prevailing extravagance and luxury give birth,
and predicated in part upon what the Assembly of 1869 declared, and is unquestionably true, on the subject, viz.: That
for infanticide and its affiliated social evils this extravagance and
luxury are largely responsible. After enumerating several
causes of these abominations, the Assembly say, "' an influence
not less powerful than any of these is the growing devotion to
fashion and luxury of this age."
On which we remarked:
"There is no region in which good men are more in danger
of being misled by superficial and fanatical views, than in that
wherein God hlath called us unto liberty, at the same time
charging us not to use our liberty as an occasion to the flesh,
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