The Sentinel and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.
By A. T. J.
The following letter is from a thorough-going National Reformer. We willingly give it space. EDITORS AMERICAN SENTINEL: Your last month’s article, under the head of “The AMERICAN SENTINEL and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union,” and signed “A. T. J.,” will bear criticism; and I hope you will permit a friend of the Woman’s Union to write a word in their defense. 1. Your assertion that the W. C. T. U. is in favor of using the civil power to compel people to favor or to practice Christian temperance, or to compel people to conform to the principles of temperance, is unfair because it is untrue. No temperance society known to the writer is “in favor of using the civil power to compel anybody either to favor or to practice” temperance. Yet all agree that no license should be granted to sell liquor to common drinkers. But there is a vast difference between “compelling people to favor or practice temperance” and compelling men to desist from selling poison to people who wish to poison themselves. 3. You err when you say that “Christian principle knows no power but the power of God as manifested in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.” This is a grave error. There is a divine power in law as well as in the gospel. God is the Author of both. “The powers that be are ordained of God.” That means civil powers. “There is no power but of God.” This, too, includes civil power. “He beareth not the sword in vain.” This means the civil men; and he who “resisteth the power resisteth the ordinance of God.” If civil government has not the power to pass civil law to prohibit the liquor traffic, then it bears the sword in vain. “The law was made for man-stealers.” This means civil law. And there is power as well as majesty in law, because all righteous law is from God, the source of all power. And “rulers,” civil rulers, legislators, governments, “are not a terror to good works, but to the evil.” The SENTINEL knows very well what kind of works, whether good or evil, are perpetrated by saloonists. The women are worthy of commendation, not of censure, for endeavoring to bring the power of civil law to bear against saloons. Your charge against the W. C. T. U. is unjust. All temperance prohibitionists wish the power of law to be brought to bear against the ruinous traffic. And why should not Christian women, as well as Christian men, desire civil prohibition? Why are you so “decidedly opposed” to such “political aspirations of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union”? That I may not occupy too much of your space, what I wish to say further in defense79of the women must be deferred until your next number. Mr. Johnston’s denial on behalf of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union will not answer. It is not sound. The National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union Convention of 1887 declared “Christ and his law to be the supreme authority in National as in individual life,” and in other places it is added, “to whose laws all human laws should conform.” Human laws are made to be enforced; if not enforced they are a nullity. If therefore the law of Christ is of supreme authority in National life, and human laws are to conform to it, then the enforcement of such laws can be nothing else than to compel men to practice Christian duties, whether of temperance or any other. Our assertion is only the logic of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union premises. It is therefore neither unfair nor untrue. We know full well that “the powers that be are ordained of God,” we also know that though they are ordained of God, they are not ordained to exercise any authority in things which pertain to God. The civil powers are ordained only to the exercise of power in civil things, and not at all in moral or religious things. “Christian women as well as Christian men” should “desire civil prohibition;” but it is essentially religious prohibition that is desired by both the W. C. T. U. and the Prohibition party, and not the religious prohibition of the liquor traffic alone, but the religious prohibition of things that are not irreligious nor even uncivil. And that is why we are “so ‘decidedly opposed’ ” to the political aspirations of the W. C. T. U., and the religious aspirations of the Prohibition party.
A. T. J.