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The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, November 12, 1867

HOG AND LIQUOR.

We find the following villainous receipt in a religious exchange: “How to cook a ham. Boil a ham for three hours, remove the skin, and trim it nicely, then rub into the fat a pound of powdered sugar, or as much as it will take up. The ham is then placed in a dripping pan, in which is put a pint of sherry, or other good wine, and put into the oven and baked very slowly for two hours. During the baking it is frequently basted with the wine. Try this, and we are confident you will say that you have never before eaten ham in its greatest perfection.”

There! If the great Enemy of the human race is not the cook, we are sure that he could not fix up the above dish any more to his purpose. Dr. Clarke used to say that if he wished to sacrifice to the Devil, his offering would be a pig stuffed with tobacco! How much better is pig steeped in liquor? The scavenger of this dirty world, the living embodiment of scrofula, steamed up and intensified with an intoxicating liquid! What a compound! Could the pit itself invent a viler and more pernicious article to be used as food! Give our degenerate race such a diet as this, let it vitiate their blood, and set on fire of hell all their baser passions, and who will answer for temperance and morals? Yet a religious paper recommends to its patrons such an article of food, the tendency of which is to lead directly down to the black depths of intemperance, and blunt and blast all the moral sensibilities of our nature, because, forsooth, it tastes good to a depraved and perverted appetite. “Try it,” it says, and promises that it will be found the “greatest perfection.” Such advice may be given in ignorance, but it is none the less criminal.