MORE TEMPERANCE FACTS AND AN OPINION.
YOUR recent editorial on temperance, with all its excellences, I fear will give a wrong impression to many who seek for some excuse for the dangerous habit of moderate drinking, especially by the statement, "The Bible does not treat the drinking of fermented liquors as a sin." There are very many sins, such as gambling, and betting, and others peculiar to our day, or appearing in far more aggravated forms than in the past, which the Bible does not condemn by name, but only by the fair application of its general principles. It is not a single passage here and there in the Bible, nor a single event in Christ's life that shows the relation of Christianity to the use of wine, but the whole current of Christ's life and the whole tendency of Bible teaching. What does the Bible as a whole teach in regard to needless indulgences that may bring harm to us and danger to others? There can be no doubt as to the answer. The dictionary and common sense both teach that temperance means moderation in the indulgence of right appetites and passions. There can be no temperance in wrong indulgences—no temperate thieving, or temperate adultery. Temperance means such self-control that one will indulge only in moderation in what is right, and restrain himself altogether from what is wrong. Is the use of wine and alcoholic liquors wrong in itself? We assume that it is wrong for one to do anything unnecessary which is likely to endanger the health and life of himself and others. It would be wrong for a man to manufacture, sell, or use an article of food for dogs which, on being introduced through the country, would cause 100,000 out of the millions of dogs in the land to go mad every year, with the consequent loss of human life. It would be wrong to use such an article, even if the dogs liked it; even though many dogs that used it escaped from the worst consequences; wrong, because any dog to which it was fed might become mad and imperil or destroy life. The use of alcoholic liquors in our land, in at least one hundred thousand cases every year, makes men into drunkards, into mad dogs, the terror of home and street. The use of alcohol as a beverage imperils life, but life may rightly be imperiled in some cases for a necessity of life. Is alcohol such a necessity? No one, not even the exceptional physicians who array themselves against the declaration of the "International Medical Congress of 1876," that "alcohol is not shown to have any definite food value"—no one would assert that any alcoholic liquor is a necessity of life to persons in health. It is wrong, then, for any one to encourage by his example the use of alcohol as a beverage, since it is not a necessity of life, and is sure to bring disaster and death to many who take it. The theory of being temperance men and helpers to the cause without total abstinence, has been thoroughly tested and found wanting. In 1600 a temperance society was organized that pledged its members not to get drunk except on public days. This society amounted to nothing. In 1700, another society was formed in New York that fined its members twenty-five cents a week for each instance of drunkenness. This also died, a failure. The history of temperance is strewn with such wrecks of attempted moderation. Nothing enduring has ever been done to help the cause of temperance on any standard less than total abstinence. As to the theory of beer and wine being harmless, who has not read Bismarck's recent lament that his beer-drinking countrymen have made a "national scandal" by their increasing drunkenness. In our climate, politics, and society, such drinks are yet more harmful. Who can name a drunkard whose degradation was not reached by the door of wine or beer? Distilled liquors are the cataract, but fermented liquors are the rapids above where the victims are drawn into the fatal current. As a professional criminal may have many aliases and disguises, so the maddening poison, alcohol, named from the ancient fiend, Al Gohol, appears at one time as beer, and at another as whisky, but in every instance it is the same poison. In several glasses of the fermented liquors one can take as much of the crazing poison into blood and brain as in one of distilled liquor. Foolish pride in small men cries as the poison glass is lifted, "I've too strong a will to be a drunkard." Wisdom says, as the glass is declined, in the words of the great Dr. Johnson, "I can abstain; I can't be moderate." —W. F. Crafts, in Christian Union.