Temperance | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Aug 3, 1882

Temperance.

THE full moral significance of the temperance conflict is gradually revealing itself. The connection between drunkenness and falsehood is thus set forth by Dr. B. W. Richardson of London—confessedly at the head of the medical profession in the Old World: “I am President of a society called ‘The Medical Temperance Association.’ There are three hundred of us banded together as Total Abstainers—by physicians and surgeons in large practice—not to make a propaganda of Total Abstinence, but to meet among ourselves and discuss the points which are most interesting to us in the treatment of disease.

A little while ago the question came up as to the treatment of dipsomania. We had a very remarkable discussion on this subject, and what struck me as I was presiding was, that everybody who spoke dealt with the moral aspect of the question. We were all of this mind, that one of the most diagnostic marks of drink-craving, that which distinguishes it as a mental characteristic from all other things, is that the drink-craver is always a falsehood-teller; that there is no actual case where a person affected with the drink-craving has been known to speak the truth; that we never can believe a word they say, and many of us are of the opinion that the tendency of untruthfulness descends to the children of these people.

See how solemnly strange it is that a physical agent should be taken into the body which should, after a time, so destroy all moral sense of right, and thought of responsibility, that the very foundation of morality is actually so changed that the person becomes, as it were, naturally and habitually the child and representative of falsehood. These are facts which were not known twenty years ago, and which must in the end tell largely as they are made known in the promotion of our cause.”—Selected.