Temperance | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 20, 1883

Temperance.

Personal Liberty.

"THE Liberty Question," commonly so-called, as an argument against the legal suppression of the liquor traffic, affords an example of a perverted truth. We claim liberty of thought and speech and action. Our claim is a sound one, but we must remember that liberty can only be secured by the suppression of tyranny. Liberty for that which is good can only be attained by restricting the liberty of that which is bad. Honest men can freely walk the street in safety, because law prevents the dishonest man's interference with another's purse in life or character. Here law protects liberty, by restricting liberty. You do not plead for freedom for the poisonous snakes in the grass on which your children play. You want no liberty for wild beasts or mad dogs about your home; but you protect your children's liberty by destroying what would interfere with its exercise. If the strong drink traffic hinders and counteracts the purifying and ennobling work of church and school and home, then you can have liberty for church and school and home only by destroying what militates against their success, hampers every step they take, and undoes what they have already accomplished. We plead for prohibition in the sacred name of liberty. Good and evil are eternally antagonistic; one can exist only at the other's expense, and freedom for the right means suppression of the wrong; liberty for virtue means prison bars for crime; and when the grandest ideal of freedom prevails supreme, every man will have the right to do what he chooses only as far as he chooses to do what is right.—Canada Citizen.