p. 3 | One Vast Grog Shop

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 21, 1870

One Vast Grog Shop.

SENATOR WILSON declared in public that we have now five hundred thousand drunkards in the country; and Mr. Murry, with a terrible earnestness, declares: “Bear me witness if I exaggerate when I say that the country is rapidly becoming one vast grog-shop, to which half a million of its youth are introduced, and over whose threshold sixty thousand are annually carted to a drunkard’s grave.” With these facts before us, it is easy to see that a desperate and fearful struggle is at hand. Will the Christianity of this age, the moral conscience of the country, meet and defeat this tidal wave of hell? We shall see. Thus far, heedless of law, careless of death or the Judgment, bidding defiance to all restraint, and all appeal, crime, drunkenness and murder stalk right on, bold and impudent, mocking all hope of reform or better days.

These are not the ages of darkness, nor are we writing of heathen lands, such as India, where Archdeacon Jeffries declares that “for every person truly converted to Christianity, the drinking practices of the English have made fully a thousand drunkards,” but of countries whose united ministry would perhaps reach a hundred thousand, and where Bibles are as thick as the green leaves of summer. If these things be done in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry? Alas, man is proving himself, every day, incapable of governing the earth, and the great want of the times is “another king, one Jesus,” to rule over the world in everlasting righteousness.

It is our solemn conviction that this Carnival of Crime, this Age of Murder, this sad era, when a country of nearly forty millions of free, enlightened people has become one vast grog-shop, this overflowing wickedness of the careless multitudes, is the predicted iniquity of the waning years of time that was to come to its full tide, not only as proceeding from the depravity of human nature, but also from the increased activity and the intense anger of Satan, who is the prince of this kingdom of darkness;—and that the Last Days, with all their foretold deluge of evil are upon the world, and that the coming of the Lord is near. And it is our deliberate opinion that the crimes of this last age are provoking the most terrific judgments on cities and countries, and that before long there will be such calamities and catastrophes in the earth as will cause the ears of men to tingle when they hear the tale. The Judge has said, “As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed;” and in Noah’s time, just anterior to the world’s destruction, not only was man’s heart given to continual sin and evil, but this inward evil overflowed until “the whole earth was filled with violence.”

And while there remains for the pure and good one blessed hope, namely, the coming of Jesus to the everlasting joy of all those who love his appearing, there waits for the impenitent, the prayerless, and the persistently wicked, the nearing Judgment throne, the solemn Depart, and the fiery lake. In view of these things we cry to the child of God, Stand fast! and in the ears of drunken, bloody men, proclaim God’s law, “Thou shalt not kill;” “Woe unto him that puteth the bottle to his neighbor’s lips and maketh him drunken;” “No drunkard shall inherit the kingdom of God;” “No murderer hath eternal life in him;” but “murderers shall have their part in the lake of fire, which is the second death.”

Thus saith God: REPENT!