Temperance by Kansas Methodist

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 11, 1883

Temperance.

By Kansas Methodist

The Gigantic Obstruction.

It becomes the duty of all philanthropists to inquire seriously, What are the chief hindrances to the progress of the race, especially its moral elevation, "for, if the foundations be removed, what can the righteous do?" All thoughtful people will admit the value, nay the absolute necessity of secure foundations in building, in business, in scholastic culture, and supremely so in morals and religion. Society is composed of the aggregation of individuals; churches of members. Every obstacle, then, which stands in the way of individual morality, lies directly across the path of the progress of society and the church.

The rum traffic is the gigantic obstruction. It is reasonably estimated that eighty thousand men die annually of the drink habit. For at least five years before they die they are effectually isolated from the church and gospel privileges by their habits. It is equally reasonable to suppose that for every one who dies there are five living men who are following so close in their wake that they are as effectually shut off from church society as are these eighty thousand dying men. Here then we have an alarming aggregate of humankind in our own land, who of choice and by habit are placing themselves beyond the reach of gospel privileges. Now if we take the eighty thousand dying, and multiply by the five who we believe are associates, it will give us in America four hundred and eighty thousand precious souls put beyond reach of the gospel; but in five years that eighty thousand have been associated with the great company who go down, annually, and their associates, or quite two million, who for the last past five years have been put beyond reach of the saving influences of Christianity, and schooled in the most faithful school of crime. Reader, imagine that in one year eighty thousand adults have been added to the Christian army, fifty thousand of them heads of families. It is reasonable to believe forty thousand wives and sixty thousand grown children would, with their fathers, be brought to Christ.

Who can compute the changed condition of society with such results? But the rumseller, more than all else, stands in the way of such results. Every church in the land should be awake to the destruction of this giant foe of human kind and God. —Kansas Methodist.