Temperance by F. G. M'Cauley

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Aug 23, 1883

Temperance.

By F. G. M'Cauley

Personal Liberty.

The cry of the liquor faction is that all attempts of the people to prohibit their unholy traffic are attacks on personal liberty. But who is it that is making so much ado about "personal liberty?" Is it the poor inebriate, who feels a hell within him, destroying body, intellect, and soul; robbing him of happiness in this world, and of all hopes of peace in the next? Is he afraid his personal liberty is about to be curtailed? Is it the wife, who sees him whom she has promised to "love and cherish" going to poverty, ruin, and degradation? Is it the child, who sees its parent, besotted and bestial, robbing him of his birthright of morals, patrimony, an education, a place in society, a good name? Is it the citizen, who pays double or treble the amount of taxes he otherwise would pay, because of the prevalence of this so-called "personal liberty" of men to debauch and make criminals of themselves? Is it society, which has to care for the inebriate, build alms-houses, insane and lunatic asylums, hospitals and the various eleemosynary institutions to care for those who are directly or indirectly the victims of intemperance? Is it Christianity, with its high purpose of saving men, soul and body, and with its noble humanity, which pronounces a curse upon the traffic in these words, "Cursed be he who putteth the bottle to his neighbor's lips"? Oh, no; none of these raise the cry of tyranny. This charge comes from the maker and vender of the accursed stuff. It is an old cry, "Let us alone." It is the demand of every outlaw, and pirate and buccaneer everywhere. It was the cry of the legion of devils which possessed the maniac among the tombs of Gadara, "Let us alone; what have we to do with thee, Jesus of Nazareth?" They plead for "personal liberty" to destroy the man, but the mighty prohibitionist, the Son of man, uttered his fiat, "Come out of him." No wonder those who "kept the swine" fled, and no less wonder the "owners" and their friends, the local politicians and policy men, hangers-on, and timid time-servers, "besought him to depart out of their coasts."

New York has a law prohibiting the sale of skim milk, and another prohibiting self-murder. Are these not direct attacks on personal liberty? And are they not "sumptuary laws"? Has not a man a right to buy and drink skim milk; and why does not some man intent on self-destruction carry the case to the supreme court and demand that a law that so arbitrarily invades his personal and individual domain be declared unconstitutional; or at least why does he not take a "calm view" and ask for license?

Strip this whole matter of "personal liberty" and "no laws purely sumptuary" of its verbiage and sophistry and cant, let the people see that the thing aimed at is not the destruction of personal liberty, but a wider, healthier, and more abiding personal liberty—the liberty to do right—and you take away the glamour that enshrines the monster evil of the age. Liberty is freedom to do right. Let that be our motto. There is no other definition. Anything else combats the laws of God and the holiest instincts of man. Let us, like Rinaldo in the enchanted wood before Jerusalem, hew at the trunk of this "personal liberty" error, forgetful of the fair forms that with disheveled hair and streaming eyes would beguile us to stay our hands, and unmindful of the crashing thunders, the barbed lightnings, the flying shafts, and the demon wings about us, until the enchanted myrtle falls, the demons flee and the sky clears.

These champions of personal liberty, it must not be overlooked, demand permission to destroy and stab, tear down our churches, invade the sanctuary of home, disrupt family ties, uproot law and order, and set loose a tempest of anarchy and ruin that may ride upon the top wave of destruction as the demons of the storm, and gather wealth from the human wrecks which they have lured to destruction. I am not writing rhapsody. Every word I have chosen is deeply bosomed in fact, and has an awful weight of truth attached. It is personal liberty for which we contend; but that which builds up men, establishes society and creates good and holy influences. "for God and home and native land." Let the workers in this grand movement for prohibition not stop with the idea of saving men from the drunkard's curse on earth and his future hell; let them observe that the demands of the liquor traffic are steadily increasing to the destruction of all that men hold dear and honorable and sacred. The occupants of pulpits should take this matter more to heart, and see that the church is brought up to the line of sternest duty in this war.—F. G. M'Cauley, in the Lever.