Why Canon Farrar Signed the Pledge.
CLERGYMEN of the English Establishment have been so slow to accept the American theory and practice of temperance, i. e., total abstinence, that the following opinion of the distinguished Archdeacon of Westminster has all the more weight:— My reasons for taking the pledge were partly general and partly special. First, I became convinced that the use of alcohol in any form was not a necessity. I saw that whole nations have lived and flourished without it. I believed that the whole race of man had existed for centuries previous to its discovery. I was struck by the indisputable fact that in England 20,000 inhabitants of our prisons, accustomed to it all their lives, and the majority of them brought into prison directly or indirectly by the use of it, could be, and were, from the moment of their imprisonment, absolutely deprived of it, not only without loss, but with entire gain to their personal health. Men enter prison sickly and blighted, are deprived of drink, and leave prison strong and hale; and women who, when incarcerated, are hideous to look upon, after being made compulsorily sober by act of Parliament, recover the bloom of health and almost of beauty. Next, I derived from the recorded testimony of some of our most eminent physicians, that the use of alcohol is a subtle and manifold source of disease, even to thousands who use it in quantities conventionally deemed moderate; and from the testimony even of many who discountenance total abstinence, that all the young, and all the healthy, and all who eat well and sleep well, do not require it and are undoubtedly better off without it. Then the carefully drawn statistics of many insurance societies convinced me that total abstinence, so far from shortening life, distinctly and indisputably conduce to longevity. Then I accumulated evidence that drink is so far from being requisite to physical strength, or intellectual force, that many of the greatest athletes, from the days of Samson onwards, "whose drink was only at the crystal brook," have achieved without alcohol mightier feats than those which have been achieved with it; and many of the world's wisest, even if they have not said Pindar, have yet drawn out a better inspiration from other sources than can be drawn chemically from the fumes of wine. Seeing all which and much more; seeing, too, in the holy Scriptures God's own approval of his Nazarites, who, as the prophet Jeremiah tells us, were purer than snow—"They were whiter than milk, they were more ruddy in body than rubies, their polishing was of sapphire"—I saw, or thought I saw, grounds sufficient, and superfluously sufficient, to make me an abstainer.—Sel.