PROHIBITION IN MAINE

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Nov 11, 1897

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 23, No. 44.

PROHIBITION IN MAINE

The New York Christian Advocate comments on an article in Zion's Herald in a manner that lays the responsibility for the wane of prohibition sentiment in Maine at the door of church-members, especially Methodists. The Herald's correspondent represents himself as a Methodist minister in a town of 1,700 inhabitants, having five places of worship.

"He had not been there very long before he saw signs of drunkenness, and no apparent shame or attempt

to conceal it. . . . He sought the co-operation of other churches, and announced a temperance Sunday. Common talk of the street declared that there were from seven to twenty places where liquor was sold. At last he succeeded in arranging a union service, but when it came to the service, not a soul except himself would say a word. . . . No attempt is made to enforce the prohibition law, and the amazing thing to him is that most of the leading men are church patrons, some of them Sunday-school workers, and all of them supporters of the church."

To this the Advocate, itself a leading Methodist organ, adds this testimony:—

"Methodism, which has ever been regarded as the chief foe of the liquor traffic, is paralyzed in a large part of that State. The Maine Wesleyan Seminary, at Kent's Hill, is the only institution under the patronage of Methodism, so far as we know, that ever disgraced the church by electing a brewer a trustee. This was equivalent to a declaration to the people of Maine that a majority of that corporation did not regard the manufacture and sale of beer as an immorality, or that, if they did, the probable pecuniary aid they expected condoned it, in their opinion."