p. 13 | THE TWO-WINE THEORY by F. R. Lees

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · May 17, 1899

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 25, No. 20.

THE TWO-WINE THEORY.

By F. R. Lees

THE really important critical query in regard to the wine question is, what things the word "wine" has been applied to in the literature of the past—that is, what variety of special liquids the name has covered or signified in general.

The advocate for drinking alcohol—which is the product of the art of fermentation—begins by discarding the idea that "grape juice" was ever a thing to which the word was applied at all, in Hebrew, Greek, German, French, or Italian. This wild and proofless assertion is backed by another that is even wilder still, namely, that the first time the thing was ever named "wine," it was so called in consequence of its having undergone fermentation. This assumes that those early users and namers understood fermentation—which they certainly did not. Of its nature and essence they knew nothing; they simply observed the result of souring and corrupting. The rabbis, indeed, were as utterly at sea as the modern tipplers, for they invented a theory that "the juice of grapes" does not ferment—in other words, they wanted the fact to be so, and therefore said it was so. Of course every chemist now knows that the principle and conditions and agency of fermentation are precisely the same in the case of wine as of bread. The Christian fathers, especially St. Augustine, did not even distinguish between boiled must (which he calls vinum coctum) and fermented wine, and charged the abstaining Gnostics with inconsistency for using it, while they denounced intoxicating wine.

The dense ignorance and confusion were not due to the people who first called grape juice wine. Think, now, how could ideas of a process producing results at first unknown—only to be slowly developed afterward—induce them to give the thing a name? Was grape juice without a name until men got drunk and chemistry became understood? The name first given to grape juice would, we may naturally suppose, adhere to it in its subsequent states, until some specific form by use or circumstance made the species emphatic—as, in modern days, we say "in drink," meaning simply inebriety. Thus, also, when "wine" changed into acid, it was vinegar, that is, soured wine.

Some American critics not only assume to teach the English abstainers—men who have mastered all the facts of the case, scientific, historical, and critical—but, in their consummately cool way, would teach the Hebrew rabbis how ignorant they also are of their own language and writings. For twenty centuries these men have written about wine in the grapes, of boiled wine, of sabe (Latin sapa and defrutum) and of intoxicating wine, while their wisest men, as Pharisees and Essenes, for centuries warned against the latter, while using the former. Nevertheless, according to these new lanterns without light, there is not now and never was any unfermented wine at all. We know nothing equal to this in audacity and simplicity, save a recent attempt of a "scholar" to show that Paul's Epistles and St. Augustine's Confessions were the work of monks in the fourteenth century. According to the Sunday School Times, of Philadelphia, and the Independent, of New York, there never was but one kind of wine, with one essential and innocent property—that of producing intoxication.

Now, in the famous controversy between Dr. Norman Kerr and the Church Quarterly and Church Times (the argument and learning of which collapsed utterly), the following fact was published on the authority of Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler and Professor Marks, of London: "Jews have, from time immemorial, used alike fermented and unfermented wines on every occasion, including the Passover, when the custom of partaking of the juice of the grape, and the saying of the appropriate blessing, was incumbent. The Jewish World expressed its surprise at the Christian sentiment that "only that wine was endued with the necessary sanctity which had likewise the property of causing drunkenness."

But the folly does not stop here. It ignores the most undeniable facts of history and language, and sets up a fancy that denies them. In the year 1841 the writer published at Douglas a long series of extracts from ancient books, English and foreign, showing the existence in olden days of both fermented and unfermented wines; and again, in 1875, appended to his reply to the four Belfast professors 32 pages of small print, being an induction from the literature of 2,500 years, showing how historians and learned men had applied the Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, French, and English word for wine to an unfermented liquid, thus justifying the use, and illustrating the sense, of the various Bible terms for the vine and its fruit and preparations from it.

Scholars ought at least to be acquainted on this subject with the history of Mohammedanism. In Turkey, for example, they use sirups, and their name for grape wine in general is shirab. Their traditions explain the whole matter. Take, for example, the one given in the Italian treatise of Fabroni, published a century ago, "On the Art of Making Wine," under the authority of the Royal Academy of Arts, Florence. It is attributed to an old Arab author, Mutardi ben Gasif. (See Dr. Lees' "Select Works," vol. 1, p. 329; vol. 4, p. 32.)

"Noah, being come out of the ark, ordered each of his sons to build a house, and afterward planted trees. The vine alone was wanting. Gabriel informed them that the devil had desired it, and indeed had some right to it. Noah summoned him to appear in the field, and said, 'O cursed! why hast thou carried away the vine?' 'Because,' he replied, 'it partly belonged to me.' 'Shall I part it for you?' asked Gabriel. 'I consent,' answered Noah, 'and will give him a fourth.' 'That is not enough,' said Gabriel. 'Well, I will take half,' replied Noah. 'Not enough for him,' said the angel; 'he must have two-thirds and thou one, and when the must shall have boiled away until two-thirds are evaporated, the remainder shall be assigned for thy use.' This custom is an ancient one." (Part 3, chapter 4.)

Of course the boiling prevented fermentation, and nothing but water really evaporated. The fable teaches the opinion that other wine than natural produces twice as much evil as good.

The argument of the papers in question is both a dream and a delusion, and consists of empty talk about scholarship. The solution of the temperance question is one of facts, of science, of morals, and of logic founded on facts, and is to be discovered, not in talk about a "Two-wine Theory," but in what the Bible represents to be the fruits of drinking, on the one hand, and of abstinence, on the other.—F. R. Lees, of Watford, England, in the Voice.