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Gerrit Smith Broadside and Pamphlet Collection

Bible for "total abstinence" / by Gerrit Smith.

Smith, Gerrit, 1797-1874.

Digital Edition.

This digitization project was supported by Regional Bibliographic Databases and Interlibrary Resources Sharing Program funds, awarded by the New York State Library.

Call number: Smith 582

THE BIBLE FOR "TOTAL ABSTINENCE."

[BY GERRIT SMITH]

The Bible, after criticism upon it has exhausted itself, remains the best and grandest and most authoritative of all books. Hence, when it is arrayed against a reform it presents an obstacle not easily surmounted nor evaded. Of all the barriers in the way of the antislavery reform the most formidable and disheartening was the bible, or rather the misinterpretations of the bible. Such, too, has it been at every step is the way of the cause of temperance: - and, just now, when this cause (thanks to dear woman !) is advancing more rapidly than ever, the appeals to the bible against it are becoming more frequent than ever. As usual, learned divines are foremost to this evil work. I am happy, however, to be able to say that the great majority of both learned and unlearned divines are steadfast in their opposition to it.

Total abstinence from all intoxicating drinks is the great central doctrine of the temperance reform, and the pre-eminent duty which t inculcates. Nevertheless, it is denied that this is amongst the doctrines and duties set forth in the bible. We are not, however, to look into the bible to learn what is suitable to drink or eat or wear. These and ten thousand other things we are to learn from observation, experience and science. In passing, we may say that, although there are passages in the bible, which seem to favor intoxicating drinks, there are also warnings in it against these body and soul destroyers - warnings as emphatic and fearful as they are numerous. But it is argued that Jesus partook of inebriating beverages, and that the bible is, therefore, to be taken to be for them. It is not certain that He partook of them - but He probably did. Whether, however, He be viewed as God or man, his partaking of them affords us no warrant to indulge in them, and does not make the bible responsible for them. For to have broadly distinguished his general modes of life and labor from those of the good men around him would have had the effect to turn men's minds away from his lessons on their supreme interests. Doubtless He planed his board as other carpenters planed theirs. He did not summon the building from its foundation into miraculous and instantaneous completion - but carried it forward by gradations as did other builders. He did not, as by the supposition of his omniscience He could have done, select only-perfectly healthful dishes and perfectly healthful drinks. But He "came eating and drinking," and, in common with other men, ate and drank what was set before him. Had He made dietetics or dress a part of his direct teaching, He would have defeated the great end his mission - for He would have thereby diverted the public attention from his soul saving messages. He would also have defeated it, had He, by the introduction of rail-roads or steam-vessels, so filled the world with wonder, as to leave no room and no relish for his sublime morality and regenerating religion. Jesus did not anticipate providence: and He requires us but to keep pace with its unfoldings. He bears with a people, who do so well as to live up to the fight of their generation. "The times of this ignorance God winked at." He excused the sins of ignorance, especially, of irresponsible ignorance. In the days of Christ, men had not yet learned that intoxicating liquors are unfit - to the last degree dangerously unfit - for a beverage. Least of all had they, as yet, learned that total abstinence from them is the only sure preventive, as well as the only sure cure, of drunkenness. Jesus did not teach his hearers these things directly and literally - but He left men to learn thereafter what, as yet, men were not able to learn. He supplied them with principles and precepts in the growing light of which they could learn these things for themselves - in the boundless scope of which every candid mind could so enlighten itself as to learn all it needs to learn. The question which most concerns us, is not what Jesus taught and required in the dimness of nearly two thousand years ago - but what does He teach and require in the present illumination of the world. The highest temperance doctrine which Lyman Beecher taught fifty years ago in his mighty and memorable "Six Sermons" was total abstinence from ardent spirit. Moderate, however, as was that teaching, it was, nevertheless, greatly in advance of the light of that day. But were this grand old pioneer now on the earth, he would, doubtless, in the increased light of the present day teach total abstinence not only from ardent spirit but from all intoxicating spirit. Indeed, I greatly err if I did not learn that in the National Temperance Convention held at Saratoga many years before his death, he acquiesced is this unlimited application of the doctrine of total abstinence. If when Beecher came to see that all alcoholic beverages go to make drunkards, no wonder that his pity for his most miserable class of men and for their even more miserable families should set him immovably against all such beve-

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rages! From the doctrines the blessed Savior has left us we easily deduce the duty of total abstinence from all intoxicating beverages, and, by faithful study, can also deduce every other duty. Specific directions could, at the most, have taught but a fragmentary morality - but these doctrines cover the whole extent of human obligation with a rounded and perfect morality. I might add that the few specific directions there are in the bible are chiefly valuable as serving to illustrate its all-comprehensive principles.

Not only is it claimed that Jesus drank alcoholic wine, but also that He made it. From the probabilities of the case it is easy to believe that He drank it - but I can hardly believe that He made it. He would not consent to render himself peculiar, offensively peculiar, and to divert attention from his work of salvation by refusing, on the ground of their imperfect healthfulness, the dishes and drinks that were universally enjoyed by the respectable portion of his countrymen. But, if called on to create either a dish or a drink, would not his omnipotence, under the promptings of his omniscience and benevolence, have made it entirely healthful and harmless? Jesus was not responsible for any of the imperfections in the dishes and drinks made by those around him: - but how could He have escaped responsibility for imperfections in the dishes and drinks made by himself? Did He make injurious food for the thousands He miraculously fed? Certainly not. No more did He make injurious wine for the wedding guests. But it was injurious-ay, of fearfully dangerous tendency both to the body and the soul - if He put into it the intoxicating element. If on his confessed policy of conforming, in the brain, to prevalent habits and customs, an argument can be built in favor of his partaking of food and drinks not strictly healthy, it by no means follows that this policy furnishes an argument for his making such food or such drinks.

What we have said is sufficient to justify the conclusion that the bible is not against "total abstinence" - is not against this only sure preventive and only sure remedy of the most destructive of all vices. The insulting interpretations put upon this heavenly book by its official and accepted interpreters have done infinite harm. The Abolitionists believed with dear John Wesley that "slavery is the sum of all villainies." Hence not a few them gave up the bible after the Doctors of Divinity had persuaded them that it is for slavery. So, too, have not a few temperance man found their faith in the bible wrested from them by the seductive arguments to prove that it is not a temperance book.

Away with all these evil teachers, and let common sense and common honesty teach in their stead! The bible is not against temperance - is not against total abstinence from all intoxicating beverages - is not against the undeniable truth that drunkenness has its origin in m[unreadable]ate drinking. On the contrary, the bible is emphatically for abstinence. So, too, is the increasing light of all the steps of providence for it. The loving heart of Christ is for it. All heaven is for it; - All the precious interests of earth are for it. There is nothing left against it but ignorance and wickedness.

Let not, then, the friends of temperance hesitate, through fear of being called fanatics, to wield all possible moral influence against the drinking of every kind of intoxicating liquor. Reason forbids such drinking, and there is no fanaticism in following reason and let not the friends of temperance doubt that such influence is ample to accomplish the triumph of temperance. Above all, let them not call on Government to contribute to this triumph. No less important is it to temperance than to every other great interest to keep Government within its own limits. It transcends them, however, when it embarks in any moral or religious enterprise, or when, in short, it does aught else than protect by simple brute force person and property from the destruction and grave danger, which Government alone can protect them from. Pre-eminently such a destruction and danger is the dramshop, that den of death where liquor is sold to be drank on the premises. From that den of death - death both to the body and the soul - proceeds day and night, a huge and endless stream of incendiaries, madmen and murderers. No family ,within its reach is safe ; and any state or nation, that upholds it, upholds within itself an enemy more to be dreaded than all foreign enemies. The Government, therefore, which permits dramselling, is guilty of throwing away that shield of protection, which it is its one office to hold over the persons and property of its citizens. Indeed, it is not to much to say that it fails to be Government, since it falls at the very point where Government is most vitally needed. The plain truth

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no political party could resist and yet prosper. Let then the temperance men press it upon all political parties, and, very soon, the land will be free from the dramshop. This will not be making temperance parties of these parties. It will be simply bringing them to recognize the protection of person and property to be the one great duty of Government.

Although Government cannot legitimately afford any direct aid to the cause of temperance, nevertheless, in suppressing the dramshop, it would bring to it an incidental aid so great, as would leave comparatively little more for the friends of temperance to do. To shut up the dramshop would be well nigh to decapitate the monster Intemperance; and to accomplish this, no punishment of the drunkard and drunkard-maker should be considered too severe. - Drinking in families is a small evil compared with drinking in hotels and saloons: and it would be much smaller, were it not promoted by this public drinking. Would, then, that these exorbitant demands on Government, which have been pressed more or less constantly, for half a century, might, at last, cease. Government will rarely to any considerable extent yield to them; and scarcely ever will the yielding fail to be followed by a reaction, that will leave temperance all the worse off for the unwise attempt to serve it.

Government must not and will not be guilty of such an invasion of individual and family rights, as would be the forbidding of all traffic, in intoxicating drinks; as would be forbidding the housewife to make her annual keg of currant or pieplant wine; and the farmer to convert his spare apples into cider; or as world be the forbidding of the importation of all foreign, wines and brandies, however strong might be the plea for the superiority of their medicinal properties. So, Government must not and will not allow itself to be driven into such fanaticism. Are we told that the temperance men in England go about as far in their demands on Government, as do the temperance men in America? Our answer is that Government in a monarchy is a different thing from Government in a republic. In the one it means the absorption of individual and private rights. In the other it means their protection.

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Honest and worthy are the temperance men: and, had they kept united and in the right path, they would, ere this, have succeeded in their great work of love and mercy. But, unhappily, whilst a part of them have asked nothing more of Government than to do its own work of protecting person and property, the far greater part of them have insisted that Government should turn moral reformer and do the, work of temperance also. So, too, whilst all temperance men desire to impress the public mind with the criminality of dramselling, a large part of them, carried away by the great folly and unprincipled inconsistency of "Local Option," would haves Government leave it to each town, village and city to choose for itself whether to indulge in dramshop. But if dramselling be a crime (and who should deny that it approaches pre-eminence amongst all crimes ?) then, very clearly, Government has no more right to let community set up dramshops than it, has to let it, welcome perjury, forgery or theft. Another blunder into which not a few temperance men have fallen is their advocacy of the "Civil Damage law." This Law reaches the height of absurdity, inasmuch as it provides that Government shall punish the man whose business it has licensed - ay, punish him for the natural and necessary results of that business.

I conclude by saying that, if by force of their sincerity and earnestness the friends of temperance have been able to do much for their dear cause, what but for these unhappy differences to which I have adverted might they not have done for it? Ere this, they might, not improbably, have put upon their labors the crown of triumph, - for between their shutting up the dramshop and that crown there would have been but a few short steps. If action ! action !! action !!! were the proper direction to orators, no less proper is it to comprise in one thing the work of temperance men, and bid them " shut up the dramshop ! shut up the dramshop !! shut up the dramhop!!!"

PETERBORO May 14, 1874