Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 26:101 (Jan 1869)
Article: What Wine Shall We Use At The Lord’s Supper?
Author: Thomas Laurie

BSac 26:101 (Jan 1869) p. 163

What Wine Shall We Use At The Lord’s Supper?

Rev. T. Laurie

All good men desire to remove social evils. They differ only as to the method of removal. Among them we may distinguish two classes. One devises its own method for removing them, and plies it with untiring zeal; the other goes to the Bible for the remedy, feeling that there we have the counsel of a present God, and that we are safe only while we follow his guiding.

Intemperance is one of the evils which good men long to bring to an end. It has occasioned untold misery to man. The tears it has caused to flow have never known intermission; the sorrow of angels over it has known no pause. The greatest marvel is the madness with which its victim clings to his destroyer. No sooner does he recover from one attack than he cries: “I will seek it yet again.” Open a door of escape to any other sufferers, and they do not wait to be told to flee; but these beat down iron barriers to get back into the fire.

All good men agree that the use of intoxicating drinks is dangerous; that even the weakest of them drunk to excess involves drunkenness; that there are special reasons, both physical and moral, why children should be trained to avoid them; for physicians testify that their use in medicine is not so dangerous to the man of mature age, as to the young. We are to see that they shun this road to ruin, that they pass not by it, but turn from it and pass away; they are not even to “look on the wine when it is red; for at the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder.”

All agree, moreover, that if our example tends to lead others astray, the spirit of Christ will induce us to abstain from things lawful in themselves, that we may not be an

BSac 26:101 (Jan 1869) p. 164

occasion of stumbling to a weak brother for whom Christ died. It is evident also that the man who has fallen under the power of intemperance must not only flee out of Sodom, but he must not tarry in all the plain if he would not be destroyed. The least indulgence may involve such in the guilt of self-destruction. So far it is to be hoped that good men are of the same mind.

But when some insist on banishing all that intoxicates from the Materia Medica, and proscribe what they call fermented wine at the communion table, many draw back. Their consciences will not allow them to do otherwise. Their desire for the most extensive and permanent triumph of the temperance reformation, leads them to protest against such teachings. Leaving the medical part of the question to others, we now inquire: What is the wine proper to be used at the Lord’s table? And here, to forestall prejudice, it may be proper to say that we practise on the principle of tot...