Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 37:145 (Jan 1880)
Article: Do The Scriptures Prohibit The Use Of Alcoholic Beverages?
Author: A. B. Rich

BSac 37:145 (Jan 1880) p. 99

Do The Scriptures Prohibit The Use Of Alcoholic Beverages?

Rev. A. B. Rich

A difficult subject to discuss, confessedly. A difficult question to answer, if we may judge from the different and opposite answers given to it by good men, men of learning, men having equal respect for the authority of the word of God, equal interest in the temperance reform.

Why so difficult? Is the legislation of God upon this subject yea and nay? We cannot believe it. It must be, taken as a whole, a unit. It must be the final and authoritative appeal.

Is there any want of testimony? No; for there is, perhaps, no other subject, if we except idolatry, respecting which the legislation of God is so voluminous. But its testimony is found in promises and in threatenings. The fruit of the vine is used as a symbol of the direst judgments of God, and of the richest blessings of his grace. It is represented as filling the cup of his indignation, and it filled the cup in the hand of our Lord at the last paschal supper. Now it is said to have “a blessing in it”; now we are forbidden “to look upon it.” And in every conceivable relation it comes in by way of illustration, sometimes implying one characteristic, sometimes another exactly the opposite; while again it is referred to in a way that sheds no light upon its nature or the judgment of God respecting its use. It is not, perhaps, a matter of wonder that men are divided in their methods of interpreting these apparently contradictory statements.

It has resulted, therefore, that, notwithstanding all that has been written upon the subject, we are yet very much in

BSac 37:145 (Jan 1880) p. 100

the condition of the ancient astronomers, who had a mass of material before them out of which to construct a theory of the universe, but had not yet discovered the law which was needed to reconcile its apparent contradictions and unify the whole.

What is that law in the case before us? What hypothesis will reconcile the entire legislation of God respecting “wine and strong drink,” as the law of gravity did the phenomena of the heavenly bodies?

In presenting the results to which several years of thought and careful study of the subject have brought me, I do not assume to be a Newton, or venture to hope that I can solve the problem before us for all minds and all coming generations, as Newton did the problem of his age. But I wish to present some features of the subject in a new light, give increased emphasis to others, question some of the statements that pass current among the advocates of prohibition, and meet the arguments of its enemies — so far, at least, as they are drawn from the Scriptures — by ...