In our discourses loudly we complain
Against the passions, weakness, vice, and yet
Those things we still cry down, we still commit.
One cannot, therefore, without indignation, hear Churchmen declaim against drunkenness, while they themselves are such ruddy examples of it.
Quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione quærentes.[1]
With patience who can hear west-country cudden
Rail against roasted beef and good plum pudden?
If the law of prescription take place, one cannot dispute with them that of fuddling with any colour of reason, for in St. Jerom’s time, the priests were very much given to wine. This we learn from an epistle of that father, in which he very severely reprehends them. They have been no changelings since. We read in the adages of Erasmus, that it was a proverb amongst the Germans, that the lives of the monks consisted in nothing but eating, drinking, and——Monachorum nunc nihil aliud est quam facere, esse, bibere. Besides, a vast number of councils, who made most severe canons against priests that should get drunk, evidently shew, that they used frequently to do so. Such were the Councils of Carthage, Agathon, the first of Tours, that of Worms, Treves, &c. To make this more clear, we shall copy a little of what H. Stephens says on this subject, in his apology for Herodotus:— “But to return, says he, to these proverbs, theologal wine, and the abbots, or prelates table. I say, that without these, one could never rightly understand this beautiful passage of Horace, viz.
“Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero
Pulsanda tellus: Nunc saliaribus