“But,” continues the laudator of ebriety, “if we give any credit to several learned persons, Noah was not the first man who got fuddled. Father Frassen maintains ‘that people fed on flesh before the Flood, and drank wine.’ There is no likelihood, according to him, that men contented themselves with drinking water for fifteen or sixteen hundred years together. It is much more credible that they prepared a drink more nourishing and palatable. These first men of the world were endued with no less share of wit than their posterity, and consequently wanted no industry to invent everything that might contribute to make them pass their lives agreeably. Before the Flood men married, and gave their children in marriage. These people regaled each other, and made solemn entertainments. Now who can imagine that they drank at those festivals nothing but water, and fed only on fruits and herbs! Noah, therefore, was not the inventor of the use which we make of the grape; the most that he did was only to plant new vines.”
Procopius of Gaza, one of the most ancient and learned interpreters of Scripture, thinks it no less true that the vine was known in the world before Noah’s time; but he does not allow that the use of wine was known before the patriarch, whom he believes to be the inventor of it. As for the wine mentioned in the New Testament, we are now assured by modern commentators—total {9} abstainers every one—that it was unfermented, devoid of alcohol, and non-intoxicating. I had certainly always looked upon the wine which Timothy was enjoined to take for his “stomach’s sake,” as some form of brandy.
The Early Christians—like far too many of the late ditto—were terrible topers. Ecclesiastical history tells us that in the primitive church it was customary to appoint solemn feasts on the festivals of martyrs. This appears by the harangue of Constantine, and from the works of St. Gregory Nazianzen, and St. Chrysostom. Drunkenness was rife at those feasts; and this excess was looked upon as permissible. This is shewn by the pathetic complaints of St. Augustine and St. Cyprian, the former of which holy fathers thus delivered himself:—
“Drunken debauches pass as permitted amongst us, so that people turn them into solemn feasts, to honour the memory of the martyrs; and that not only on those days which are particularly consecrated to them (which would be a deplorable abuse to those who look at those things with other eyes than those of the flesh), but on every day of the year.”
St. Cyprian, in a treatise attributed to him, says much the same thing:—
“Drunkenness is so common with us in Africa that it scarce passes for a crime. And do we not see Christians forcing one another to get drunk, to celebrate the memory of the martyrs?”
Cardinal du Perron told his contemporaries “that the Manichæans said that the Catholicks were people much given to wine, but that they {10} never drank any,” which sounds paradoxical. Against this charge St. Augustine only defends them by recrimination. He answers, “that it was true, but that they (the Manichæans) drank the juice of apples, which was more delicious than all the wines and liquors in the world.” And so does Tertullian, who said the liquor press’d from apples was most strong and vinous. His words are: “Succum ex pomis vinosissimum.”
I trust that in quoting all those things I am not becoming wearisome, at the very commencement of my work; the main object being to show that all the drinking in the world is not done by the present generation of vipers.
But the Early Christians were excused for their habits of soaking, by Paulinus, on the grounds of the “excellence of their intentions”; which naturally reminds us of the celebrated excuse of the late Monsieur Thiers, on a much later occasion. The words of Paulinus are, when translated and adapted:—
But yet that mirth in little feasts enjoy’d