Christ spoke as follows:
“John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine.... The Son of Man is come eating and drinking; and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man and a winebibber” (Luke, vii, 33, 34).
This censure was evidently not unmerited. The first act in Christ’s ministerial career was to manufacture three barrels of wine for a wedding feast; his last recorded act was a benediction upon the wine cup.
Theology being no longer in demand, the Protestant clergy, contrary to the teachings of the Bible, and the traditions of the church, now find it popular and profitable to espouse the cause of temperance. But in championing one rational virtue they employ two Christian vices, hypocrisy and intolerance. The most inconsistent, the most uncharitable opponents of the liquor traffic to-day are these fresh converts who profess to be doing their master’s will and who claim that his Word is the advocate of total abstinence and prohibitory laws. With fierce invective they declaim against the old God Bacchus, yet every anathema they hurl at him will apply with equal justice to their God and Christ.
One of the most unscrupulous arguments ever adduced in support of any cause is that now advanced by some Christian temperance advocates to the effect that the wine sanctioned in the Bible was not intoxicating. With the same ease that they declare that in the Bible “black” means “white,” that “hate” means “love,” and “day” means “age,” they declare that Bible wine does not mean wine, but unfermented grape juice.
The Rev. Dr. W. M. Thompson, Rev. William Wright, Rev. S. H. Calhoun, Rev. C. V. A. Van Dyke, and other able Hebrew and Sanscrit scholars of Western Asia, who have made the history and customs of its people both ancient and modern a life study, affirm that such a thing as non-intoxicating wine was unknown, that the unfermented juice of the grape was never recognized as wine. Dr. Philip Schaff, the foremost Bible scholar of this country, affirms the same:
“The wine of the Bible was no doubt pure and unadulterated.... It was genuine and real wine, and, like all wine in use in grape-growing countries, exhilarating. To lay down the principle that the use of intoxicating drink as a beverage is a sin—per se—is to condemn the greater part of Christendom, to contradict the Bible, and to impeach Christ himself, who drank wine and made wine by miracle to supply the marriage guests.”
At the General Assembly of the Presbyterian church held at Belfast, Ireland, in 1870, an exhaustive examination and discussion was given this subject. The result was the adoption by an almost unanimous vote of the following resolution offered by the Rev. Robert Wales, Professor of Dialectic Theology, Belfast:
“As the wine used in the oblations of the Old Testament time at the Passover and by our Lord Jesus Christ himself in the institution of the supper was the ordinary wine of the country, that is, the fermented juice of the grape, we cannot sanction the use of the unfermented juice of the grape as a symbol in the ordinance.”
That the sacramental wine used by the early Christians was intoxicating, and that they were addicted to using it to excess at the Lord’s Supper, is admitted by Paul (1 Cor. xi, 20–34).