No one questions that the wine referred to above as unholy and a mocker and unclean, is fermented wine, and no one supposes for a moment that it is unfermented wine. "But they also have erred through wine, and through strong drink are out of the way; the priest and the prophet have erred through strong drink, they are swallowed up of wine, they are out of the way through strong drink, they err in vision, they stumble in judgment. For all tables are full of vomit and filthiness, so that there is no place clean." (Isa. xxviii, 7,8.)
How correctly and literally do the above words represent the effects of drinking fermented wine and strong drinks, seen today as of old. O gentlemen of the clergy! beware! beware! "Woe to him that giveth his neighbor drink; that putteth thy bottle to him." (Hab. ii, 5,15.) You have young and inexperienced men and women and even boys under your charge. May the Lord protect them!
CANON WILBERFORCE ON SACRAMENTAL WINES.
Canon Wilberforce is reported by the London Temperance Record as saying at a recent meeting in England: "He believed if people desired to go back literally and absolutely to the days of the institution of the Sacrament, it would be a most difficult thing, if not impossible, to prove that the particular cup which their Master took in His hand in that solemn crisis of His life when He instituted the Holy Eucharist was fermented at all. There was abundant testimony to prove it was not. Some went back to primitive authorities. He should like to read one or two which might have weight with them. Take for example the testimony of St. Cyprian, who wrote in A. D. 230:—
"'When the Lord gives the name of His body to bread, composed of the union of many particles, He indicates that our people, whose sins He bore, are united. And when He calls wine squeezed out from bunches of grapes His blood, He intimates that our flocks are similarly joined by the varied admixture of a united multitude."
"This distinctly implied, for all he knew, squeezing bunches of grapes. But there was more important testimony from one man who was considered by a certain party in the Church of great value—St. Thomas Aquinas, a great father of the 13th century. He said:—
"'The juice of ripe grapes, on the other hand, has already the form of wine; for its sweet taste evidences a mellowing change, which is its completion by natural heat (as it is said in the "Meteorologica," iv, 3, not far from the beginning), and for that reason this Sacrament can be fulfilled by the juice of grapes.'"
While in Egypt in 1884 I visited the American missionaries, and asked them what kind of wine they used as a communion wine in their churches. They told me that almost all of their members were from among the Copts, who are the descendants from the early Christians of Egypt, who have been comparatively isolated and separated from the Christian world for many centuries, and when they told them that the Western Christians used fermented wine, or "shop wine," as they called it, they were horrified at the idea, and would not partake of it; so they steeped or soaked raisins in water, and then pressed the juice from them and used that, as has been done by the Orthodox Jews when they could not obtain pure unfermented wine. I visited the Grand Patriarch of the Coptic Church, and through an interpreter he told me that he did the same, and that it was suitable for use the moment that it was pressed from the raisins. The day is not far distant when the members of the Western Christian churches will be as much horrified at the idea of using fermented wine as a sacramental wine as are the unperverted Christians of Egypt, and this will occur when our clergy and laity cease to be controlled by either strong confirmations or preconceived ideas or by sensual appetites, and can study the Sacred Scriptures and ancient history, and science and well-established facts, in the light of reason and common sense, instead of assuming everything which accords with their desires, and ignoring everything which conflicts therewith.
Again, the writer of the article I am reviewing says:—
"Drunkenness is always and everywhere a sin; whether drinking is a sin depends upon circumstances; and whether the circumstances are such as to make drinking sinful, each individual must decide for himself, and answer for his decision, not to a priesthood, a society, or a newspaper press, but to his own conscience and his God."