“In the vision of the prophet he sees the great evils that have come upon his country; the palmer-worm, and the locust, and the canker-worm have destroyed the crops. ‘The meat-offering and the drink-offering is cut off from the house of the Lord, ... the corn is wasted, the oil languisheth,’ etc. While in the verse quoted the drinkers are mildly requested to howl, in verse thirteen we have, ‘Gird yourselves and lament, ye priests; howl ye ministers of the altar.’ No temperance admonition or lesson here, that is plain.
“[Joel 3 : 18]: ‘And it shall come to pass in that day that the mountains shall drop down new wine, and the hills shall flow with milk, and all the rivers of Judah shall flow with water,’ etc.
“Thus, again, among the great blessings to be bestowed upon the faithful is wine in abundance. One of the facts that strikes me most forcibly, in making such an examination as this, is the almost universal favor with which the Hebrew prophets looked upon wine and wine-drinking; and in prophesying the evils to come upon their people because of their disobedience to God or their oppression of their fellows, they rarely fail to include the cutting off of the wine supply. This they evidently regarded as one of the greatest of calamities. Our Christian temperance friends would gladly, so they say, visit wholesale destruction upon the vineyards and barley fields, and they seem almost to seek to convey the impression that God made a mistake when he created grapes and barley. This proves how honest they are when they say that the Bible is a temperance book. In [Amos 5 : 11], we have another example of the above-mentioned fact in the utterances of the prophet. Denouncing the people for their injustice, he says: ‘Ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.’ In the preceding sentence he had said: ‘Ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them.’ Houses were good, wine was good; but because of their sins they should be deprived of both. There is here no argument either direct or implied in behalf of abstinence.
“[Amos 9 : 14]: ‘And I will bring again the captivity of my people of Israel, and they shall build the waste cities and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens and eat the fruit of them.’
“It does not seem that even Mr. Stevenson would venture to claim this verse as a Bible argument for temperance. They shall drink the wine!
“Micah. 6 : 15: ‘Thou shalt sow, but thou shalt not reap; thou shalt tread the olives, but thou shalt not anoint thee with oil; and sweet wine, but shalt not drink wine.’
“How can apparently honorable men claim that God, as revealed in the Bible, disapproves of the use of intoxicants when he is continually telling his chosen people that he will punish them by destroying their corn, and their wine, and their oil; evidently taking particular pains to impress upon them the fact that they (wine, corn, and oil) are equally good and useful?
“[Zeph. 1 : 13]: ‘They shall also build houses, but not inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, but not drink the wine thereof.’
“The same old story:
“In chapter 1, verse 11, Haggai calls for a drouth upon the land to punish the people, and he includes, as usual, the corn, and the oil, and the new wine among the things to be destroyed.