A Clergyman on Prohibition.

Feilding Star, Volume XVIII, Issue 86, 8 October 1896, Page 2

A Clergyman on Prohibition.

We take the following letter from the columns of the New Zealand Herald : — Sir, — It is time that a protest should be ottered in the name of common sense, common decency, and common humanity, against the language used by some advocates of Prohibition, regarding a considerable class of our neighbours and fellow citizens. It is bad enough to have God's good gift of wine, which was chosen by Christ as a high and sacred symbol of the means of our salvation, stigmatised as " liquor damnation," but when men go on to affirm that all who are in any way engaged in the manufacture or sale of alcoholic liquors are trading upon the blood and misery of human beings, and are, therefore, such unclean pariahs and outcasts that their money should not be received by the Christian Church, truth, justice, and charity demand that such false, cruel, and wicked statements should be indignantly challenged. No one will deny that drunkenness is the cause of fruitful evils. Most people will allow that reforms in the mode of conducting the liquor trade are needed, that the number of licensed houses might well be lessened, the law as to selling during prohibited hours more rigidly enforced, and, above all, the quality of much of the liquor improved. No doubt there are dishonest brewers and dishonest hotelkeepers. but to brand a whole class on account of the evil-doing of a few is as dangerous as it is uncharitable. An aggrieved hotelkeeper might reply to Mr Isitt with the general statement all ministers of religion are hypocrites, which would be quite as true and quite as capable of proof as the general statement that all makers or sellers of liquor are unfit to be members of the Christian Church. Such wholesale denunciations do unspeakable harm. The sense of justice in those against whom they are levelled revolts against them ; their conscience refuses to respond to them. Those who are endeavoring to pursue honestly a calling which they know to be legitimate &re hurt and wounded by expressions which blacken themselves and their families. And the framers and approvers of such unjast accusations are taking one of the surest means of crushing then: neighbours' self-respect and of hardening and embittering their own hearts, while at the same time they are impeding the cause of rational and moderate reform. Mr Isitt objects to the church taking money from brewers and publicans, because it is the product of robbery. If he will search the New Testament, which contains at least as many and as strong warnings against spiritual pride and censoriousness as against drunkenness, he will find one instance in which money was refused on account of a scruple as to the way in which it had been earned. But the example is not an encouraging one. Christ did not refuse the offering of an alabaster box of ointment from a woman, whose sins He declared to be many ; it was the chief priests whose nice conscience would not suffer them to put into the treasury the reward they had not hesix tatcd to give for the betrayal of innocent blood. The manufacture and sale of pare liquor is an honest, useful, and respect* able business, and for my own part I would a thousand times rather make or sell good beer than retail bad theology. And there are many persons engaged in the liquor trade who are quite as good Christians as Mr Isitt, and better than I can pretend to be. This fact needs to be broadly and plainly stated, for such persons cannot stand forth to defend themselves from attacks which they know to be unfair and unkind, and which they feel deeply as tending to imprint a brand on themselves and their children. Again, suppose the church authorities are bound to scrutinise the source of gifts which seem to be made in all good faith, where are they to stop ? There are people who make money by lies and puffs, by adulteration, by extortion ; there are some who put on a cloak of religion that thus they may better cheat their neighbors, and some of their ill-gotten wealth finds its way into the coffers of the church. Are we to exam* me every man's books, to question his customers, to test his goods, before we will receive any contribution from him ? Are we to distinguish between what he makes honestly and what he makes dishonestly, and say the church will tak« tithe of the former, but not the latter. The thing is absurd. What the church has to do is to proclaim with unfaltering voice the need of strict integrity and fair dealing, the duty, the wisdom, the blessedness of doing as yon would be done by, to denounce all attempts to profit oy another's injury, and then to leave every man's conscience to apply these universal principles to his particus lar case. But to lump together in a com' mon condemnation the person keeps an orderly comfortable hotel, and sells wholesome liquor, with the sconn<* drel who enconrases debauchery, and gambling, and drugs people with vile decoctions, is to compound good and evil in the most reckless and presumptuous fashion. But some of the advocates of Prohibition seem determined to shut their eyes to the plainest facts. They tell us that with the disappearance of alcohol would come the disappearance of the greater part of our poverty, vice and crime. No doubt drunkenness is answerable for a skocking amount of misery, but Prohibition is no such panacea for human sin and wretchedness as its advocates would have us believe. There is a startling proof of this before the world at the present time. The Koran forbids the use of intoxicants, and every orthodox Mussulman is a strict abstainer. Religious scruple has brought about and maintained in Mohammedan countries a prohibition far stricter and more effectual than any which legal enactments could produce in New Zealand ; and yet murder, cruelty, rapine, lust, ignorance, sloth, are rife in Turkey, though alcohol is banned. I know that we have infinences for good at work among us which the Turks have not ; but the fact remains indisputable that you may have the vilest conditions of things in a country which enjoys the advantages of Prohibition. And it is a questionable advantage to have the outside of the platter clean if the inside is full of filth. There are sincere and consistent abstainers who feel that the champions of Prohibition are making a religion of a. political crusade, that they are invoking? the law to restrain men's action instead; of proclaiming the power which can renew their hearts, uplift their desires,, and mould their wills. And certainly the suggestion made lately with all gravity, that for six weeks before the cooling election ministers of religion should leave their work of preaching the Gospel, visiting the sick and afflicted, and teacbiug the young ia order to embark in a political campaign, is a singular proof of the danger we are all in of thinking that in New Zealand parliament and policemen have more authority than God. I am, etc, Way. BEAmrRernuevfi, September 14th, 1596».