Part 30

"And inasmuch as Solomon was the wisest of all men (or God made a mistake when he so said), and the temple was for the said God, I am justified in concluding that this God regards wine as a legal tender, and so I put the above passage in this category as one in which God has sanctified the use of wine.

"Neh. 5 : 11: (To the usurers): 'Restore, I pray you, to them, even this day, their lands, their vineyards, their olive yards, and their houses, also the hundredth part of the money, and of the corn, the wine, and the oil, that ye exact of them.'

"Neh. 10 : 39: 'For the children of Israel and the children of Levi shall bring the offering of the corn, of the new wine, and the oil ... and we will not forsake the house of our God.'

"Wine, old or 'new,' seems to have been always acceptable to 'our God,' whether tendered as a holy offering or otherwise.

"'The Lord' makes wine, according to the Psalmist:

"Psalm 104 : 15: 'And wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man's heart.'

"If 'the Lord' lived in Iowa, Lozier and Foster would have him arrested for violation of the new iron-clad prohibitory law.

"Prov. 3 : 10: 'So shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out with new wine.'

"Prov. 31 : 6, 7: 'Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy heart. Let him drink and forget his poverty and remember his misery no more.'

"In these two verses, the author of Proverbs has more than nullified all the good things he said in his earlier chapters, and which I have quoted in List A. I am quite sure that where they have prevented the drinking of one glass of wine or strong drink, these passages have led to the drinking of one thousand. And this is a mild statement of the case.

"Eccl. 9 : 7: 'Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works.'

"Song of Sol. 1 : 2: 'Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth; for thy love is better than wine.'

"From this we gather that, next to love wine is the best thing in the world. This is the opinion of most bacchanalian experts, I believe. Solomon seems to have had much experience.

"Song of Sol. 5 : 1: 'I have drunk my wine with my milk; eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O believers.'

"Is this the earliest mention of milk punch?

"Song of Sol. 8 : 2: 'I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine of the juice of my pomegranate.' Metaphorical, undoubtedly.

"Isa. 1 : 22: 'Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water.'

"Have your wine full strength, as much as you would have your silver unalloyed, is the admonition of God's prophet.

"Isa. 24 : 7: 'The new wine mourneth, the vine languisheth; all the merry-hearted do sigh.'

"One more in the long list of passages wherein it is said that God punished his chosen people by cutting off their vintage. What God regards as a real deprivation to lose must be good to have and to keep, in his opinion, whatever the Woman's Christian Temperance Union people may think about it. Verse 9 says: 'They shall not drink wine with a song; strong drink shall be bitter to them that drink it.' Verse 11: 'There is a crying for wine in the streets; all joy is darkened; the mirth of the land is gone.'

"God thus punished them by taking away their wine, on the same principle that he punishes us by killing our children, as Christians say that he does. Will they contend that children are inherently an evil? They must if they follow the same line of reasoning that they do in interpreting these texts.

"Isa. 27 : 2, 3: 'In that day sing ye unto her, a vineyard of red wine. I the Lord do keep it; I will water it every moment; lest any hurt it, I will keep it night and day.'

"Figurative, doubtless! So is the next, but all the influence of these passages is on the side of intemperance, necessarily, for the simple reason that the great mass of the people will take them literally, and for the further reason that the constant association of wine with 'good news' and symbols of religion familiarize the mind with it and serve to give it something of a sacred character. This last mentioned fact helps to explain why the church so long opposed the modern temperance movement. But here is the passage above indicated, Isa. 55 : 1: 'Ho, everyone that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy and eat: yea, come buy wine and milk without money and without price.'

"Isa. 62 : 8: 'The Lord hath sworn by his right hand, and by the arm of his strength, Surely I will no more give thy corn to be meat for thine enemies; and the sons of the stranger shall not drink thy wine, for the which thou hast labored.'

"Rev. Stevenson should suggest to the Lord that, whereas wine is an evil thing, and the Bible a 'great text book of morals,' and the palladium of temperance, essential in the proper training of our children, therefore, he, the Lord, should have clearly shown that he meant that the enemies of his chosen people should take from them their wine that through such deprivation they should be better and happier. But, no! he ranks wine with corn, and registers a mighty oath that the people shall have them both.

"Isa. 65 : 8: 'Thus saith the Lord, As the new wine is found in the cluster, and one saith, Destroy it not, for a blessing is in it, so I will do for my servants' sake, that I may not destroy them all.'

"Jer. 31 : 12: 'Therefore they shall come and sing in the height of Zion, and shall flow together to the goodness of the Lord, for wheat, and for wine, and for oil,' etc.

"Jer. 40 : 10: 'But ye, gather ye wine, and summer fruits, and oil, and put them in your vessels, and dwell in the cities that ye have taken.'

"Probably 'wine' here means grapes, though it is used in the same construction as 'oil.'

"Jer. 48 : 33: 'And joy and gladness is taken from the plentiful field, and from the land of Moab, and I have caused wine to fail from the wine presses.'

"Dan. 1 : 5: 'And the king appointed them a daily provision of the king's meat, and of the wine which he drank, so nourishing them three years, that at the end thereof they might stand before the king.'

"Here God intends, plainly, to convey the impression that wine is nourishing! The only way in which the Christian temperance people can relieve him from the imputation of teaching lessons so opposite to theirs is to enter the plea that he did not inspire the writer!

"Hos. 2 : 8, 9: 'For she did not know that I gave her corn, and wine, and oil, and multiplied her silver and gold which they prepared for Baal. Therefore I will return and take away my corn in the time thereof, and my wine in the season thereof, and will recover my wool and my flax given to cover her nakedness.'

"Of course, if these passages and very many of like import, are any argument against wine, they are of equal weight in the scale against corn, wool, and many other useful and necessary articles. The authors of such verses, wherever found, unquestionably looked upon wine as one of God's good gifts to his children, but which he was compelled to sometimes deprive them of because of their disobedience.

"Hos. 9 : 2: 'The floor and the wine-press shall not feed them, and the new wine shall fail in her.'

"That is, Israel shall be punished for her transgressions by the destruction of the fertility of the soil.

"Evidently the perfume of wine was pleasing unto the Lord, for he says, in promising his blessing to the repentant people (Hos. 14 : 7): 'They shall revive as the corn, and grow as the wine; the scent thereof shall be as the wine of Lebanon.'

"Joel 1 : 5: 'Awake, ye drunkards, and howl, all ye drinkers of wine.'

"This, taken by itself, would be an unqualified condemnation of intoxicants, but such was not the prophet's meaning. The verse concludes: 'Because of the new wine, for it is cut off from your mouths.'

"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.

"Zech. 9 : 17: 'For how great is his goodness, and how great is his beauty; corn shall make the young men cheerful, and new wine the maids.'

"Rather a singular apportionment of his bounty, unless 'corn' means something stronger than wine.

"Matt. 11 : 19: 'The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold, a man is gluttonous, and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. But wisdom is justified of her children.' But are these her children who claim Jesus as very God and yet fly directly in the face of his precepts and practice? Or is it moral uprightness instead of wisdom that they lack?

"In Mat. 21 : 33 to 41, and Mark 12 : 1 to 9, Jesus gives us the parable of the vineyard and the husbandman, and in it all there is no hint that there was anything wrong in the business of winemaking.

"The thought that we find expressed in Mat. 11 : 19, is given again in Luke 7 : 33-4-5, where we read: 'For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, He hath a devil. The Son of man is come eating and drinking, and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man, and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners! But wisdom is justified of all her children.'

"Whoever uttered these words, man or god; whoever wrote them, John or some one else one hundred or more years later, there can be no disputing regarding the lesson which is taught. It is that each individual is to determine for himself or herself in all things pertaining to personal conduct and habits. 'Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind' is the central idea of the various renderings. There is no rebuke, expressed or implied, of intemperance; there is nothing that can be tortured into a condemnation of wine-drinking or into an approval of the principle of total abstinence, or that of prohibition. Here was his opportunity to condemn the drinking of wine, to speak for that which is now called temperance; but from his lips fell no words of warning; to those gathered about him he said nothing in favor of the great reform which Christians of to-day, falsely assuming to speak in his name, declare finds its sanction and inspiration, its bulwark and tower of defense, in the Bible.

"It seems that the good Samaritan (Luke 10 : 34) had with him a supply of wine with which he dressed the wounds of the stranger.

"John 2 : 3-11: 'And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, They have no wine. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what have I to do with thee? Mine hour is not yet come. His mother saith unto the servants, Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it. And there were set there six water pots of stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews, containing two or three firkins apiece. Jesus saith unto them, Fill the water-pots with water. And they filled them up to the brim. And he saith unto them, Draw out now, and bear unto the governor of the feast. And they bare it. When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and knew not whence it was (but the servants which drew the water knew), the governor of the feast called the bridegroom, and saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse; but thou hast kept the good wine until now. This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him.'

"John 4 : 46: 'So Jesus came again into Cana of Galilee, where he made the water wine.'

"The first miracle which Jesus performed was to convert six pots of water into wine! And this feat convinced his disciples of his supernatural origin and powers! And he did this to manifest forth his glory! Either this is true or the Bible is false. Whether true or not, it has been a most powerful argument against abstinence; it has resulted directly in making drunkards, as it has indirectly in making hypocrites and Jesuitical sophists. I of course mean by this last sentence that the seeming necessity to prove the Bible a temperance work has made any number of Christian apologists resort to all kinds of specious arguments and make any number of false claims in order to make good their assertions. The assumption that this wine was not of an intoxicating nature is purely gratuitous. There is not even the ghost of a fact to be found in support of it. Hundreds of passages, which I have quoted under their appropriate heads, prove beyond a doubt that the wine so often mentioned in the Bible was intoxicating; the words of the governor prove that this miraculously produced portion of it certainly was of the very best, for it is against all reason to suppose that men accustomed to the taste and effects of wine would pronounce simple grape-juice to be better than all that had already been served to them at the feast; and, finally, the declaration that this act of Jesus was a miracle and that it made his disciples to 'believe on him,' gives the last stroke to the already nearly dead 'non-intoxicating' theory.

"Col. 2 : 16: 'Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a holy day, or of the new moon, or of the Sabbath days.'

"In other words, judge for yourselves in all these matters, submit to no dictation from without. How does that strike you, Messrs. Bible Prohibitionists?

"1 Tim. 5 : 23: 'Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach's sake and thine often infirmities.'

"It is probable that this short verse has led to the consumption of more wine and caused more intemperance than any other equal number of words in any language or contained in any book. It has had more potent effect upon the mind of the Christian believer than have twenty passages which have in a hesitating, half-hearted, uncertain way caution against the use of much wine.

"Comparing this class of passages with those grouped under 'A,' we find that the Bible pleas for temperance are out voted more than five to one by those in favor of the use of intoxicants. The record is an astonishingly bad one for the Bible as a total abstinence and Prohibition work, and should put to the blush all of its worshipers and apologists who have been so foolish or unscrupulous as to claim that it is indispensable to the temperance cause and in the education of our children. Both claims are absurd." (E. C. Walker's "Bible Temperance.")

The Inconsistency of Agnosticism.

"It seems to me as irrational to say there is no God as to say there is a God."--Editor Twentieth Century.

"But pray, why? Does not that proposition tacitly concede that it is irrational to say there is a God? If so, how can it be irrational to deny an irrational proposition or absurdity? Are not the two propositions antithetical? If so, one or the other is, of necessity, false. Conceding then, as he does, the absurdity of the God idea, why will Mr. Pentecost persist, inconsistently, in maintaining that there is no difference between the rationality of Theism and Materialism, with its incidental Atheism?

"Will he kindly tell us the difference in degree of rationality between the position that there is a personal Devil and that there is a God? Are not both notions of the same origin and equally absurd? Are not both transmitted to us from the dark ages, from the same book, and must not both stand or fall together? Yet Mr. Pentecost would not, from pure deference and respect for our poor, non-evolved pious friends, assume an Agnostic's attitude and concede that 'it is as irrational to say there is no Devil as to say there is a Devil.' Of course not. He simply denies the existence of His Satanic Majesty without equivocation, and the proof of his existence not being forthcoming his denial is equivalent to proof that such a being does not exist.

"In law and equity the affirmative is obliged to prove its case. If then a proposition is self-evidently absurd, unnatural and absolutely impossible, why concede to those affirming, without a shadow of proof, that their belief is equally rational with our unbelief, that 'it may be so,' 'I don't know,' etc.

"Having discarded as authoritative ancient traditions, there is absolutely no logic, no reason, no science, no analogy that will sustain or demonstrate the existence of a God. And in view of this fact a simple denial is all-sufficient to prove the negative. As the plea of the prisoner at the bar of 'not guilty' is equivalent to proof of his innocence and bound to be respected by court and juror, unless, indeed, the affirmative, beyond a shadow of a doubt, establishes his guilt, so the Atheist's fearless denial, nowadays, must demand profound respect, and is equivalent to proof, unless, indeed, the Church brings proof, outside of a discarded Bible, of the truth of its basic idea.

"Now, though unnecessary to prove a negative, and the God-idea not having been established by history, revelation, science, or reason, yet alleged arguments being continually advanced in the vain endeavor to resuscitate a vanishing religion, a few propositions are here advanced which prove there is no God.

"There is a universe. This proves there is no God.

"The universe is infinite. This excludes anything else of like character--two infinities being an absurdity.

"The universe (nature) is here and there and everywhere. This proves that God cannot be here and there and everywhere.

"Two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Matter (implying energy and force) monopolizing every point of space, nothing else can occupy it in addition.

"The universe exists now. Something cannot come from nothing, therefore the universe has always existed.

"Being eternal and infinite, this excludes anything anterior, exterior, or superior to it.

"Is God in the universe or the universe in God? If there is a God, either of these propositions must be true, yet both are glaringly absurd.

"Can an engineer drive a locomotive and be a locomotive at the same time? If not, how can a God manipulate an infinite universe and be infinite 'Himself?'

"Yet the universe, outside of a God, is an absolute reality, as much so as a locomotive is a reality outside of the engineer. The world is a reality, our planets, the sun, all the countless millions of stars within reach of our telescopes and the infinitude of stars and systems beyond the reach of our strongest lenses, which science infers to exist, all these are a reality and all these, yes, every object of knowledge is a reality, and all these are not God! How then, in the name of reason I ask, can a God, of whom we know absolutely nothing, be infinite, when an infinite number of material objects--not God--fill all space?

"But does the universe exist in God? If we but imagine for a moment the aspect of the universe to resemble a huge machine of infinite proportions, eternally active in all its vast proportions, the idea of the universe existing within a God will appear equally childish and simple.

"All phenomena are the results of energy co-existent and inseparable from matter. All cosmic motion, change, and life may be traced to this physical and chemical energy pervading all nature--never to a God.

"Mind--the so-called infinite as well as finite--implies limit, localization, conditions, etc. This fact tends to prove that while God, perchance, might concentrate his mind on the world or some particular sect or individual, considering their exhortations, the rest of the world and the universe for the time being would be Godless!

"From a late scientific authority I quote in proof: 'It is impossible for a person's mind to be in two places at the same time.' Noted chess players may play twenty games simultaneously, but it is done by speedy transfer of thoughts from one game to another and not by considering two moves at once.

"Thus 'Omniscience' is impossible.

"Again; mind implies limit and necessitates organism, brain, nervous force, etc. This again makes impossible a God. Let the Church demonstrate how a God without a brain can be a God and all it implies, or how a God with a brain can be infinite, and I will kneel down and worship with them.

"Is this dogmatism? The 'dogmatism of the Infidel' we hear so much about? If it is, then asserting that twice two is four is dogmatism. Then we state all the facts of mathematics, all the truths of history is dogmatism. We simply confine ourselves to fact, to knowledge and demonstrated truth. There we stop and refuse to accept the crude notions transmitted from our ignorant ancestors, which, it is dogmatically asserted, are true in spite of our knowledge and reason.