Temperance and total abstinence, or the use and abuse of alcoholic liquors in health and disease / By Spencer Thomson.

  • Spencer Thomson
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Temperance and total abstinence, or the use and abuse of alcoholic liquors in health and disease / By Spencer Thomson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    always proving injurious to the human system, the question would be at an end; it may be said, further, that the same must be the case, did revealed Scripture furnish us with any testimony that the wse of fluids containing alcohol was forbid by God. There is no intention here of calling in the aid of the Bible in the way it is often done, and of insisting that all the wines mentioned therein were alcoholic wines similar to those drank at the present day. The question is one on which much controversy, a good deal of philology, and some amount of intemperate language have been expended, and, after all, it is in many points doubtful. It has been pointed out in a previous chapter, that what were called wines by the ancients, were drinks of very varied properties; some, not bemg fermented, contained no alcohol at all; others were drugged, and many being really fermented, contained spirit, but not to the extent that the stroug wines of the present day do, which have their strength artificially and injuriously increased, by the addition of free alcoho]. That these drugged or alcoholic wines were not only used, but liable to be abused in those days, as now, may be gathered from the warnings and denunciations against that abuse given in the sacred writings; but, that anywhere, the employment of naturally fermented wine is forbidden, cannot be proved; certainly, the condemnation of the perversion of God’s good gifts, cannot be assumed as a command against their legitimate and properly regulated application. In making, then, as is too frequently done, the abstinence from all fer- mented liquor a “ shibboleth” in a Christian community, is, to say the least, a transgression of the law of Christian charity, and an assumption of power not quite consistent with Christian liberty. If anywhere we might expect to find alcoholic stimuli
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