PRESBYTERIANS AND PROHIBITION

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3353, 20 October 1911, Page 3

PRESBYTERIANS AND PROHIBITION

“A GREAT AMOUNT OF SHAM

At a recent meeting of the AucliterPresbyter... hold in YYc.it Church Session House, Crieff (the Rev. _\lr Kemp, Trinity Cask, moderator.) •The Rev. Mr MacNaugliton (theclerk) read the report of the Presbytery’s Committed on Temperance. In submitting the report, he said the lempeiance Committee of the church so-called ■ was for the most part composed of such extreme people that one naturally felt inclined to give them a wide berth- —in fact it required a long spoon to sup with a rabid teetotaler. (Laughter.) The question had been dealt with by the Presbytery of Edinburgh and Glasgow in a very snivelling fashion. It was necessary that Auchterarder should give utterance to the words of truth and soberness on this question. In connection with i '© resolution com© to by Edinburgh and Glasgow on© could not but feel, there nos a great amount of sham. SPEECH BY DR- RANKIN. The Rev. Dr. Rankin moved 1 the adoption of the report, and that the clerk send a copy of it to the convener of the General Assembly’s 'Temperance Committee. It seemed to him they required to draw a very emphatic distinction between temperance and teetotalism. Attention had been drawn to the dual basis existing in the church—one accepting a temperance programme and the other a teetotal programme. This dual basis was quite unworkable, and instead of being a ‘•'dual,” it was really a “duel.” (Laughter, and a member: ‘Devil.”) It meant simply war among themselves. When speaking about vowels in that way, there was no harm in calling the memorandum which had been sent them by the Temperance Committee, and which the clerk had called a syllabus, a “sillybus”—(laughter) —for anything.

MORE MISERABLE AND SILLY, they could hardly get. (Laughter.) He criticised the teetotal position as an endeavor to raise up a thing into a virtue which was no virtue. It was based on a sham. It was absolutely without foundation in Scripture, and this sham virtue people were trying to promote by violent and tyrannical means. The charge he brought against them in the way of ’criticism was they neglected all method of reason, all method of Scripture, that they ought to adopt in dealing with this very serious evil. The method of reason and. Scripture was that of regulation and gradual improvement. The points of regulation had been fairly well indicated in the report. The first of these was as to the sound quality of the drink —that it be unadulterated. Those, again, who were guilty of supplying drink in excess to persons who had already had too much were not doing

right. One great means to mitigate the evils of drunkenness would be to discountenance the more dangerous kinds of drink, and to encourage the drinking of, say, beer and wine. Quoting from a temperance pamphlet that “strong drink was a hindrance to the progress of the Gospel” ; that these who are reclaimed from drunkenness were disposed to relapse after partaking of the wine at the Lord’s^Supper, ,Dr Bankin said he could hardly read that without horror. He seldom read without a holy horror a statement containing such A B SOLUTE PRO-FA NIT Y. These fanatics were running a-tilt of human reason, of human nature, and of tlie world. They were injuring a most sacred cause. They indulged in the wildest and most condemnatory language, reviling, for instance, that portion of the community associated with the trade in public-houses. . . After referring to the wild system which these fanatics adopted of reviling ministers of the Gospel who confined themselves to the Scriptural view of temperance, Dr. Rankin said one of their methods of working was to get associated with divinity halls- and catch students when they were green and raw—especially students in dissenting piaces —and make the boast they had threefourths or nine-tenths pledged to teetotalism at an age before they weio capable of properly judging. To people who needed methods of that sort for spreading their principle it might be said their principles have hardly feet of their own to stand on. The rev. doctor proceeded to refer to the impertinence of saying a man engaged in the traffic ought not to be accepted to any branch of the Christian Church as an office-bearer. In regard to parliamentary candidates, he said. POLITICS WERE DEGRADED and endangered by the red-hot class of people who asociated with men who were “sound” on this particular point, regardless of the twenty other revolutionary things in his programme. The teetotal programme was unworkable. The result of it, if made law, would be tlie commencement of a system of evasion that would corrupt the whole country. (Applause.) Rev. Mr McGibbon seconded.

After discussion the report was adopted' unanimously, one member declaring he would not think a man worth twopence if he could not have a drink if he wished.*