Orleans County monitor. [volume] (Barton, Vt.) 1872-1953, 1880-11-22
Temperance.
TEMPERANCE AND THE
CHURCHES.

We want-we must have-a public
sentiment in Illinois that will uphold
vigorous temperance Legislation. How
are we to get it? Largely through the
churches. They are Gods appointed
medium for reaching the worlds dis
orders. They cannot afford to look on,
while outside reformers do the work
that belongs to them. They cannot
afford to allow any man even a pretext
for believing that he has outrun them in
any benifcent work. And, slice slavery
expired at Appomattox, no one form of
evil to be compared with intemperance
confronts the churches. How are they
to build up sentiment so high that
legislation. planting its guns upon it,
will command the enemy?
1t will not be by keeping to the
gospel and letting reforms alone" The
treacherous folly of that policy we dis
covered in the struggle with slavery.
Thousands of pulpits were keeping to
the gospel" without word on the bru-
tality of selling men, women and chill
dren to the highest bidder. And the
iniquity throve and grew under the
caves of their sanctuaries. The gospel
includes reforms. 1t is keeping to it to
promote them. And that must be done
by applying it to them. A physician
might as well deliver lecture on the
science of therapeutics to patient
writing with the govt; family might
as we'll quench a fire breaking out in
the kitchen by keeping the beds well
made and the shelves we'll busted as a
church expect to reach intemperance by
teaching the exceeding sinfulness of sin.
They must make the temperance reform,
not exclusively, but as they do with
missions, for example. speciality. If
we are ever to see progress against the
foremost evil of the age, pastors must
speak plainly upon it. And not par
agraph of sermon, now and then,-a
little spray thrown out from the main
current of their preaching,-but whole
| discourse, say three or four times year,
solid with fact and argument, and aglow
with life and fire, pouring from the
preachers brain and heart like molten
matter from furnace, with his fears
for the imperiled and grief for the fallen,
his denunciations of the traffic, and
appeals for rally of all good souls
against it.
The children, too, in our Sabbath
schools must be filled and fired with
intelligent interest in the work. 1t is
miserably insufficient to warn them
against drinking. themselves. They
must be no such negative temperance
characters, but positive, whole-souled
upright and downright enthusiasts fol
the good cause. They must be taught
to loathe the dramseller's business. DR.
Arnold, of Rugby school, never though
it enough that boy should only love
good. 1t was not till he began to hat,
evil that the doctor was content will
him. Let the children know that it il
crime against society to recognize
dram-selling as respectable trade-th'
mayor of Chicago to the contrary not
outstanding.
God calls the churches to raise tn
public sentiment of temperance, becaus
viewed at large-they are themselve
already raised. There are many t
sneer at this assertion. There are, con
fessedly, many individual exceptions t
be found. But every man of intelli
gence and candor knows the assertion t
be true, Notwithstanding. The churche
have been the backbone of every eficien
temperance movement. And they al
ways will be. But they should no'
be more than merely that.-.SeLected.