River Falls journal. [volume] (River Falls, Pierce County, Wis.) 1872-2019, 1894-02-22
Evangelistic Work of the w. c. T. U.

with that of the court of Heaven S
King. Good social position must
mean good morals; good morals
must be equivalent to the White
Cross and the White Shield. The
circulating medium between the
sexes must be Heavens coin, purity
for purity, honor for honor" the
strength of integrity for the beauty
of virtue" No man must be allow
ed, with impunity, to cover up two
or three years of his life with the
drapery of wit, and smile, and
sophism, and trip lightly into the
charmed circle of some pure home,
and lead away the LOWEST of her
daughters to a marriage, that, on his
part, is mockery. This has been
done a thousand times too often al
ready, and our evangel must come
in, and with that holy guile" of
which st. Paul speaks, teach society
King Arthur's fashion of purity for
men, and the beauty of holiness for
the belle of the season.
And then, Christian law must
have a hearing in the courts, and be
eligible to the dignity of the judicial
gown in Christian America. The
time must come quickly when legis-
lators will be elected upon this
issue-"for" or against" the
Decalogue and the eleventh COM
mandment; when conscience shall
be as potent as distillers' gold in
controlling election returns, and
when honesty, at least, shall have
the counting of the ballots; when
lust shall no longer be able to crawl
his Shiny length from the hot bed of
unclean thought to the arena of
political power, but when the secret
whisper in the closet of prayer shall
be published on the housetop of
legal enactment.
AT first, in our work, we only saw
the saloon and the man who went to
ruin in it, and the broken hearts
that chung to him, so all our efforts
Were expended in the work of trying
to save the man, destroy the saloon,
and bind up the broken hearted.
This led us into strange places, made
us familiar with the spectacle OF
want, uncleanness and sorrow in
many forms. We found our way
into saloons, jails, prisons and aims
houses: were forced into courts, and
often brought face to face with
counterfeit law. Appalled, at the
hideous deformity of that creature
which had taken Gods place, we
asked that an immediate end be
made of the usurper; that license be
stricken from the statute, and Thou
shalt not be substituted: then began
the war between the home and the
saloon, the end of which is not yet.
At present the imperative need Of
the home is a majority. There are
many true men, pure, conscientious
men, but not enough of them, and
we are forced into the work of max
ing them out of the crude material
to be found in the boys in our
homes, schools, and even in the
slums of the street. Voters are
wanted legislators, magistrates,
men; and ours is the high calling OF
God by the processes to which the
w. G. I. U. has consecrated her
energies, to develop majority which
shall snow the liquor traffic under
with the clean ballots of pure men,
so deep that it shall never know a
resurrection.
We have become solemnly con-
scious of the fact that to do this we
must call in the aid of all the forces
of heaven. Science must be our
servant, our faith must venture to
take Jehovah at His word, when He
said, Concerning the work of my
hands, command we Me-" We
must take the kingdom with rever
ent violence, and open all its
treasures of wisdom and grace.
The mighty engine of the Holy
Spirit must be made to run all our
machinery, for without Him we can
do nothing, and there is SO much to
do. ifGambrinus is ever made to lay
aside the ermine and step down
from the place of supreme power in
this nation, and Christ elected to the
seat. Our evangel claims the
world for Him. We honestly be-
lieve it is His own; that He bought
not only the souls OF men with His
blood, but the earth, its territory,
its mines, its highways by land and
sea, its vineyard slopes, its grain
fields, its forests, and every ounce of
animal strength, as well as the finer
stores of intellect and spirit.
We do not believe that He con-
sents that the juices of fruit or grain
shall be converted into alcohol; that
tobacco shall be made into an article
for human consumption; that trees
should be manufactured into
lumber. or quarries be made to yield
their stone for the building OF dis