THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
TOTAL ABSTINENCE.
I. The Term and its Use.
Meaning of the Term (§1). II. History of the Total- Abstinence Idea.
The Modern Problem Versus the Ancient (§ 1). Opinions Changed with the Problem (§ 2). Nineteenth-Century Movement (§ 3). Results of the Movement (§ 4).
III. Good and Bad Reasons for Total-Abstinence. Argument from the Evils of Drunkenness (§ 1). From the Evils of Moderate Use (§ 2).
The Ethical Argument (§ 3). Arguments from the .Scriptures (§ 4).
IV. Total Abstinence and Temperance Laws.
I. The Term and Its Use: Human society can not hold together, much less be prosperous and tolerable to live in, unless most persons voluntarily practise total abstinence from the grosser forms of crime, and an abstinence more or less stringent from many other possible acts and habits. Nothing is more essential to successful living, either individual or social, than the exercise of this form of the virtue of self-control. Opportunities for it occur in all regions of our experience; but the term is especially associated with the use of certain drugs which affect the nerves and the brain, and result in disastrous habits. Intoxicating alcoholic beverages are the best-known of these, and with them this article will mainly concern itself. But similar dangers arise, and the same principles apply in the case of opium, cocain, tobacco, hashish, and many other substances.
The term " total abstinence " has a history, and
a historical meaning. There is an advantage in
employing it in this historical mean-
I. Meaning ing, and guarding against the perver-
of the sions that have naturally crept in.
Term. The taking of the pledge was an important item in the temperance reform movements, and several different pledges were in use. They were alike in that they applied, with possible rare exceptions, only to liquids that might produce intoxication, and to these solely in their use as a " beverage " or " common drink." The substitution, in the pledges, of " alcoholic " for " intoxicating " came later; and whatever the reformers thought concerning alcoholic wine in the sacrament, for example, or the use of alcohol as medicine or in flavoring-extracts, they ordinarily left these uses outside the pledge. But there were other particulars in which the pledges differed, and sometimes two or three different pledges were offered at the same meeting, the people being invited to choose which pledge they would sign. One pledge was against the excessive use of intoxicants, as distinguished from the so-called moderate use. Another was against distilled liquors as distinguished from wine or beer or cider. Another was against all use as beverages of drinks that can intoxicate, whether distilled or fermented. This third was the total-absti nonce pledge — total as including all intoxicants and not some only, and total as being against all use of intoxicants as a beverage, and not against excessive use only. There was a longer form of this pledge in which one promised not to sell or give away intoxicating drinks for beverage purposes, as well as not to drink them. Total abstinence, teetotalism, is therefore, historically, not abstinence
from everything that contains alcohol, but from everything which so contains alcohol that one might get drunk upon it; not abstinence from such liquids for all purposes, but abstinence from them as a beverage. The historical total-abstinence position distinguishes the medicinal and other uses of alcohol from its use as a beverage, though it demands that it shall not be recklessly or needlessly used for these other purposes. It does not place the very light wines and beers on the same footing with those that will intoxicate, though it disapproves them as a matter of prudence, on account of their relations to the stronger beverages.
II. History of the Total- Abstinence Idea: Intoxicants, in the form of wine and beer at least, have been known from the earliest historical times; and the vice of drunkenness has also I. The been known. This is evident from the
Modern familiar Biblical instances of Noah and
Problem Nabal and others, from the figures and Versus the inscriptions on the Egyptian and Meso-
Ancient. potamian monuments, from the Greek myths concerning Dionysos, and from many other sources. But the conditions of the problem of drunkenness have been very materially changed within the last few centuries by the extent to which the art of distillation has developed. This art has long been known and practised; but it was not until a comparatively recent period that it came to be the powerful means it now is for increasing and cheapening the world's stock of intoxicating beverages. According to Theodore W Dwight {Independent, Apr. 27, 1882) the earliest recognition of the existence of distilled liquors to be found in English legislation is in the year 1629; and it was not until much later in the seventeenth century that these came to be recognized as in general use. As might have been expected, their introduction greats ly increased the evils of intemperance. Says the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in its article on " Gin ":
"In the early part of the eighteenth century, gin-shops multiplied with great rapidity in London; and the use of the beverage increased to an extent so demoralizing that retailers actually exhibited placards in their windows, intimating that there people might get drunk for a penny, and that clean straw, in comfortable cellars, would be provided for customers."
Contemporaneously with these changes in the facilities for the practise of drunkenness occurred certain other changes in men's habits of living, which also greatly affected the question of the use of alcoholic drinks. Coffee was known as early as 875 a.d., but it was first brought from Abyssinia into Arabia early in the fifteenth century. Coffee houses were established in Constantinople about the middle of the sixteenth century, and in London in 1652; and, before the close of the seventeenth century, coffee was a customary beverage in Europe. Chocolate and tea came to be generally used, among Europeans, within a few years of the same time. In both these directions, throughout Europe and America and parts of Asia and Africa, the generation^ of men who were of middle age about the year 1700 witnessed a radical revolution in the conditions of human life. In their childhood, fermented alcoholic drinks were the one resource of men, not only for I purposes of intoxication, but for all the purposes