realized in the Author of the Christian religion. Cicero derived the word religio from "relego' or "religo," meaning to review and retrace; saying "Sunt dicti religiosi ex relegendo," they are called religious from retracing. The same comprehensive writer summed up the two duties. prompted by religious conviction thus: "Religio est, quæ superioris cujusdam naturæ, quam divinam vocant, curam cærimoniamque affert;" which may be rendered: "Religion is that which prompts to moral carefulness and ceremonial devotion to any superior being whom men regard divine." It is, now, religious conviction as to the moral propriety of using wines, both as a beverage and in religious rites, to which Cicero's comprehensive statement calls us. It will be found that as religious duty rests in all minds, and in all ages, on these two ideas, of carefulness as to personal moral habits, and of scrupulousness as to formal religious rites, so in all ages, distinct from all articles of diet and select among all offerings to deity, wine has been made the subject of special thought and debate.

THE PRESENT CALL FOR THIS REVIEW.

In everything that concerns man, in scientific survey, in moral reform, in religious progress, there is, as there was before Christ's coming, a "due time.” In the gradual spread and power

Present Call for Historic Review.

15

of Christ's Gospel, there was a time for Grecian wisdom, and then for Roman power to yield to its sway; a time for frequent successive reformations where Christianity prevailed, and then for missions abroad; a time for moral reforms in civil and then in domestic associations; and now, perhaps, a time for the true law of the use of wines in social customs and ecclesiastical rites to gain its legitimate sway. Men of science are now devoted with special earnestness to the recovery of the victims of intoxication; they are noting with all the appliances of modern chemical research the effects of alcohol on the human body; and they do not fear to be regarded unscientific in maintaining the truth to which observation leads them. They declare that, in admixtures, alcohol is not only not nutritious, but more, that it is not even a stimulant, being, in fact, an irritant; and they illustrate their idea by the different effects of food, some kinds and proportions of which are nutritive and others stimulating, while any surplus in proper proportions, and some ingredients in any proportions, only inflame and irritate, being not only void of nutrition, but unhealthful in their excitement. They agree universally in declaring that pure, unadulterated alcohol is as truly a poison as antimony. If now as early as the days of Hippocrates, the earliest medical writer whose records

are preserved, the same truth is found stated, and its recognition age after age is recorded, it must be the part of those who wish to be scientific to note this testimony of successive observers.

Artists and men of letters are yet more observant; and, as of old, they are embodying truth. Gustave Doré, the magical delineator of supernatural scenes, conceived a vase of strange device for the Paris Exposition of 1878. It is a Greek "amphora" or wine-tureen, on whose brim ruddy cupids are sporting in childish innocence; but who, becoming gradually intoxicated by the mere fumes of the wine within, successively fall from the brim upon the projecting bulge of the vase below, where toads and lizards, snakes and vipers, ravenous beasts and reptiles receive and prey upon them. Strange though it seem to modern view, it is nothing else than the reconstruction of the visions of Homer and Virgil, when nymphs and sirens seduced and betrayed the Greek Ulysses and the Trojan Æneas by the inflaming intoxication of the winecup. If men of genius are found even before the days of Homer, long indeed before Moses' day, to have had the same vision, then it need not be wondered at that Mrs. Jameson has traced the preeminent success of the three great masters, Lionardo, Angelo, and Raphael, to their absti nence; and that the long-lived caricaturist,

Artists, Jurists, and Churchmen Aroused. 17

Cruikshank, has enlisted in the ranks of advocates for total abstinence from all that can intoxicate. Doré has studied the spirit of the age, and sees its moral drift. He leads only by yielding

to the current.

Yet again, jurists and churchmen are coming, not reluctantly, but with conscientious ardor, to weigh facts, arguments, and appeals that come from every civilized nation and their statesmen, and from every branch of the Christian Church; which latter, where established Churches prevail, finds its ultimate appeal in courts of law. In Great Britain Presbyterian Synods and Wesleyan Conferences are agitated with discussions whether unintoxicating wines may not be furnished for the Lord's Supper; and in the English Episcopal Church suit is actually brought to test the question whether the change may not be legally made. In America, the multiplying number of communicants brought into churches from the ranks of former inebriates is prompting from policy, if not for conscience' sake, the use of unintoxicating wine at the Lord's Supper. Meanwhile, in the Roman Catholic Church Archbishop Manning is heard, at London, declaring that the great evil of English Christianity is the social drinking custom; while Archbishop, now Cardinal, McCloskey, three winters ago, called on Irish Catholics to maintain

the virtue of total abstinence from intoxicating liquors, citing Christ's abstinence during his six hours of agony on the cross from the intoxicating wine offered Him, as the Divine call to that virtue. There seems, then, to come from every class of thinking men, scientists, artists, jurists, and moralists, a common call to review the question of wines in religious uses.

THE MATERIALS FOR THIS SURVEY.

It is remarkable that universal literature should be permeated by statements of facts and principles relating to the use of wines; an indication most manifest that mankind have found in it a theme worthy of consideration. Prior to the records of Moses, among the codes of law alluded to by him as inferior to his own writings Deut. iv. 8), in Chaldea, Egypt, and India, a learned class left records which indicate that men had, at that early day, so observed the effects of the use of wines as to make them the subjects of legislation. Thus the "Institutes of Menu," the last of the Indian Vedas, embody as statutes founded on "immemorial customs," laws prohibiting its use; while also like Egyptian statutes are recorded. The Hebrew Scriptures of three special ages, the patriarchal history and body of laws written by Moses, the lyric and didactic poems of the early kings David and