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[211]
By no means.
Is church discipline visited only on those who see and confess their sins?
Is it not used to rouse them to a sense of the principle they will not acknowledge, and hold them up to the rebuke and take from them the respect of their fellows?
If our Temperance agitation is “intimidation,” then nine tenths of the land's pulpits are bulldozers, and the other tenth is useless.
What does the Bible say of those who prophesy smooth things, and whose order was Nathan obeying when he said, “Thou art the man” ?
I have known even a Greek professor, when speaking in downright earnest, fling about the keenest and roughest words in :;he dictionary in the most reckless and biting manner;1 yet I never dreamed of charging him with seeking to intimidate his opponents.
Dr. Crosby says it is false, our constant assertion that moderate drinking makes drunkards.
Will he please tell us where, then, the drunkards come from?
Certainly
1 As illustrating Dr. Crosby's “calmness,” the Chicago Advance says: “A collection of the dynamic complimentary phrases applied by this ‘calm’ lecturer to the main body of Temperance people of America would make a curious paragraph. Here are some specimens: ‘Mere obstinacy of opinion and personal pride ;’ ‘ what a fearful prostitution of a noble word is seen in the use of the word temperance to-day!’ ‘ a false flag’ seized by “radical and intemperate souls” which “ will disgust and alienate true and enlightened souls; ” “ these infatuated defenders of the Total-abstinence principle ;” “ these great untruths that are flaunted on its banners will disgust most men that have brains and use them;” “its spirit of intimidation” and “bulldozing,” the “invariable accompaniment of it during its forty years curriculum ;” “overbearing and tyrannical,” “using a violence of language that can admit of no excuse;” whose “principal agencies have been falsehood and intimidation ;” whose “ principles are at war with proper manliness or self-respect;” “ upon the Total-abstinence system I charge the growth of drunkenness in our land and a general demoralization among religious communities;” “moral jugglery,” “a blunder that has the proportions of a crime;” of the pledge, a “ most pernicious instrument for debauching the conscience,” “ always an injury and never a help;” the wild “ bashi-bazouks of controversy” etc., etc.”
Lee and Shepard, 1891.
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