We are told by the reverend gentleman in the _Christian Union_ that nature produces alcohol in the juices, as though its production was by a natural and orderly process. The process of fermentation is just as natural as the putrefaction of meat, when not prevented by care, and from an altogether similar cause; and as orderly as the eating of grain by rats if no care is taken to prevent it; and it is a no more natural or orderly process. The writer tells us that:-- "Whether the community can properly, without infringing on the liberty of the individual, prohibit all manufacture and sale of alcoholic liquors, is a political question, on which the life and teachings of Christ throw no light." A strange statement, indeed! Is it not right to prohibit theft, highway robbery, and other evil acts? Do Christ's teachings throw no light upon such questions? "Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself." In our country the government is by the people and for the people, and voters are responsible for the laws made or unmade; and they should be governed by Christ's precepts and not by political cliques. We do not hesitate to enact laws to prohibit druggists and others from selling other well-known poisons to people without the prescription of a physician, for fear they may possibly be used by the purchasers to harm either themselves or others; and I presume the reverend writer does not seriously question the justice and propriety of such laws; yet, strange to say, we license men, and thus give the sanction of the law, to sell fermented wine, beer, and other intoxicating drinks, and allow them to sell tobacco, all deadly poisons, when they know the purchasers will use them to harm themselves and others, and often destroy their lives. Yes, we thus license men to sell when we know that these poisons are sold to men and women who are controlled by an unnatural appetite instead of by reason; when it is known that they have harmed and killed more of the human family than all other poisons put together, and that many of the purchasers, to say the least, will certainly use them to destroy health, reason, and their own lives, and to render their own families and all intimately associated with them unspeakably wretched and unhappy. And yet, exclaims the above writer, whether the community can prohibit such sales of alcoholic liquors or not, without infringing on the liberty of the individual, "is a political question, on which the life and teachings of Christ throw no light." And the inference is that Christians, preachers, and our religious press have nothing to do with this question. "O consistency! thou art a jewel." Let stealing become as universal as the selling of intoxicants, and wives and children thereby be deprived of their means of support as extensively as they are by the selling of intoxicants, would the reverend gentleman stand aloof, and represent that the life and teachings of Christ throw no light upon the