Again, all poisons, when taken into the stomach in a sufficient quantity and length of time, cause specific diseases characteristic of the poison taken. Healthy food does not do this. You see a man reeling in the streets, or drunk on the sidewalk, or with rum-blossoms on his face; you know that he has been drinking fermented wine or some fluid containing its chief ingredient--alcohol. Now, unfermented wine and other healthy drinks never cause such specific diseases or symptoms, however freely used. Here then, in the characteristics given above, is a broad gulf, as broad and deep as that between Heaven and Hell, between nourishing, life-giving substances and the poisons named above. Of the one we are to use temperately, but from the latter we are to totally abstain. "Thou shalt not" is clearly written. In all ages fermented wine has been regarded as a poison. In the Bible it is likened to the poison of dragons and the cruel venom of asps. Solomon tells us not to look upon it, for at last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder. Clement of Alexandria, who lived at the close of the second century, says: "From its use arise excessive desires and licentious conduct. The circulation is accelerated, and the body inflames the soul."--_Divine Law as to Wines._ We know by observation that fermented wine is a fluid which fills man when he drinks of it as freely as he may of healthy needed drinks with all manner of uncleanness of both body and soul. How can a clergyman talk of using such a fluid temperately? Can we steal temperately, bear false witness temperately, commit adultery temperately, or murder temperately? Is it right to deliberately do any of these acts temperately? If it is, then it is right to deliberately drink fermented wine temperately, which we know endangers health, freedom, reason and life, and leads men to commit crimes even the most filthy. One glass leads naturally to another, and that to many; just as stealing pennies leads to stealing dollars, and hundreds and thousands of dollars. A perverted appetite or passion can never be fully satisfied, but it leads to sorrow. All such evils must be shunned totally as sins against God. It would be difficult to find elsewhere in the English language, in so few lines, as many statements so absolutely untrue, dogmatically proclaimed, as in the following from the article in the _Christian Union_:-- "This notion of two wines, one fermented, the other unfermented, must be dismissed as a pure invention, unsupported by any facts, unsanctioned by any scholarship. There was but one wine known to the ancients--fermented grape-juice. This was the wine Christ made, drank, blessed. There was no other used in His time or known to His day."