The last Hebrew authority whose teachings concerning drink it will be necessary to consider is St. Paul. Whilst deprecating coercion and tolerating the temperate use of drink, he undoubtedly commended total abstinence as an example to those who were unable to control themselves. To Timothy he said, “Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities.”[130] “A bishop,” he remarked, “must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach; not given to wine, not greedy of filthy lucre. Likewise must the deacons be grave, not double-tongued, not given to much wine, not greedy of filthy lucre.”[131] It is obvious that avarice, gluttony, and drunkenness were then prevalent vices, and, as we shall find when the customs of Rome are under consideration, they had assumed their most glaring and repulsive form in that city. To his co-religionists in Rome, therefore, Paul addressed the most earnest exhortations, enjoining total abstinence as an example. To them he said distinctly, “It is good neither to eat flesh nor to drink wine, nor anything whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak.”[132] At the same time, as we have said, he deprecated the wholesale condemnation of persons who thought fit to enjoy these luxuries in moderation. “For one,” he said, “believeth that he may eat all things; another, who is weak, eateth herbs. Let not him who eateth despise him that eateth not, and let not him which eateth not judge him that eateth; for God hath received him. Who art thou that judgest another man’s servant? To his own master he standeth or falleth.”[133] But of drunkenness he spoke in very different terms. “Let us walk honestly,” he said to the Roman Christians, “not in rioting and drunkenness;”[134] and elsewhere he ranks drunkards with thieves and extortioners, and even goes so far as to deny them salvation.[135]