That the use of fermented liquors was sinful was an unknown idea, quite as unknown as we have seen the use of distilled liquors to have been. Previous to the sixteenth century, we find ascetic individuals or select orders renouncing wine, but always, like true ascetics, either with the idea of making their abstention a distinguishing mark, or with that of renouncing pleasures lawful or even necessary to the community at large for the sake of special practice in self-control. Thus among the ancient Hebrews certain men would dedicate themselves to be “Nazarites to the Lord,” and as such would vow never to drink wine or to cut the hair or beard. The wine cup was no more evil than the scissors, abstention from both was merely the distinctive sign of a peculiar dedication. Just so, ascetic Christians would renounce wine except in the sacrament; St. Dominic is an instance. He was teetotal for years, although he finally gave up the practice. Here the idea was that of complete devotion to the service of God. Even entirely lawful and proper pleasures were to be freely laid aside by an individual in order that all fleshy desires, as such, might be “mortified,” and that the soul should not risk being swerved even by a hair’s breadth (through an instant’s delight in “creatures”) from complete and utter devotion to the Creator. Ascetic Christians were even more apt to give up eating meat than drinking wine. And, of course, none but the most frantically heretical Christians ever maintained that there was anything sinful about eating meat as such. Such renunciations were merely two among many forms of self-imposed “discipline.” In the same spirit a devout layman, like St. Louis, might abstain from marital intercourse during Lent. Apart from the practice of a general asceticism, the ancient and the mediæval worlds knew of but one great example of fear and hatred for wine. That appalling exception was the doctrine of Mohammed. Within Christendom itself, however, the theological and moral influence of Islam was slight. The only one of the various Mohammedan innovations in morals which had even a brief and partial echo among Christian men was the Prophet’s prohibition of images. With regard to the point under discussion, the use of wine, Mohammed’s teaching failed to commend itself to our ancestors. Instructed in Christian tradition, with the marriage in Cana and with the sacrament continually before them, the teetotaller fanaticism took no hold upon them. The chroniclers speak of it merely as an oddity, like the Jewish taboo against pork—which the Mohammedans also copied.