Last of all, there is, at the very least, a difference in the degree of contradiction to the teaching and example of Our Lord (as recorded in the Canonical Gospels), between the Inquisition and the Prohibition movement. So as to meet possible opposition half way, let us abandon the conclusions of the Rev. A. Vermeersch, S.J., who seems to hold that there was no contradiction between the Inquisition on the one hand and the doctrine and example of Our Lord on the other. The present writer must confess that the learned Jesuit’s forceful work is somewhat weakened by traces of a curious obliquity of mind, as when he defines “religious liberty” as “the liberty of the true religion!” For the sake of the arguments against the Prohibitionists, let us rest our case upon the conclusions of Vacandard, whose book is entrenched behind an array of “Nihil Obstat” and “Imprimatur” from Roman Catholic ecclesiastical authority equal in impressiveness to that displayed by Vermeersch. Vacandard calls the Inquisitorial forms of procedure “despotic and barbarous,” and flatly says that “severe penalties, like the stake and confiscation ... were alien to the spirit of the Gospel.” Nevertheless, the contradiction between Inquisitorial severity and the “spirit of the Gospel” must to some extent be qualified. The logical conclusion is irresistible that if (as all Christians must) we assume Our Lord’s doctrine and example to be of inestimable value to mankind, we must admit that any attempt to pervert that doctrine and example so as to make Our Blessed Lord say and do as he did not is a more serious matter than any crime recognized by law. Furthermore, this argument from reason is, in a measure, supported by authority in the person of Our Lord himself because of the extreme bitterness with which he denounced the Pharisees for perverting religion. On the other hand, the contradiction between Prohibition and the Gospels is complete and absolute. According to the Gospels, Our Lord spent most of his time in the society of men and women. Especially he hallowed, by his continual use of it, the adornment of social life by wine, so much so that his enemies called him “a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber.”[46] We find him working a miracle so that a wedding party, including himself, might be abundantly supplied with wine ... as if any wedding party since the creation would have cared whether or not they were indefinitely supplied with grape-juice. He did even more—he made wine a part of the Sacrament—the one ceremonial act which he prescribed. Bacchus-Dionysus also, so the pagan Greeks taught, had made wine a sacrament of fellowship, human and divine. In contrast with the dull and repulsive fanaticism taught in so-called Christian Protestant churches in the United States to-day, the traditional Christian, like the heathen worshipper of Bacchus, seeks and has ever sought communion with his God in the drinking of wine. FOOTNOTES: [37] Isaiah, chap. v, verse 2.