Personal Experience of a Physician Part 9

The greatest obstacle which the grand temperance reformation has to encounter to-day is the stand publicly taken by so many of our clergy and religious periodicals in favor of fermented wine as a good and useful drink, and the use of intoxicating wine as a communion wine in so many of our churches. But the True Light has come into the world, and it will shine more and more until the perfect day.

As to tea and coffee, while they can hardly be compared with intoxicating drinks, tobacco, and opium, as to their injurious effects on man when he uses them, yet they are very far from being harmless; for, like the other poisons named, their use begets an unnatural appet.i.te which healthy fluids will not satisfy, and they cause symptoms and diseases characteristic of the fluid taken. Tea causes sleeplessness, palpitation of the heart, and other symptoms, while coffee causes the "coffee headache," often destroys the morning appet.i.te; if given to children, interferes with their development, interferes with digestion, and causes a variety of nervous symptoms about the chest and stomach. Parents make a great mistake and do their children great injustice when they allow them to taste of tea or coffee before they are twenty-one years of age, or until they have pa.s.sed out from their control. If the young can be kept from becoming enslaved by such habits, and consequently remain in freedom, until their rational faculties are fully developed, in the increasing light of this new day, it will not be difficult for them to see that all such substances should be avoided. They do not add to one's enjoyment, for they, like intoxicants, tobacco, and all stimulating condiments, destroy or seriously impair the natural delicacy of taste with which the Lord has endowed us, when we eat or drink wholesome and needed articles of food. I am seventy-six years of age, yet I never had a better appet.i.te, and food never tasted better than it does to-day; and I attribute this to my having so generally avoided improper articles of food and drink. After a most patient and careful examination of both sides of the wine question in the light of Divine Revelation, ancient history and of science, for many years, and after having witnessed the fearful demoralization, the wretchedness and sorrow, the diseases and deaths which result from drinking fermented wine and other intoxicants, nothing so surprises me, and discourages me, in regard to the immediate future of the American people, as the pertinacity and persistency with which so many of the clergy of our country, without any careful examination of both sides of this question, are striving to justify the use of fermented wine as a beverage and even as a Communion wine. Instead of a.s.suming and ignoring everything, let the advocates of fermented wine answer the following inquiry by the Rev. Dr. Eliphalet Nott, President of Union College: "Can the same thing, in the same state, be good and bad; a symbol of wrath and a symbol of mercy; a thing to be sought after and a thing to be avoided? Certainly not. And is the Bible, then, inconsistent with itself? No, certainly."