George Barrell Cheever: Deacon Giles' distillery (1844)

I am not willing to believe that your honor will lend your influence to sanction this enormity. You will see that the respectability of the distiller can with no more propriety shield his occupation from scorn, than that of the dramseller can protect his. He may boast in his veins the blood of all the Howards, or he may have descended from the man who first put a bottle to the lips of his neighbor; his family may be rich and respectable, or poor and degraded; he may be a member of the church, receiving on the Sabbath the emblems of the body and blood of his Saviour, with the same hands that during the week prepare and circulate the means for his betrayal; or he may be a man excommunicated from the church for persisting in the traffic in ardent spirits;—whether he be the one or the other is to you a matter of entire indifference. You will remember that " it is just because the sin of intemperance is upheld by the rich and the reputable, and by professed Christians, that the Temperance Reform dragt so heavily."

I have been accused of turning aside from the path of my profession in the attack which I have made, through the fiction of a dream, on the evils of distilleries. I scarcely know in what spirit I should treat this absurd accusation. Clearly, the office of the ministry, in its very nature, is one of uncompromising warfare with sin of every kind. There is no iniquity with which the servant of Christ may dare to parley; no form of vice, which he may innocently refrain from holding up in the condemning light of the gospel. There is no citadel of iniquity, nor entrenchment of wickedness in high places, which his commission as a soldier of the cross does not authorize him to invade. The sin of intemperance in all its forms he should be the first to unveil, the firmest to encounter, the longest to resist. He should trace it to its fountains, and give himself no rest, till its streams of pollution are dried from the land; for it is the one enormous sin, " in all the family of plagues that waste our vitals." It is the one opposing obstacle, the world over, to the spread of the gospel. As a minister of the gospel, he cannot innocently be silent while the manufactories of that iniquity are tainting the atmosphere in his own neighborhood, and sending up their smoke of distillation almost beneath his own window. He does not step from the legitimate path of duty when he attacks them with the power of truth, and aims at their entire destruction. He never acts more in the spirit of expansive benevolence.

The very existence of the distillery is the perpetual production of sin in opposition to the gospel. It renders the word of God itself of none effect to the souls of multitudes. Shall the minister of the cross preach the gospel, and let this iniquity alone! Nay, but what is the gospel 1 It is no mere meek and silent abstraction, but an energetic influence, that will be supreme or nothing. It will rule in all relations and occupations in life, and makes war upon all that are opposed to its nature. It is perfectly uncompromising, and will clear the world of sin. It declares itself against specific sins. It declares that the drunkard shall not inherit the kingdom of heaven. And it breaks out with a " wo unto him that giveth his neighbor drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunken." The gospel of Christ is essentially an aggressive system, aggressive in its spirit, aggressive in its movements; and so it must continue, as long as God's enemies are in the world.