George Barrell Cheever: Deacon Giles' distillery (1844)

I conceive it to be the duty of a minister of Christ not merely to preach the truth, but likewise to labor for the removal of all barriers that hinder its success. If in a military expedition an officer were commanded to cannonade an enemy's entrenchment, and between him and the fort they had thrown up a high and broad embankment, would he think he had done his duty as a good soldier in planting his cannon, and firing day after day with such an obstacle before him, while the possessors of the fort are securely shaking their sides with laughter to see him waste his ammunition and bury his balls in the earth 1 I think he would deem it necessary at all hazards to dig down that embankment; he would despair of accomplishing anything till that were done. And is it likely that the minister of the gospel will find the word of God take effect, when the whole population to which he preaches is entrenched behind a triple fortification of dram-shops, barrooms, and distilleries 1 Is it likely that the gospel will be victorious, while these fountains of sin are pouring their streams through the earth?

The product of the gospel is holiness; but faster than the gospel produces holiness, the distillery produces sin. The object of the gospel is to fill the world with blessedness in obedience to the law of God. The business of the distillery is to fill the world with anguish in the prevalence of crime. It is neither more nor less than a manufactory for the wholesale violation of the ten commandments. Can a minister of Christ fulfil his commission, and refrain from condemning it 1 Shall he be convicted of a libel against the distiller, if he attacks it even in a dream 1

The object of the gospel is to deliver the soul from the bondage and pollution of sin, and prepare it for a mansion in heaven. The business of the distiller is to chain down the soul to sense, imbrute all its faculties, and prepare it for the fires of hell. If that business, in doing its work of death upon the body, at the same time redeemed the soul from sin—if, when it has bloated the soul's tabernacle into a mass of impurity, it could burn away the moral gangrene from the immortal spirit—we would hail the employment, and bless its indefatigable laborers, as ministers of mercy to mankind. But alas! its work of defilement and devastation on the body is but a faint symbol of its work upon the soul. The fire kindled by the drunkard in this world is only an emblem of what awaits him in the world to come. Of all degraded beings the victim of the distillery is perhaps the most abandoned to the power of sin ; and of him, with special significancy, must that sentence be issued when he dies, " he that is filthy, let him be filthy still." In the language of Scripture, he shall go out from one fire, and another fire shall devour him.