This editorial by Frederic Cook Morehouse was first published in the February 28, 1925, issue of The Living Church.
The Eighteenth Amendment has, unhappily, become a matter of controversy. It has become complicated with a number of other questions. It is fashionable both to denounce it and to violate its provisions. It is a little difficult to tell, except on the pendulum plan, why this should be so. If ever a reform came slowly and was debated ad nauseam over many years, it was that of prohibition. The majorities in Congress and the haste and enthusiasm with which state legislatures indorsed the amendment certainly indicated that the people were in earnest.
And what did it mean?
It meant that a great, powerful, self-governing people had resolved that they would assume for themselves “such a measure of abstinence” as, they believed, would promote the well-being of the whole American people. Not because the vast majority believed the temperate use of liquor to be wicked, or wrong, or, necessarily, harmful. Not because they had been converted to an unchristian propaganda that had declared drinking per se to be wicked—a position which deprives our Blessed Lord himself of his sinlessness. Not because it was impossible to use a gift that God, through nature, has given to man, without abusing it.
But because a vast majority of the American people, as indicated by the votes of their representatives in Congress and in state legislatures, had slowly come to the conclusion that liquor selling and liquor drinking were doing more harm than good; that first the commercialization and then the demoralization of the liquor traffic, with its alliance with vice and crime in all our cities, could not be broken up without the suppression of breweries and distilleries; that the saloon had become a center of corruption and must be removed from our streets; that no harm could come to our people by removing liquors from them; and that no other way than an act sweeping it all away at once could remove these evils from them—these were the considerations that created American prohibition.
We should especially like to have this perspective appreciated by our friends in England. The (London) Church Times, for instance, has been singularly blind to the real facts. It has treated prohibition as a fanatic movement based on a belief—held, indeed, by some deeply religious people, especially among the Methodists, but by no means by Christian people generally—that drinking is, in itself, sinful. Our contemporary has even declared that no Catholic could favor prohibition. Of course, this only means that our valued contemporary has permitted itself to be grossly misinformed as to the whole subject and has not thought it through. A national policy of prohibition, directed by a free people toward the limitation of their own natural rights for the sake of cleaning up very serious abuses, may be wise or unwise. But when it comes to the discussion of it from the standpoint of eternal verities, we are willing to permit the contrast to go down to history between a national policy that tries to do this, even though it be unwisely, and a national policy that permits great numbers to grow rich by the sale of contraband liquor to America as of contraband opium to China, and does not try to prevent it. If Catholics ought not to support the one, perhaps they ought to be rather outspoken in denouncing the other.
For every attempt to distinguish between a decent drinking and the saloon, failed; between the saloon and deliberate, commercialized vice, failed; between the manufacture of liquor and the propagation of vice, failed. Brewers and distillers and saloon-keepers, with their unfathomable stupidity and defiance of public opinion, were the immediate factors that produced prohibition. These created the issue: take drinking, and saloons, and drunkenness, and vice, and crime, altogether, for we will not separate them—or give up the right to take your innocent glass of wine or beer at your table. We have no apology to make to our English critics when the American people, by a vast majority of their chosen representatives, met the issue and chose the latter alternative.
Of course, the sequel has been a disappointment. Nobody ever supposed there would be unanimous observance of the law; there is no such observance of the Ten Commandments.
But we did have the right to believe that representative Americans—those whom we look upon as our examples in Christian citizenship—would scrupulously set the example of law obedience; that these would willingly undergo for themselves, such a measure of abstinence as is more especially suited to extraordinary acts and exercises of devotion to their country and their fellow men. Especially we believed this of church men.
And some of them have levelled up to the test. There are men and women, not a few, who will not drink where there seems, a likelihood that the glass is offered in defiance of law. It must be remembered that the act of drinking is not per se unlawful. One is justified in drinking from stock that is lawfully owned. One is justified in presuming that a host who offers a social glass is not a law-breaker, unless his open or secret defiance of law is so notorious that this presumption is untenable. One is justified in drinking under one set of circumstances and declining to drink under other circumstances. Our Lord, at a marriage feast, both drank and replenished the supply of wine by an act that is described as his first miracle; one cannot conceive of his doing either at a time or place when it was unlawful to do so, or secretly buying wine from a bootlegger for the gratification of His own appetite.
Amidst all the disgrace of law violation in high places, which has put proud and hitherto respected sons and daughters of the American Revolution on a level with I.W.W. agitators [Industrial Workers of the World, a radical labor union known for its ties to socialism and anarchism], there are vastly more of these quiet, self-respecting, and law abiding practisers of “such a measure of abstinence” than the world supposes.
But when the test has come, some Americans, some Christian people, some churchmen, are living according to the dictates of their consciences and some according to the dictates of their stomachs.
Now, in the days when the Church was a large factor in the lives of her people, Lent would have been used for the correction of such a condition as this. If ever there was a time for Christian people voluntarily to exercise “such a measure of abstinence as is more especially suited to extraordinary acts,” this is the time. Granted that there is ample room for differences of opinion as to whether the law is wise, granted that the government has partly fallen down in enforcement and that in places the failure to enforce has been venal and disgraceful, granted that one can violate the law with impunity,—
What has that to do with the duty of a Christian man?
At the outset of Lent, we venture to call upon all our fellow Churchmen voluntarily to abstain from all use of liquor, lawful as well as unlawful, as their “measure of abstinence,” to which, not we, but the Church, calls them. Especially do we earnestly call upon our bishops and clergy to lead us in such a Lenten abstinence; for these can scarcely know how difficult they make the abstinence of the laity when bishop or priest is willing to drink socially at the table of a known law-breaker. It is an issue of religion and churchmanship rather than of politics or of law. Let us at least prove to ourselves that our stomachs are not the dominant organs of our several personalities.
As to what will be the ultimate fate of the Eighteenth Amendment, we frankly do not know. We are not greatly interested in that now. Just as long as the issue created by brewers and saloon-keepers—Take it all or leave it all—lasts, there can be no question upon which side Christian citizens will stand. Whether a way can be devised to divide the issue, whether the issue ought to be divided, are questions that must be deferred entirely until a time when Christian citizens are obeying the law as it stands. When that time comes, when it has lasted long enough to have become a continuous policy, then we shall have no objection to the reopening of the whole question. In the meantime the respectable law-breakers of today are responsible for the utter impossibility of reconsidering the law. A virile Christian hates a flabby, weak, powerless religion.
If there is not power enough in the sacrament of the altar to enable a man voluntarily to give up all drinking, as his measure of abstinence, during these forty days of Lent, then his Christianity is a failure. But the Christianity of Jesus Christ is not.
Episcopalians were slow among American Protestants to embrace the cause of Prohibition, though abstaining from spirits had been advocated by most evangelical leaders in the church from the mid-19th century. The Living Church’s editor, Frederic Cook Morehouse, frequently editorialized against “bone dry” local laws passed in some states in the 1910s, which failed to make exceptions for sacramental wine.
The Church Temperance Society, founded in 1881, only became fully committed to legislation prohibiting the sale of alcohol in 1916, when General Convention also passed a resolution stating “that this Church places itself on record as favoring such action in our legislative assemblies as will conserve the large interests of temperance and the repression of the liquor traffic.” Late in 1918, as states were in the process of ratifying the Eighteenth Amendment, all but two of the church’s bishops signed a pastoral letter for reading in churches urging total abstinence and the amendment’s ratification.
When it became law on October 28, 1919, the amendment prohibited the manufacture, sale, and movement of beverages containing more than 0.5 percent alcohol, but not the possession or consumption of them. It remained lawful to drink alcohol that had been purchased before Prohibition began and home winemaking was effectively legalized in 1920. The Eighteenth Amendment was repealed in 1933.
