at there before the Lord their God, and rejoice, they and their
household_. Deut. 14:26. But before any one settles down into a
conclusion that this passage warrants the use of wine and ardent
spirits, in our age and country, let him consider that there may have
been, as there doubtless were, peculiar reasons, under the Levitical
dispensation, for permitting the Jews to partake of what their soul
desired _before the Lord_, which would not apply to mankind generally;
as was the case in respect to several other things. But not to urge this
point, I would say, further, that the fact that _Judea was a wine
country_, that is, a country where the grape for the manufacture of wine
was easily and abundantly raised, puts a different aspect upon this
permission. In our country, the apple takes the place of the grape, and
our cider is nearer equivalent to the wine of Judea; because there the
apple does not flourish, and here, the grape cannot be extensively
cultivated. _To use wine in wine countries, therefore, is essentially
the same thing as to use cider in cider countries_; and it does not
appear that the one, in such cases, is much more productive of
intemperance than the other. The fact is, the wines used in countries
where they are manufactured, contain but little more then half as much
alcohol as most of the wine sold in this country, where, as a very
respectable authority states, "for every gallon of pure wine which is
sold, there is perhaps a pipe, or fifty times the quantity of that,
which is adulterated, and in various manners sophisticated--the whole,
without exception, the source of a thousand disorders, and in many
instances an active poison, imperfectly disguised."

But after all, I am not obliged, in this place, to prove that God has
forbidden the use of wine, though led into this digression from the
desire to correct a general misapprehension of the Scriptures on this
subject; for the inquiry now relates to ardent spirits. And what shall
we say concerning the permission, above pointed out, for the Jews to use
_strong drink_? I say, it was merely a permission to use wine; for the
strong drink several times mentioned in the Bible was, in fact, _nothing
more than a particular kind of wine_, made of dates and various sorts of
seeds and roots, and called strong drink, merely to distinguish it from
the wine made from grapes. Nor is there any evidence that it was in fact
any stronger, in its intoxicating qualities, than c