INTEMPERANCE OF TEETOTAL ORATORS.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XVI, Issue 948, 7 May 1908, Page 21

INTEMPERANCE OF TEETOTAL ORATORS.

“If there is one thing more calculated than another,” says a recent issue of “The Licensing World,” “to disgust the public with the absurd doctrines preached by the teetotal party, it is the disgraceful and most intemperate language which their orators so frequently use. Two instances of this gross indulgence in slanderous utterances have occurred during the last few days. At a “temperance mission” held in a Nonconformist chapel at Evesham (England), one of the speakers asserted that ‘prayer could not be acceptable to God if it came from lips that had been polluted bv the taste of alcohol.’ It is difficult to imagine a more pharasaical and un-Christian remark, and it is a

sad comment on the blind ignorance of the dissenting congregation to whom such a speech was addressed that they applauded the uncharitable slander. In equally bad taste —perhaps even worse—were the comments made at a ‘brotherhood’ meeting by the ‘Rev.’ J. Wilson, of Preston (England), anent the proceedings at the Brewster sessions. Mr Wilson is a fair type of the utterly irrational teetotaler who deems that scurrilous abuse may serve in lieu of argument. Describing

the scene in court, he said that the indifference of the license-holders present to the observations of the Bench was ‘shown in the features of the men—bloated, pale, degraded, merely a set of animals. When they were put in a row he never saw such a pig-faced crew.’ The public may be allowed to form its own opinion of the professing Christian who could make use of such language, and its own estimate of the amount of Christianity the irreverent teetotaler really possesses. As to good

looks —well, it must be confessed that Mr Wilson is by no means an Adonis, though no one would pay a popular and useful quadruped such a bad compliment as to call the abstaining biped ‘pigfaced.’”