Our Stumbling Brother

An aged man — the noblest man then living on our globe — once sat down and wrote, under the inspiration of God, these words: “It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor anything whereby thy brother stumbleth.” Now, who is our “brother?” In this passage Paul may have referred to his brother in Christian fellowship; he was to do nothing wilfully offensive and injurious to his fellowdisciple in God’s household. But if he is to be thus tender of the feelings and watchful of the interests of other Christians, how much more oughthe to avoid anything which would be morally hurtful to the impenitent masses of his fellowmen! Let us look at the teaching of this famous passage, so redolent of Christian philanthropy.

What does the passage teach? To our mind it clearly teaches the moral obligation to abstain from practices and usages that inevitably injure others. We are to abstain from that which works mischief to our brother-man, and we are to do so from the laic of love. This is the drift of the passage, and of the whole chapter in which it is imbedded. Even so conservative an expounder as Professor Hodge of Princeton says, (in treating of this passage,) that things not sinful in themselves are to be given up for the sake of others. The legal liberty of a conscientious man, is never to be exercised where a moral evil will inevitably flow from such exercise. If my “liberty” puts a stumbling-block in the way of another, and trips him so that he falls, then woe unto me for persisting in using this liberty. The principle is a broad one, and it is as noble as that Gospel of love that gave it birth. It is the principle that good men are to sacrifice everything and anything that is destructive to the best interests of humanity.

We lay down then, this proposition, that no man of conscience has a moral right to abet any system or practice which is known to be inevitably hurtful to his neighbor man. I have a legal right to do many things which, as a man of principle, I ought not to do. I have a legal right to take opium or arsenic, or swallow vast quantities of fourth-proof brandies; but I have no moral right thus to commit self-destruction. I have a legal right to attend habitually a theatre, even though every play there enacted should be surcharged with moral poison, and every tier were thronged with harlots. There is no written law to forbid my going there, and no officer stands guard to repel me. But I have no moral right to go there — not merely because I shall see and hear what is ensnaring and polluting to myself, but because that whole garnished and glittering establishment, with its sensuous attractions, is to many of my fellow-men a chandeliered and crimsoned hell; a yawning maelstrom of perdition. The dollar I give at the entrance, is my direct contribution toward sustaining an establishment whose dark foundations rest on the murdered souls of hundreds of my fellow-men. What right have I to contribute my money and to give the sanction of my example to the support of a perfect slaughter-house of character and of immortal souls?

Now on this same principle — not merely of seZ,“-preservation, for of that I am not now speaking — what right have I to sustain the magazines of moral death where poisonous drinks are vended? What right have I to sustain a traffic which is simply dealing out death by measure? What right have I to abet the drinking usages of society? If a glass of intoxicating drink on my table (be it sparkling Madeira or Bourbon whisky) will entrap some one of susceptible or excitable temperament into dissipation, what right have I to set that trap for his life, to tempt him to his own ruin, and make myself the particeps criminis in his destruction? If the contents of the glass which I give my brother cause him to stumble, he stumbles over me. If his moral restraints are broken, I helped to break them. I am an accomplice in his sin. If he goes away from my table with an increased thirst for the bottle, I have helped to make him a drunkard; and, to that degree, have helped to shut him out of heaven. The words he may have spoken, the blows he may have struck, the excesses he may have committed under the stimulation of my offered glass, are, to a certain degree, my words and deeds of folly and of wickedness. But for me he would not have uttered the words or done the shameful deeds. The man who (in the language of Scripture) “puts the bottle to his neighbor,” is partially and largely responsible for all the havoc which that bottle makes, and for the dark damnation which may follow in its train. Of course, this principle makes fearful work with the wilful traffic in intoxicating drinks as a beverage; and when society punishes the drunkard for his outrages, and licenses the drunkard-maker, it simply punishes the effect and protects the cause!

We might say a thousand things here on the woes of the drunkard, on the guilt of the dramseller, on the poisonous nature of the most popular alcoholic drinks, and on the frightful havoc which the bottle is working in the army, in our households, and even in our churches. But we prefer now to speak on one specific point, viz., the duty of all conscientious people to abstain from drinking and offering strong drink, while that drink makes others ‘-stumble.” It is the stumblers that we are now pleading for. It is for those whom your wine-cup — offered in mistaken hospitality, or under the’ tyranny of fashion — may precipitate into drunkenness and perdition. Oh! those stumblers! Who are they? I hardly dare tell; for it would touch many of us too tenderly. It would tear open too many secret wounds which pride and affection are attempting, but in vain, to conceal. It would reveal ivrecks that angels might weep over. It would open afresh some tombs where the charitable green turf now hides out of sight what surviving friendship would love to have forgotten. For the sake of my stumbling brother, I am bidden to abstain. Is this asking too much of me? Let a single incident answer. In a certain convention of temperance philanthropists, a clergyman made a plausible defense of the moral right of even good men to drink and to offer alcoholic liquors. Teetotalism he denounced as fanatical and unscriptural. He talked glibly about the wine used at Cana of Galilee, (though not very understandingly.) and insisted that for one he should claim the right to use liquors at his own table and in social gatherings. When he had concluded his sophistical argument, an old man arose under much emotion. His voice trembled with grief. Turning to the convention, he said in substance to them, “I know a young man. He is fast becoming an inebriate. I fear he is ruined. When he is urged to give up the wine-cup, he always pleads the example of a certain popular clergyman. He says that while that minister takes his glass and defends it, he means to do the same. Gentlemen! that poor intemperate youth is my son; and the clergyman whose evil example he is following is the very same one who has just addressed this convention!”