“‘Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness and his chambers by injustice, ... who says, “I will build myself a wide house with spacious chambers, and cut out windows for it, paneling it with cedar and painting it with vermilion.” Shall you reign because you enclose yourself in cedar? ... Your eyes and your heart are for nothing but your covetousness, for shedding innocent blood, and practicing oppression and violence.’” Jeremiah 22:13-17.MHH 189.1

This scripture pictures the work of those who manufacture and who sell intoxicating liquor. Their business means robbery. For the money they receive, no equivalent is returned. Every dollar they add to their gains brings a curse to the spender.MHH 189.2

With a liberal hand, God has bestowed His blessings upon the human family. If His gifts were wisely used, the world would know little of poverty or distress! But wickedness has turned His blessings into a curse. Through greed of gain and the lust of appetite, the grains and fruits given for our sustenance are converted into poisons that bring misery and ruin.MHH 189.3

Every year millions and millions of gallons of intoxicating liquors are consumed. Millions upon millions of dollars are spent to buy wretchedness, poverty, disease, degradation, lust, crime, and death. For the sake of gain, the liquor dealer sells that which corrupts and destroys mind and body. He entails on the drunkard’s family poverty and wretchedness.MHH 189.4

When his victim is dead, he does not hesitate to take the very necessities of life from the destitute family, to pay the drink bill of the husband and father. The cries of the suffering children, the tears of the widowed mother only exasperate him. He grows rich on the misery of those whom he is leading to perdition.MHH 189.5

To a great degree, prostitution, vice, violent crimes, and poverty are a result of the liquor seller’s work. Like the mystic Babylon of the Apocalypse, he is dealing in “bodies and souls of men.” Behind the liquor seller stands the mighty destroyer of souls, and every art that earth or hell can devise is employed to draw human beings under his power. In the city and the country, on the railway trains, on the great steamers, in places of business, in the halls of pleasure, in the medical dispensary, even in the church on the sacred Communion table, his traps are set. Nothing is left undone to create and to foster the desire for intoxicants. On corner after corner stand taverns or night clubs, with their brilliant lights, welcome, and good cheer, inviting the working man, the wealthy idler, and the unsuspecting youth.MHH 190.1

In private lunchrooms and fashionable resorts, women are supplied with popular drinks containing alcohol. For the sick and the exhausted, there are the widely advertised tonics, consisting largely of alcohol.MHH 190.2

To create the liquor appetite in little children, alcohol is introduced into confectionery. Such confectionery is sold in the shops. And by the gift of these candies the liquor seller entices children into his resorts.MHH 190.3

Day by day, month by month, year by year, the work goes on. Fathers and husbands and brothers, the hope and pride of the nation, are steadily passing into the liquor dealer’s haunts, to be wrecked and ruined.MHH 190.4

More terrible still, the curse is striking the very heart of the home. More and more women are forming the liquor habit. In many a household, little children, even in the innocence and helplessness of babyhood, are in daily peril through the neglect, abuse, and vileness of drunken mothers. Sons and daughters are growing up under the shadow of this terrible evil. What outlook for their future but that they will sink even lower than their parents?MHH 190.5

From so-called Christian lands the curse is carried to developing nations. The poor and ignorant are taught the use of liquor. Men and women of intelligence recognize and protest against it as a deadly poison, but their efforts to protect their lands from its ravages have been in vain. By civilized peoples, tobacco, liquor, and opium are forced upon various nations. The ungoverned passions of the people, stimulated by drink, drag them down to degradation unknown before, and it becomes an almost hopeless undertaking to send messengers of the gospel to these lands.MHH 190.6

Through their contact with peoples who should have given them a knowledge of God, pagans and idolaters are led into vices that are proving the destruction of whole tribes and races. And in the dark places of the earth the representatives of civilized nations are hated because of this.MHH 190.7

The Milder Intoxicants

The Responsibility of the Church