A Temperance Woman

Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise. PROVERBS 20:1

Amanda Smith’s first husband was a man who could talk sensibly about religion when he was sober, and was profane and unreasonable when strong drink got the better of him, which, she says, was quite often. She never dwelt on it. But it is not hard to see why, for the rest of her life, wherever she went — New York, Calcutta, Monrovia, the villages of the Liberian interior — she preached temperance alongside holiness, and pressed people to sign the total abstinence pledge. “You know I am a temperance woman,” she told an African king who offered her wine, and it would have served as a description of her whole ministry.

Gospel temperance

Her temperance work was not a separate campaign bolted onto her preaching. She called it Gospel Temperance, and saw it as part of the same message. In Liberia she organised Gospel Temperance bands in town after town, and explained that it was meant “to help Christian men and women on to a higher platform of Christian character and Christian life.” The pledge was not a substitute for conversion; it was a fruit of it, and a protection for the weak.

It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor any thing whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak. ROMANS 14:21

She saw at first hand what she was fighting. In the Liberian settlements she watched merchants flooding the country with cheap gin, and one foreign trader ordering, she was told, a hundred thousand cases to get it in before a new duty took effect. “The merchants are flooding the land with this accursed fire,” she wrote, “and men and women are being devoured by it.” In Old Calabar she looked into a king’s palace and saw the rulers of the town around a table covered with bottles of champagne and brandy, while the women of their households lived in misery. When the President of Liberia vetoed a bill to take the duties off imported gin and whisky, she wrote in her diary that it was a great triumph and an act of courage.

Ministers who would not sign

What grieved her most was not the drinkers but the ministers. Again and again she notes that superintendents, local preachers, class leaders and pastors refused to sign the pledge or to speak against the trade. “Oh, what hindrances they are in the work,” she wrote after one Sunday school where the children signed and the officers would not. She was ashamed, she said, when a Black bishop she had admired, who knew the suffering of the Liberian and native people from strong drink, did not give the temperance work even his sympathy. She longed for church leaders to lead.

Woe unto them that are mighty to drink wine, and men of strength to mingle strong drink. ISAIAH 5:22

The bottle of champagne

The most vivid temperance story in her book is a story about herself. In India, a kind colonel and his wife had given her, as a gift, a bottle of wine and a bottle of champagne. She had promised to speak on temperance that very evening. The tempter suggested that no one would know, and that since her hosts, who had been so kind, did not see it as she did, it would be better not to say anything about it. She resolved, by God’s grace, to refuse the gift and to speak as she had intended; she spoke strongly, and no one was offended. But she still had the bottles. She carried them for days hidden in her lunch basket, terrified that someone would see them and she would not be able to explain. At last, alone in a railway compartment, she asked the Lord to help her get rid of the champagne, and threw it out of the window into a deep cutting.

Abstain from all appearance of evil. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:22

Weighing total abstinence

Here the reader must weigh her with care. She held total abstinence to be the duty of every Christian, and she could speak of those who did not sign the pledge as hindrances to the work. Scripture does not go so far. It condemns drunkenness in the plainest terms, warns against the snare of strong drink, and calls believers to give up even lawful things for the sake of a weaker brother. But it also records that the Lord Jesus made wine at a wedding, that Paul advised Timothy to take a little wine for his stomach’s sake, and that the Lord’s Supper was instituted with the cup. Many faithful Christians, then and now, drink moderately and are not thereby worse Christians. To make abstinence a condition of full discipleship is to add to the Word.

Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not; and let not him which eateth not judge him that eateth. ROMANS 14:3

And yet we should be slow to dismiss her. She lived among people for whom drink was not a pleasant accompaniment to a meal but a destroyer of homes, bodies and whole communities; she had married into its misery; she watched it devour Liberian settlements and African kingdoms while foreign merchants grew rich. In such places total abstinence was not legalism. It was love in action, and it was costly. Where drink is ruining lives around us, her example still speaks: the strong should be willing to give up their liberty for the sake of those it is destroying, and the church should be willing to speak against those who profit from it.

Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit. EPHESIANS 5:18

That last verse was, for her, the heart of the matter. She did not merely want people to stop drinking. She wanted them filled with something better. The remedy for strong drink, she believed, is the Holy Spirit.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Consider honestly whether alcohol, or anything else, has more hold on you than it should. If it does, deal with it this week, with help if you need it.

2. Is there someone near you for whom your liberty could be a stumbling block? Be willing to lay it down in their presence.

3. Find out what a local recovery ministry or support group is doing, and how you might pray for or support it.

4. Think about who profits from what is destroying people in your community. Is there a way for your church to speak or act?

5. Where you disagree with her rule of total abstinence, make sure you still agree with her love. Ask God to fill you with the Spirit rather than with anything else.

A PRAYER

Lord, strong drink and many other things have devoured homes and bodies and whole peoples. Have mercy on all who are enslaved.

Keep me from being mastered by anything but You. Where my liberty could make a weaker brother stumble, give me grace to lay it down.

Give Your church courage to speak against those who grow rich on the ruin of others.

And fill me with Your Spirit, so that I need nothing else to make me glad. Amen.