Why Sign the Pledge?

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

Tucked among the devotional addresses of The Secret of Guidance, between an essay on fact, faith and feeling and another on burdens, is a piece that surprises modern readers: a straightforward temperance tract called Why Sign the Pledge? It is not there by accident. For Meyer, the campaign against strong drink was not a side-interest but part of the gospel he preached. He had seen what drink did in the back streets of Leicester and Lambeth. He had met its victims at the prison gate. And he believed that a Christian who had surrendered his life to Christ should be willing to surrender a glass of wine for the sake of those it was destroying.

The ruin he saw

It is hard now to picture the scale of the drink problem in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Public houses stood on almost every corner of the poorer districts. Wages were drunk on the way home from work. Wives and children went hungry, and violence in the home was common. Meyer writes with the anger of a man who had seen it close up. There is not a house, he says, in which its slain cannot be found, nor a newspaper that does not record its outrages.

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

He speaks too of how it creeps up on the moderate. You have no intention of becoming a drunkard, he tells his reader; you scorn the thought. But you take it now for the sake of company, and you may come to take it for its own sake. Wise men, good men, strong men have been mastered by that thirst who no more expected it than you do.

His reasons

The tract is a list of reasons for signing the pledge of total abstinence, and they are a mixture of the spiritual and the thoroughly practical. It is a public protest against a great evil. It will benefit your health and save your time and money; he liked to tell those who signed his pledge cards that there was a banknote hidden inside. It will keep you from temptation. It gives a clear starting point to a new life. It makes a strong obligation, a double knot on a resolution. And it gives you an answer that ends the argument when others press you to drink.

But his weightiest reasons are about other people. If only reformed drunkards signed the pledge, he says, it would become the badge of the reclaimed, and those who most needed it would be ashamed to sign. So respectable people should sign it too, to lend it their good name. And we are creatures of example. “More eyes are watching us than we think.” The boy, the companion, the servant may be waiting to see what we do.

Wherefore, if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend. 1 CORINTHIANS 8:13

That is the ground on which Meyer’s case is strongest, and it is Paul’s ground. A Christian may freely give up a lawful thing for love of a weaker brother. Meyer adds that the temperance pledge had done too much good to be despised now. “We must not kick away the ladder by which we have climbed up.”

God helping me

The heart of the tract is not in its arguments but in three words printed on most pledge cards of his day. “GOD HELPING ME. These words are the heart of all.” A pledge resting on human strength alone, Meyer says, is not worth much. But when a man lifts his heart to God, divine power pours in; a garrison is placed inside the weak nature to hold it against the enemy.

For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil. 1 JOHN 3:8

For those who had signed and broken the pledge, perhaps more than once, he has no scorn. Take it again, he says, in humble dependence on the Saviour. Ask the Lord Jesus to forgive the past, to save you from your enemy, to shield you in the day of battle, and when the door is nearly battered in, to set His foot against it. Put yourself into His hands before you leave your room in the morning, keep looking to Him all day, and praise Him each night. He tells of a working man who was overheard muttering at his bench and explained that he was saying over and over, Lord help me, because it was the only way he knew to keep down his thirst.

Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy. JUDE 1:24

And he adds one piece of advice that shows the pastor behind the campaigner. Avoid the places where drink is sold, he says. “Refuse to enter them unless the Good Shepherd sends you there to find a lost sheep.” The Christian may go into the public house, but only on a rescue mission.

Reading him with care

Here more than anywhere the reader must hold Meyer’s cause and Meyer’s argument apart. His cause was noble. Drink ruined millions in his day and ruins many in ours, and the Christian who chooses total abstinence for love’s sake — for his own weakness, his family, or those who watch him — is following Paul. Meyer’s care for the drunkard, and his refusal to despise the one who fails and tries again, are wholly admirable.

But Scripture does not forbid wine. It warns against drunkenness again and again, and it also speaks of wine that makes glad the heart of man, of a Lord who turned water into wine at a wedding, and of an apostle who told Timothy to take a little for his stomach’s sake. Abstinence may be a wise and loving choice; it is not the law of God, and it must not become a test of Christian standing. Meyer’s tract sometimes leans that way, and some of his health arguments rest on the medical opinion of his time. The reader should keep the love that moved him and leave the overstatement.

For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. GALATIANS 5:13

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Consider honestly whether alcohol, or any other habit, has more hold on you than you would like to admit.

2. Ask whether your freedom in this area might cause someone close to you to stumble. Would love lead you to give it up, at least in their company?

3. If you have made a promise to God and broken it, make it again in dependence on Him: God helping me.

4. Pray by name for someone you know who is struggling with addiction. Ask whether there is some practical help you could give.

5. Examine whether you have ever judged another Christian by a rule Scripture does not make. Repent of it.

A PRAYER

Lord, You have seen the ruin that drink and every other bondage bring, and You came to destroy the works of the devil.

Give me the love that will give up a lawful thing for the sake of a weaker brother, and keep me from making my choices into laws for others.

For those I know who are in chains, I pray: set Your foot against the door, and keep them.

And in every temptation of my own, let me say and mean it: God helping me. Amen.