Article November 4, 1922 Issue

The Law of Prohibition

PAUL STARK SEELEY

There is no power on earth that can give legitimate license to evil. Its negative totality is forever prohibited by the infinite and omnipresent God. Step by step mankind perceives this verity, and mentally concurs, individually and collectively, in this righteous prohibition, which emanates from the goodness of God.

After more than a half century of consideration, thirty-four states of the United States of America enacted, within a comparatively few years, laws prohibiting the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors. Their population totaled more than a majority of the nation's people. Soon thereafter, Congress, moved by the country's fuller recognition of the iniquity of the liquor traffic and its desire to forever repudiate it, submitted to all the state legislatures an amendment to the Federal Constitution prohibiting for all time the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors within the borders of the United States. This amendment was ratified by forty-six of the forty-eight states, and became the law of the land. Congress then passed the Volstead Act, defining what should be regarded as intoxicating liquor, and providing means to enforce the constitutional amendment. Vigorous efforts are now being made by opponents of these righteous enactments to choose at the November election a Congress which will so modify the Volstead Act as to give governmental sanction of the manufacture and sale of certain intoxicating beverages. The issue thus presented to the citizens of the United States is a momentous one. Their decision will determine, to a considerable degree, the measure of civilization's progress out of materiality for generations to come; for alcoholic indulgence holds men and nations in bondage to matter, and turns them from the living God, who is Spirit, matter's opposite.

Christian Science has brought with it convincing proof that all things are mental. Reality is God, the divine Mind and His infinite expression. The unreal and temporal is the so-called carnal mind and its negative modes of thought. Men discern reality only as the unreal, material sense of life and pleasure is put off and the spiritual sense of life is gained. Unreality seems to be reality as long as men believe life to be in and of matter, and matter to be the source of man's pleasure. In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 318) Mrs. Eddy tells us that "the material senses originate and support all that is material, untrue, selfish, or debased." Alcohol is a liquid form of materiality, used by material sense to pander itself. It is a drug of Satan. It is a poison that serves only the purposes of evil. When allowed to enter the human body, it intensifies the belief of material sensation; and, while alluring men with the deceptive argument that they are being satisfied, it sinks them deeper and deeper into the mire of error's misconception that life is material and man an educated mammal animated by motives of sin, selfishness, and false love. Alcohol, therefore, perpetuates a false sense of life, substance, and manhood. In belief, it accentuates the temporal sense of existence, obscures the eternal sense, postpones the day of deliverance, produces cruelty, poverty, hatred, war, defies the purposes of Love, and resists the rule of God.

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