Lycurgus, the Spartan lawgiver, for ordering the vines cut down, merely 'because men were sometimes drunken with the grapes.' Speaking of celibacy, Robinson says, 'Abstinence from marriage is no more a virtue than abstinence from wine or other pleasing natural thing. Both marriage and wine are of God and good in themselves.'
Since I do not wish to incite a religious and Puritanical resistance to the Volstead Act, I must add that Robinson, in that tone of sweet reasonableness which characterizes all his essays, remarks further: 'Yet may the abuse of a thing be so common and notorious and the use so small and needless as better want the small use than be in continual danger of the great abuse.' And this, I suppose, is exactly the ground taken by the sensible modern prohibitionist. It is not a matter of theological sin with him at all. It never was that. When it is not a question of health, it is now a matter of economics and æsthetics, and of the greatest happiness and freedom to the greatest number.
These iron men are accused of being hostile to beauty, the charge being based upon the crash of a certain number of stained-glass windows and altar ornaments, which offended them, however, not as art, but as religious symbolism.
