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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 74

"Behold, we Knew it not."

"Behold, we Knew it not."

Indeed, if we had to suppose that the moderate drinker's choice was deliberataly made with an accurate knowledge of the facts and their bearings, theme be reason to despair of our religion. But the best thing, that can be said for him is that he knows not what he does. For one kind of ignorance there is no excuse. The doings of alcohol are written for all the world to read blue-books and newspapers, in the records of our criminal trials and [unclear: roner] inquests, in horrors innumerable and often unmentionable, in every of wretchedness and vice; and yet a moment's consideration assures us that what obtrudes is but an insignificant fringe of the mass that is festering and poisoning and destroying beneath the surface. Whoever does not know these things is guilty of a blindness which is inexcusable. That passage in the Proverbs seems to have been written for him:—"If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death and those that are ready be slain if thou sayest, 'Behold, we knew it not'; doth not he that page 16 pondereth the heart consider it ? and he that keepeth thy soul, doth not know it? and shall not he render to every man according to his works." These words declare that to overlook a glaring evil does not relieve us of [unclear: s] responsibility for it; and, as I have said, the ignorance of the ordinary Christian consists in ignoring the responsibility rather than the evil [unclear: it] He does not realize that they "that are drawn unto death and those that [unclear: as] ready to be slain" are daily calling upon him for help which it is in his power to give. He does not see that both the responsibility and the cute rest [unclear: v] him. He will perhaps admit in the abstract our contention that moderate drinkers as a class might do much, if not everything, as one controllers of the source of supply. But what can one do alone ? Would [unclear: v] the thing still go on ? The answers are many.