p. 297 | Temperance by Rev. Charles Beecher

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 30, 1881

Temperance.

By Rev. Charles Beecher

THE GOOD WINE.

SAID the governor of the feast to the bridegroom, "Thou hast kept the good wine until now!" He seems to have been struck with the goodness of that wine. And well he might, for Christ had just made it, and, as in his creative work at the beginning, he "saw that it was very good." If we had some of that wine, we would drink it unhesitatingly. It was really good wine—having been made by creative power out of pure water, without any process of "descending change." If it was a rich and ripe product of "ascending change," the climax of growth—a rare and luscious juice such as the chief butler had dreamed of handing to Pharaoh—then it was really good. Let any one in tropical climes, enervated with long-continued heat and fainting from thirst, quaff the delicious nectar, and say if it be not thoroughly and absolutely good. Nature in her wondrous laboratory, by the process of growth, has changed the sap of the vine, which is water, stage after stage of ascending change, into this ripe and rare result which is wine—the very topmost round of ascent. Did Jesus by his silent volition do the same, or did he produce a substance a step further on, and a step lower in the scale of nature, a substance that had commenced the process of descending change, a substance that had taken the first step of decay?

There may be those who think that nature's juices are better when they begin to rot (fermentation is the first step toward rottenness), but there are also those who think that nature's wine is perfect in the original packages; in the berry; in the cluster. Yes, it was good wine that the Saviour made—wine that had not begun to rot.

—Rev. Charles Beecher, in the Advance.