The Church and the Public House
The Church and the Public House Rev. Thomas Hancock Date: 3 rd Sunday after Easter 1888 (An extract from the sermon ‘The Church and the Public House: or Temperance not to be used as a Cloak of Maliciousness’ from Welsby (1970)) Text: As free, and not using your liberty for a cloak of maliciousness, but as the servants of God. Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the King. 1 Peter 2: 16-17 As it is the special temptation of the free man to abuse his liberty to libertinism in thought and conduct, so it is the special temptation of the professional temperance-man to rush into the wildest degrees of tyrannical intemperance. It has become a truism that he exceeds all the rest of mankind in his intoxication. He has to be particularly on guard lest his temperance, like the other’s liberty, be used ‘as a cloak of maliciousness’. The maliciousness of the temperance man, as the outsiders view it, assumes two forms – firstly, a most unreasonable social or rather