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 anti-social economy, which preaches against the public house, as if it were the very Babylon of the Apocalypse, and as if the shortest and surest way of founding Sion on earth would be the burning down of all inns, ale houses, and hotels; and secondly, a most uncharitable indication of the landlords of inns as the chief agents of Satan and the most hurtful of all foes of individual and social morality. A popular Independent preacher said a few days ago to a crowded audience, ‘I could make a garden of Eden down in the East End in three months if I had my way.’ If he might ‘use his liberty’ as St Peter puts it, what would be the use of his liberty? ‘My way,’ he continued, ‘would be rough at the first. I should do nothing but burn down all the breweries, and shut up all the public houses. That is the way back to paradise.’

Is it? Paradise is the home of undivided religious unity as well as sobriety, and if we began by burning all the public houses to secure national sobriety we should end by burning all the churches, or all the dissenting chapels, or all the secular halls to secure national religious unity. That ‘rough’ method has been tried as the infallible way to national religious unity, and it has failed. Its failure would be equally conspicuous as the way to national sobriety. Men are not drunkards because there are breweries, but because they get from breweries what if there were no breweries they would get elsewhere. In ‘the Garden of Eden’, according to the tradition, there seems to have been neither a brewery or a public house. Nevertheless, the tempter found his way in to the Garden of Eden, and brought ruin upon all its inhabitants, who were all strict teetotallers. Neither, according to the tradition, did Cain come out of an inn when he murdered Abel, although it is the habit of our intemperate temperance-men to trace every modern murder directly or indirectly to ‘the bottle’. But Cain was certainly a teetotaller.

A public house is ideally a very noble, humane, and social institution. It is much more democratic than the modern club. The club is too often the centre of a caste, a class, or a party; it is exclusive, pharisaic, and anti-social. One club shuts out all who are not ‘gentlemen’, another all who are not working men. One club excommunicates Tories, another puts it ban upon Radicals. But the public house or inn, according to its name, belongs to everybody, whatever his class, whatever his party. A man used to be welcome there, as in the Church of God, because he was human, and not because he was a sectary who could proffer some pharisaic or aristocratic differentiation between himself and the rest of the parish. The ancient relations between the parish church and the parish inn, as the spiritual and secular ‘public houses’ of the local republic, had a very wholesome side. The keen dialectic Archdeacon Paley chose an inn to write in. The saintly Archbishop Leighton said that he should like to die in an inn. Charles Kingsley, whom the greatest of modern theologians called ‘the best of modern parish priests’, would smoke his pipe in the village public house, and drink out of the same pot as his poor parishioners. St Francis de Sales, the most sensitive and refined of prelates, advised all his parochial clergy to begin by making a friend of the village innkeeper. The most terrible mischief done in public houses – as well as in churches and dissenting chapels – is too evident for anybody to deny. But nothing is so intemperate or fanatical as to sweep away an institution with a fine ideal, and still capable of being redeemed to excellent social service, because that ideal is now blurred and those services are not now rendered. The reasons why the public inn is degraded and mischievous lie far deeper than the intemperate ‘temperance-men’ dare to look.

It would much help us to grow in temperance if we would recollect that when Christ’s holy apostle beseeches the church to ‘honour all men’ he does not add ‘except inn keepers’. Those Christian bishops and priests, whom I have just cited, honoured the ‘man’ in the innkeeper, and that was the true way of awakening in him the consciousness of the honourable function entrusted to him in the parish and the commonwealth, to which the ancient title of ‘host’ bears witness. Samuel Fisher, the Quaker, in his answer to the attacks of the famous Independent, John Owen protested against the Calvinist’s denunciation of alehouse keepers. ‘The calling is as honest in itself,’ said the sturdy Quaker, ‘as that of Gaius, the Church’s host, or any other innkeeper, though it be often much abused. What trade is not, when evil men manage it?

I have but skimmed hastily the surface of an important subject, which I could not pretend to handle satisfactorily in so short a time. We cannot grow in the inward liberty, which is true temperance, if we pervert our liberty or our temperance into a ‘cloak of maliciousness’.  We do not change the ungodly character of such abuse by giving it the specious name of ‘Liberalism’. To free our commonwealth from the gross sin of drunkenness, and from the miseries which follow it, is a noble and Christian object. But we shall help little towards that liberation if we are ourselves in bondage to the intemperate superstition that inns are the cause of drunkenness, or if we indulge the least degree of an intemperate and pharisaic spitefulness towards the innkeeper. Rather ‘honour all men’ – honour the man in the wretched slave of drink, as the Saviour honours the man under that and every other form and variety of sinner. Honour the man in the innkeeper, whom our manifold social apostasies from Christ’s Law, which I cannot here specialize, has degraded from the ‘host’ which he ought to be, into a seducer of the poor and a tool of the capitalist fortune-hunter, which he ought not to be. The public house does evil for the same reason that every other social institution does evil, because we have come to regard Mammon and not God as its proper ruler, as the supreme inn keeper. It may be in part the fault of Christ’s bishops and priests that the landlords of inns are so often apostates from their calling, and expropriate as their ‘customers’ those whom they ought to honour as their ‘guests’. But here in England, and in parts of the world, there are still hosts who care for the health and soberness of their guests, and who set their fellow Christians an example of walking worthy of the vocation wherewith they are called.