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WINES AND LIQUORS
mankind ascended from
savagery and developed civilized refinements the right
use of wines and other alcoholic beverages became an
art, and an encouragement to all the arts. No nation,
pastor present,ever produced great music or sculpture,
painting or literature, on an unrelieved diet of plain
water! The great peoples of the earth—notwithstand
ing certain "reforming" elements to whom these spir
itual values mean little—^have taken the products of a
beneficent soil, fermented or distilled them, and
quenched their thirst with cheerful thanks to tlie gods
for such blessings.
Consequently the art of right drinking is to a degree,
the story of the human race. The ancient Hebrews,
migrating into the Holy Land, dreamed of the day
when every man should contentedly drink of his own
vine beneath his own fig tree, in those times the cri
terion of prosperity. The Greeks of the classic Golden
Age,leaving to posterity their priceless legacies of the
Iliad and the Parthenon,of Socrates,Aristophanes and
Pythagoras, cultivated the grape even on the slopes
of high Olympus, at whose summit Bacchus and his
fellow deities quaffed goblets of nectar at fair Hebe's
hands.
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