Touchstone  June 2002
 

"A Bloated Abomination"
 

By Yvonne Wilkie
Director of Archives

My attention was drawn to an 1871 Synod of Otago and Southland Report when I noticed in a Parish record its recommendation that they would abide by the Synod's decision of that year.

At the Annual Congregational meeting, then called a Soiree, the Minister read to the meeting the following : "The discountenance drinking at funerals, ordination, or induction dinners and also at social gatherings", and, "that the Synod give such deliverance as will leave no doubt on the minds of any the light in which this Church views this evil, and that by Divine grace she will endeavour to overcome it." The Parish then formed a Temperance Society for the children of the district. Interestingly, no similar organisation was formed for the adults of the district.

As it is today, the use of statistics as a strategy to gain attention is evident in the Synod's reports from the Temperance Committee. In 1871 the report gives the official statistics that the people of Otago and Southland drank 198,995 gallons of alcohol for the year 1869. Along with an estimated 200,000 gallons of privately brewed alcohol the population of 58,000
averaged A "consumption of eight and a half gallons of fermented liquors for every man, woman and child." A comparison shows that in Great Britain the average was only one gallon per person.

Further statistics reveal that there was a "public house for every 125 individuals" and including bottle license outlets, "one licensed house for every 95 people." In Scotland it was 275 people per license house.

The increase in criminal statistics as a result of intemperance is also noted and the Chaplain of the Lunatic Asylum in Dunedin reports that "disappointment in business, and intemperance, are unquestionably the chief cause of insanity, the latter preponderating to a fearful extent." The increase in the number of children being admitted to the Benevolent Institution due to their intemperate parents caused alarm among the religious leaders of the region.

The Committee congratulated those who had taken steps to form Temperance Societies but stressed that "it is the gospel of God alone that can make men truly temperate, that most effectively checks an evil so productive of social degradation and misery, so wasteful of means, so powerful an enemy to morality and religion, so destructive to body and soul."

The Temperance Committee of the Synod of Otago and Southland and later the General Assembly struggled with issues of intemperance and the church' response to it for just on 100 years before the Committee was renamed the Committee on Liquor Problems and Alcoholism in 1958 and then finally dismissed in 1968. The Public Questions Committee has since brought the issues of alcohol and its social causes and consequences to the attention of the Church.
 

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