# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1898_S36
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

36 Proceedings of the seventeenth convention

By far the most of those who are ruined bodily and spiritually as drunkards fetch their intoxication in the tavern. Yes, one can further say that many of the tavern keepers can exist only because there are people who come to the bar not merely to quench their thirst but, beyond thirst, to indulge their lust, the demon of drink. Even where this is not the rule, it is, as said, recognized even by the world as nearly impossible for someone who runs a public drinking house to remain free of the danger of cooperating in all sorts of wicked excesses. A business to whose greatest possible restriction even the state is moving is certainly not a business that would make it probable for a Christian to earn his daily bread by it in a manner pleasing to God, to God's honor and the service of men. This does not say that it would not, under certain circumstances, in certain places, still be possible to be a tavern keeper and at the same time keep a good conscience. But one may well say that such cases are very rare nowadays, and that a congregation demands nothing unreasonable if, in such an exceptional case, it requires from the proprietor proof that things go on in his house in an orderly, respectable and morally unobjectionable way, and that he could take and does take and carries out precautions which make it possible for him to carry on such a business with honor before God.

To be sure, a distinction is to be made between the trades of the first class, which are in and of themselves, and therefore everywhere and in all cases, reprehensible and sinful, and those of the second class, which are sinful in the form in which, or under the circumstances under which, they are carried on. With the former a Christian must remain unentangled in every respect; these he may neither carry on, nor may he have any share in the business, nor may he do anything by which they would be given support. These he may not use either; with these he may not show himself as a customer either, but must avoid them in every respect. The businesses or trades of the second kind, however, a Christian may practice where it is established that the circumstances are of such a kind that the business does not thereby become sinful and reprehensible, because a violation of the love of God and of the neighbor would unavoidably be bound up with it. These businesses a Christian may also use in such a way that he is himself a customer of such a business even where it is carried on by people who sin daily with their trade. One cannot say: If running a beer house is as a rule a dangerous thing, and running that beer house diagonally across from me is certainly a reprehensible thing, as I must see with my eyes and hear with my ears, then I also cannot be a customer of this tavern keeper, may neither fetch myself a pint of beer there nor send my child there to fetch a measure of beer for lunch or supper; for in that case I am furthering his reprehensible business. That does not hold.