Raise a Juice Box to the Temperance Movement

For many years, tellers of the saga of the Welches have believed that the Methodist church was not ready for T. B.'s discovery. After all, Christians had been using wine at the Communion table for over 1,800 years. Methodists were no friends of drunkenness (John Wesley's tract Word to a Drunkard begins “Are you a man! God made you a man; but you make yourself a beast.”), but they had accepted wine in the sacrament for over 150 years—first as a religious movement within the Church of England and then as a separate denomination. How could their minds have changed so quickly? They must have been convinced by the power of advertising and done it in service to capitalist greed, historians argued.