The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World

by Stephen Mansfield

“recollect that although diligence in our worldly calling is our indispensable duty as Christians, yet we have higher than these to engage our attention for we have a Heavenly calling in Christ Jesus and to this our supreme diligence is required.”

Culture. It means “what is encouraged to grow,” the “behavior and ways of thinking that are inspired.”

Amazing his associates, who often showed a callous intolerance for the poverty-stricken, Cameron proclaimed, “I would like to bear testimony to the wonderful kindness which the poor show to those who are still poorer and more helpless than themselves.” This not only challenged a popular conception of the poor as lazy and indifferent, but it also extolled to the surprised members of his own class the virtue Cameron had found among the poor. This was exactly what Charles Dickens had attempted to do in his novels, but it was an unexpected perspective coming from a man of Cameron’s position.

These classes were so popular, in fact, that these men later became the first registered division of the St. John Ambulance Brigade in Ireland. This connected Dr. Lumsden and St. James’s Gate, as well as health care in Ireland, to the larger St. John Ambulance Association that had been founded in England in 1877 as a unifying organization for first aid and ambulance services.

But we must remember that he could not have done it alone. He needed a culture of generosity and social concern from which to work. He needed wise men to stand with him and to take risks on his innovative ideas. And he needed an arena in which he was trusted, where he could work out the procedures and techniques that would save human lives. This, then, is what Guinness gave him.

These descend from John Grattan Guinness, the youngest son of First Arthur, and continue through the centuries in lives so turned to God and so given to adventures of faith that, as Frederic Mullally has written in his thrilling The Silver Salver: The Story of the Guinness Family, they make the other Guinness lines “seem almost pedestrian.”

Reformation leaders like Luther and Calvin, writing in the 1500s, knew that this was not what scripture taught. They insisted, instead, that God called men not just to offices in the church but to every kind of labor and trade. So in their thinking, the farmer was no less holy than the priest, the innkeeper no less ordained by God than the bishop.

Reformers taught that holiness was a matter of conformity to the image of Jesus, which a man ought to exercise as openly in the world as possible.

In other words, the Christian shopkeeper or candle maker served his God while he plied his trade as Jesus would—with skill, with excellence, with morality, and with joy. This would do more good in the world than a thousand monks hidden away in monasteries, so the Reformers believed.

As Luther expressed in his usual blunt fashion, done to the glory of God, even “household chores are more to be valued tha...

This Protestant ethos of work found its way into the lives of the Guinnesses through the deeply reformed faith of the first Arthur Guinness and certain of his descendants. Many of them understood that brewing could be done as a holy offering, as a craft yielded in the service of God. They did not see themselves as secular, but rather as called.

They understood that this transformed workbenches into altars and the labor of a man’s hands into liturgies pleasing to God.

Children are their own, unique creatures but they carry a piece of their parents with them in their souls. Together, all the children of a family reflect the sum of who their parents are, just as a prism reflects all the tones of the light; but each of them individually reflects only a part of the whole and this is often what makes each individual child such a fascinating extension of his or her parents’ lives.

Many a man who has come to late middle age with despair and disillusionment has found—perhaps in love or work or devotion to a cause— the meaning or fulfillment that eluded him earlier in life.

Born in his parents’ latter years—and regarded by them as a token of God’s unceasing grace—Henry Grattan Guinness would become such a firebrand of faith in his time that his name would be mentioned with Dwight L. Moody and Charles Spurgeon as one of the greatest preachers of his age.

Though but a child at the time, I think I entered more or less into my father’s profound admiration for the passage, and felt with him the vibration of the soul attuned to eternal realities.

Beyond his huge popularity and impact, we should note, too, his simplicity. There was no attempt to stir up emotions, no crafty plan to manipulate the crowd to a fever pitch. Instead, Henry Grattan Guinness simply preached the gospel—calmly, plainly, and with respect for his audiences.

He had determined to rise above “party strife,” to issue a call to Christ that transcended politics and petty religious division.

Henry Grattan Guinness was recuperating from his American tour. She attended a service at which he preached, the two were introduced, and three months later they were married on October 2, 1860. Subsequently he would write, “I felt that I had found, for the first time in my life, a woman with a mind and soul that answer to my own. When with her I no longer felt alone.”

He spared himself nothing in the process. He immediately began sleeping on bare wood and eating very little. He moved into a noisy, poverty-ridden suburb and began to minister there, learning how to trust God for the money he needed to carry on. His body toughened, his faith deepened, and his vision for China became more keen.

Prohibition, then, not only led to illegal trade in alcohol, but it also meant that increasing numbers of Americans were drinking hard liquor rather than the more moderate and healthy beer. In short, Prohibition increased the consumption of hard liquor in America.

Rockefeller was perhaps the most interesting of these because he did not drink alcohol—but he did recognize the failure of Prohibition.

Prohibition stands as a testimony to the damage that can be done through ignorance of the benefits of beer. Rather than emphasize beer as an antidote to drunkenness, as a healthy alternative to harder drinks that, in excess, ruined men’s lives, Prohibitionists treated all alcohol as the same.

Rupert was made of better stuff, though, and this seems to have come as a surprise to nearly everyone who knew him. He had absorbed the Guinness concern for the needy, that family sense of obligation to use wealth for the good of mankind. When he received the wedding gift from his father, he did not set himself up in fashion. Instead, he moved his new bride into a home in the slums and launched a crusade to ease the plight of the poor. His social class was scandalized. The common man in Ireland was moved. And the media barely knew what to make of it.

Dorothy Sayers, who became famous for her Lord Peter Wimsey mystery stories, worked for Benson from 1922 to 1931 and partnered with Gilroy on a number of his campaigns. The first toucan jingle mentioned above is hers.

Fawcett had fulfilled one of the great principles of advertising: don’t just sell your product—sell your product’s culture.

They knew how to brew beer, yes, but they also knew how to care for their employees, how to invest wealth for social good, and how to create corporate cultures that would change the course of nations.

discern the ways of god for life and business.

Harry Grattan Guinness had a favorite saying, one that he had borrowed from the wisdom of Prince Albert: “Gentlemen, find out the will of God for your day and generation, and then, as quickly as possible, get into line.”

Think in terms of generations yet to come.

Perhaps this can be the meaning of Guinness for us, that we learn again to build for centuries rather than decades and that we do so selflessly, knowing that the measure of our lives is not determined at our death but rather in the lives and accomplishments of generations yet to come.

Whatever else you do, do at least one thing very well.

Master the facts before you act.

“We followed our traditional policy of considering long and acting quickly.”

Invest in those you would have invest in you.

workers and owners, labor and management, prosper together or decline separately.

social uplift best happens through the power of benevolent employment.

It is in the world of work that men gain skills, have character modeled for them, gain a broader education, learn to lead, and are given the t...

Guinness understood this. The company did not drain a man and then expect the church or the state to rebuild him again. They invested. They paid high wages, offered every type of education, provided medicine, sports, entertainment, and even a place to think, and ass...

we must invest in those who serve us if we expect them to serve well.

Finally, if a man finds a loving wife in this life, he finds a good thing. If he finds in that same wife a friend, he is twice blessed. But if he finds as well a skilled partner who builds with him professionally while at all times being that lover and friend, he should fall to his knees often and thank God that there is mercy for the undeserving. I do, often,

Drinking with Calvin and Luther: A History of Alcohol in the Church by Jim West

God Gave Wine: What the Bible Says About Alcohol by Kenneth L. Gentry Jr.