Two-hundred proof grace

The Ref­or­ma­tion was a time when men went blind, stag­ger­ing drunk because they had dis­cov­ered, in the dusty base­ment of late medieval­ism, a whole cel­lar full of fif­teen-hun­dred-year-old, two-hun­dred proof grace—bottle after bot­tle of pure dis­til­late of Scrip­ture, one sip of which would con­vince any­one that God saves us sin­gle­hand­ed­ly. The word of the Gospel—after all those cen­turies of try­ing to lift your­self into heav­en by wor­ry­ing about the per­fec­tion of your bootstraps—suddenly turned out to be a flat announce­ment that the saved were home free before they started…Grace was to be drunk neat: no water, no ice, and cer­tain­ly no gin­ger ale…

— Robert Far­rar Capon, Between Noon and Three