082. Amusements

Amusements

Jdg_16:25 : ’93And it came to pass, when their hearts were merry, that they said: ’91Call for Samson, that he may make us sport.’92 And they called for Samson out of the prison-house; and he made them sport.’94

There were three thousand people assembled in the temple of Dagon. They had come to make sport of eyeless Samson. They were all ready for the entertainment. They began to clap and pound, impatient for the amusement to begin, and they cried: ’93Fetch him out! Fetch him out!’94 Yonder I see the blind old giant coming, led by the hand of a child into the very midst of the temple. At his first appearance there goes up a shout of laughter and derision. The blind old giant pretends he is tired and wants to rest himself against the pillars of the house, so he says to the lad who leads him: ’93Bring me where the main pillars are.’94 The lad does so. Then the strong man puts his hands on one of the pillars, and, with the mightiest push that mortal ever made, throws himself forward until the whole house comes down in thunderous crash, grinding the audience like grapes in a wine-press. ’93And so it came to pass, when their hearts were merry, that they said, ’91Call for Samson, that he may make us sport.’92 And they called for Samson out of the prison-house; and he made them sport.’94 In other words, there are amusements that are destructive and bring down disaster and death upon the heads of those who practise them. While they laugh and cheer, they die. The three thousand who perished that day in Gaza are nothing compared with the tens of thousands who have been destroyed, body, mind and soul by bad amusements and by good amusements carried to excess.

In my sermons you must have discovered that I have no sympathy with ecclesiastical strait-jackets, or with that wholesale denunciation of amusements in which many indulge. I believe the Church of God has made a tremendous mistake in trying to suppress the sportfulness of youth and drive out from men their love of amusement. If God ever implanted anything in us, he implanted this desire. But instead of providing for this demand of our nature, the Church of God has for the main part ignored it. As in a riot the mayor plants a battery at the end of the street and has it fired off, so that everything is cut down that happens to stand in the range, the good as well as the bad; so there are men in the church who plant their batteries of condemnation and fire away indiscriminately. Everything is condemned. They talk as if they would like to have our youth dress in blue uniforms, like the children of an orphan asylum, and march down the path of life to the tune of the ’93Dead March’94 in Saul. They hate a blue sash or a rosebud in the hair, or a tasseled gaiter, and think a man almost ready for the lunatic asylum who utters a conundrum.

Young Men’92s Christian Associations of the country are doing a glorious work. They have fine reading-rooms, and all the influences are of the best kind; and they are now adding gymnasiums and bowling-alleys, where, without any evil surroundings, our young men may get physical as well as spiritual improvement. We are dwindling away to a narrow-chested, weak-armed, feeble-voiced race, when God calls us to a work in which he wants physical as well as spiritual athletes. I would to God that the time might soon come when in all our colleges and theological seminaries, as at Princeton, gymnasiums shall be established. We spend seven years of hard study in preparation for the ministry, and come out with bronchitis and dyspepsia and liver complaint, and then crawl up into the pulpit and the people say: ’93Don’92t he look heavenly!’94 because he looks sickly. Let the Church of God direct, rather than attempt to suppress, the desire for amusement. The best men that the world ever knew have had their sports. William Wilberforce trundled hoop with his children. Martin Luther helped dress the Christmas tree. Ministers have pitched quoits, philanthropists have gone a-skating, prime ministers have played ball.

Our communities are filled with men and women who have in their souls unmeasured resources for sportfulness and frolic. Show me a man who never lights up with sportfulness and has no sympathy with the recreations of others, and I will show you a man who is a stumbling-block. Such men are caricatures of religion. They lead young people to think that a man is good in proportion as he groans and frowns and looks sallow; and that the height of a man’92s Christian stature is in proportion to the length of his face. I would trade off five hundred such men for one bright-faced, radiant Christian, on whose face are the words: ’93Rejoice evermore!’94 Every day by his cheerful face he preaches fifty sermons. I will go further and say that I have no confidence in a man who makes a religion of his gloomy looks. That kind of a man always turns out badly. I would not want him for the treasurer of an orphan asylum. The orphans would suffer.

Among forty people whom I received into the church at one communion, there was only one applicant of whose piety I was suspicious. He had the longest story to tell; had seen the most visions, and gave an experience so wonderful that all the other applicants were discouraged. I was not surprised, the year after, to learn that he had run off with the funds of the bank with which he was connected. Who is this black angel that you call religion’97wings black, feet black, feathers black? Our religion is a bright angel’97feet bright, eyes bright, wings bright’97taking her place in the soul. She pulls a rope that reaches to the skies and sets all the bells of heaven a-chiming. There are some persons who, when talking to a minister, always feel it appropriate to look lugubrious. Go forth, O people, to your lawful amusements. God means you to be happy. But, when there are so many sources of innocent pleasure, why tamper with anything that is dangerous and polluting? Why stop our ears to a heaven full of songsters to listen to the hiss of a dragon? Why turn back from the mountain-side all a-bloom with wild flowers and a-dash with the nimble torrents, and with blistered feet attempt to climb the hot sides of Cotopaxi.

Now, all opera-houses, theatres, bowling-alleys, skating rinks and all kinds of amusement, good and bad, I put on trial and judge of them by certain cardinal principles. First, you may judge of any amusement by its healthful result or by its baneful reaction. There are people who seem made up of hard facts. They are a combination of multiplication tables and statistics. If you show them an exquisite picture they will begin to discuss the pigments involved in the coloring; if you show them a beautiful rose, they will submit it to a botanical analysis, which is only the post-mortem examination of a flower. They never do anything more than feebly smile. There are no great tides of feeling surging up from the depth of their soul in billow after billow of reverberating laughter. They seem as if nature had built them by contract and made a bungling job out of it. But, blessed be God, there are people in the world who have bright faces and whose life is a song, an anthem, a p’e6an of victory. Even their troubles are like the vines that crawl up the side of a great tower, on the top of which the sunlight sits and the soft airs of summer hold perpetual carnival. They are the people you like to have come to your house; they are the people I like to have come to my house. Now, it is these exhilarant and sympathetic and warm-hearted people that are most tempted to pernicious amusements. In proportion as a ship is swift, it wants a strong helmsman; in proportion as a horse is spirited, it wants a strong driver; and these people of exuberant nature will do well to look at the reaction of all their amusements. If an amusement sends you home at night nervous so you cannot sleep, and you rise in the morning, not because you are slept out, but because your duty drags you from your slumbers’97you have been where you ought not to have been. There are amusements that send a man next day to his work bloodshot, yawning, stupid, nauseated; and that proves that they are wrong kinds of amusements. There are entertainments that give a man disgust with the drudgery of life: with tools because they are not swords, with working aprons because they are not robes, with cattle because they are not infuriated bulls of the arena. If any amusement sends you home longing for a life of romance and thrilling adventure, love that takes poison and shoots itself, moonlight adventures and hairbreadth escapes, you may depend upon it that you are the sacrificed victim of unsanctified pleasure. Our recreations are intended to build us up, and if they pull us down as to our moral or as to our physical strength, you may come to the conclusion that they are pernicious.

Still further, those amusements are wrong which lead into expenditure beyond your means. Money spent in recreation is not thrown away. It is all folly for us to come from a place of amusement feeling that we have wasted our money and time. You may by it have made an investment worth more than the transaction that yielded you thousands of dollars. But how many properties have been riddled by costly amusements? The table has been robbed to pay the club dues. The champagne has cheated the children’92s wardrobe. The carousing party has burned up the boy’92s primer. The table-cloth of the corner saloon is in debt to the wife’92s faded dress. Excursions that in a day make a tour around a whole month’92s wages, ladies whose lifetime business it is to ’93go shopping,’94 have their counterpart in uneducated children, bankruptcies that shock the money market and appal the church, and that send drunkenness staggering across the richly figured carpet of the mansion and dashing into the mirror, and drowning out the carol of music with the whooping of bloated sons come home to break their old mother’92s heart. When men go into amusements that they cannot afford, they first borrow what they cannot earn, and then they steal what they cannot borrow. First they go into embarrassment and then into theft; and when a man gets as far on as that he does not stop short of the penitentiary. There is not a prison in the land where there are not victims of unsanctified amusements. How often I have had parents come to me and ask me to go and beg their boy off from the consequence of crimes that he had committed against his employer’97the taking of funds out of the employer’92s till, or the falsification of the accounts! Why, he had salary enough to pay all lawful expenditure, but not enough salary to meet his sinful amusements. And again and again I have gone and implored for the young man’97sometimes, alas! the petition unavailing.

How brightly the path of unrestrained amusement opens! The young man says: ’93Now I am off for a good time. Never mind economy; I’92ll get money somehow. What a fine road! What a beautiful day for a ride! Crack the whip, and over the turnpike! Come, boys, fill high your glasses! Drink! Long life, health, plenty of rides just like this!’94 Hardworking men hear the clatter of the hoofs and look up and say: ’93Why, I wonder where those fellows get their money from. We have to toil and drudge; they do nothing.’94 To these gay men life is a thrill and an excitement. They stare at other people and in turn are stared at. The watch chain jingles. The cup foams. The cheeks flush, the eyes flash. The midnight hears their guffaw. They swagger. They jostle decent men off the sidewalk. They take the name of God in vain. They parody the hymn they learned at their mother’92s knee; and to all pictures of coming disaster they cry out: ’93Who cares!’94 and to the counsel of some Christian friend: ’93Who are you?’94 Passing along the street some night you hear a shriek in a grogshop, the rattle of the watchman’92s club, the rush of the police. What is the matter now? Oh, this reckless young man has been killed in a grogshop fight. Carry him home to his father’92s house. Parents will come down and wash his wounds and close his eyes in death. They forgive him all he ever did, though he cannot in his silence ask it. The prodigal has got home at last. Mother will go to her little garden and get the sweetest flowers and twist them into a chaplet for the silent heart of the wayward boy and push back from the bloated brow the long locks that were once her pride. And the air will be rent with the father’92s cry: ’93O my son, my son, my poor son; would God I had died for thee, O my son, my son!’94

You may judge of amusements by their effect upon physical health. The need of many good people is physical recuperation. There are Christian men who write hard things against their immortal souls, when there is nothing the matter with them but an incompetent liver. There are Christian people who seem to think that it is a good sign to be poorly, and because Richard Baxter and Robert Hall were invalids they think that by the same sickness they may come to the same grandeur of character. I want to tell Christian people that God will hold you responsible for your invalidism if it is your own fault, and when, through right exercise and prudence, you might be well and athletic. The effect of the body upon the soul you acknowledge. Put a man of mild disposition upon the animal diet on which the Indian lives, and in a little while his blood will change its chemical proportions. It will become like unto the blood of the lion or the tiger or the bear, while his disposition will change and become fierce, cruel, and unrelenting. The body has a powerful effect upon the soul.

There are people whose ideas of heaven are all shut out with clouds of tobacco smoke. There are people who dare to shatter the physical vase in which God put the jewel of eternity. There are men with great hearts and intellects in bodies worn out by their own neglects. Magnificent machinery capable of propelling a great Campania across the Atlantic, yet fastened in a rickety North River propeller. Physical development which merely shows itself in a fabulous lifting, or in perilous rope-walking, or in pugilistic encounter, excites only our contempt; but we confess to great admiration for the man who has a great soul in an athletic body; every nerve, muscle and bone of which is consecrated to right uses. Oh, it seems to me outrageous that men, through neglect, should allow their physical health to go down beyond repair, spending the rest of their life not in some great enterprise for God and the world, but in studying what is the best thing to take for dyspepsia. A ship which ought with all sails set and every man at his post to be carrying a rich cargo for eternity, employing all its men in stopping up leakages! When you may through some of the popular and healthful recreations of our time work off your spleen and your querulousness and one-half of your physical and mental ailments, do not turn your back from such a grand medicament.

Again, judge of the places of amusement by the companionship into which they introduce you. If you belong to an organization where you have to associate with the intemperate, with the unclean, with the abandoned, however well they may be dressed, in the name of God quit it. They will despoil your nature. They will undermine your moral character. They will drop you when you are destroyed. They will not give one cent to support your children when you are dead. They will weep not one tear at your burial. They will chuckle over your damnation. But the day comes when the men who have exerted evil influence upon their fellows will be brought to judgment. Scene: the last day. Stage: the rocking earth. Enter dukes, lords, kings, beggars, clowns. No sword. No tinsel. No crown. For footlights, the kindling flames of a world. For orchestra, the trumpets that wake the dead. For gallery, the clouds filled with angel spectators. For applause, the clapping floods of the sea. For curtains, the heavens rolled together as a scroll. For tragedy, the doom of the destroyed. For farce, the effort to serve the world and God at the same time. For the last scene of the fifth act, the tramp of nations across the stage’97some to the right, others to the left.

Again, any amusement that gives you a distaste for domestic life is bad. How many bright domestic circles have been broken up by sinful amusements! The father went off, the mother went off, the child went off. There are all around us the fragments of scattered households. Oh! if you have wandered away, I would like to charm you back by the sound of that one word, ’93Home.’94 Do you not know that you have but little more time to give to domestic welfare? Do you not see, father, that your children are soon to go out into the world, and all the influence for good you are to have over them you must have now? Death will break in on your conjugal relations, and, alas! if you have to stand over the grave of one who perished for your neglect. I saw a wayward husband standing at the death-bed of his Christian wife, and I saw her point to a ring on her finger and heard her say to her husband, ’93Do you see that ring?’94 He replied, ’93Yes, I see it.’94 ’93Well,’94 said she, ’93do you remember who put it there?’94 ’93Yes,’94 said he, ’93I put it there.’94 And all the past seemed to rush upon him. By the memory of that day, when in the presence of men and angels, you promised to be faithful in joy and sorrow and in sickness and in health; by the memory of those pleasant hours when you sat together in your new house talking of a bright future; by the cradle and the anxious hour when one life was spared and another given; by that sick bed, when the little one lifted up the hands and called for help and you knew he must die, and he put one arm around each of your necks and brought you very near together in that dying kiss; by the little grave in the cemetery that you never think of without a rush of tears; by the family Bible, where, between the leaves of its stories of heavenly love, is the brief but expressive record of births and deaths; by the neglects of the past and by the agonies of the future; by a Judgment Day when husbands and wives, parents and children, in immortal groups will stand to be caught up in shining array or to shrink down into darkness’97by all that, I beg you to give to home your best affections. I look in your eyes today, and I ask you the question that Gehazi asked of the Shunammite: ’93Is it well with thee? Is it well with thy husband? Is it well with thy child?’94 God grant that it may be everlastingly well!

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage