[CHAPTER X.]
APPEAL TO THE YOUNG MEMBERS OF THE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH.
"I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcome the wicked one." I John ii, 14.
Before we part, will our young Christian reader "suffer the word of exhortation?" I am not unmindful of the situation in which you are placed. You have associates, intelligent, agreeable in manners, and not immoral, who argue stoutly in defense of their thoughtless pleasures. Your conscience resists, and yet you feel the effect of their solicitations. You are sometimes almost ready to wish that your parents, your pastor, your class-leader, and your own conscience would consent to your yielding, that you might escape the pressure and feel no conflict between duty and the wishes of your gay companions. Let me call your attention to certain considerations, which I trust will have the effect to strengthen you for the right.
1. Frivolous and doubtful amusements have always been condemned by the Discipline of our Church.
Our General Rules do not indeed name dancing, the theater, and the rest. Had they done this, it might have been argued that the Discipline allows every folly not specified in the list. Our fathers in the Church were too wise thus to attempt to war against an evil which assumes a thousand Protean forms. They announce a broad principle, which condemns all "such diversions as can not be used in the name of the Lord Jesus." Do you profess to be in doubt as to the true intent and meaning of the Rule? If you do, look at the past history of the Church. Which of the founders of Methodism favored dancing? Did John Wesley? Did Fletcher or Clarke? Which of them favored the theater or the horse-race? Did Hedding, or Fisk, or Olin? I challenge the apologists for dancing, theaters, and races to show that a single one of the multitude of holy men and women who have a name in our annals ever practiced or approved such diversions. On the contrary, there arise from their honored graves a great cloud of witnesses against them. The devoted servants of God, who shine as stars in our firmament, and whose names are "as ointment poured forth," condemned, feared, abhorred them as utterly at war with the life which they were living and the work which they were doing. Nor were these the views of ignorant, morose, narrow-minded people, soured by disappointment, or disabled by age or disease, but of intelligent, happy men and women, who served the Lord with glad hearts and went about with smiling faces.