Amusement: A Force in Christian Training

by Marvin R. Vincent

“The trail of the serpent is over them all.”

It is innocent for boys to play marbles, but sinful to play dominoes. Wherein, pray? They can learn to gamble with one as well as with the other. It is sinful to play billiards, but highly graceful and innocent to play croquet. But why? Really, when it comes to a comparison, the first is infinitely the more beautiful and intellectual game. The ethical distinctions are positively bewildering between balls of ivory and balls of wood; between mallets and cues; between green baize and green grass. A Christian household must not sit down and play at whist, but they are engaged in a Christian and laudable manner if they spend an evening over Dr. Busby, or Master Rodbury cards. Really, it is hard to draw the moral line between cards bearing aces and spades, and cards with the likenesses of Dr. Busby's son and servant, Doll the dairymaid, and the like. When it comes to a question of profit, one is an amusement involving a good deal of healthy, mental exertion, while the other is about as silly and profitless a way of spending an evening [pg 015] as can well be imagined. Youth must not dance, but they may march to music in company, and go through calisthenic exercises, involving a good deal more motion than dancing. But if people may march to music and be guiltless, it is very hard to see how skipping to music converts the exercise into sin. It is said that the associations make the difference; but the advocate of this theory is shut up to proving that the associations are inseparable from the amusements. And here is the place to remark that the best amusements are the ones most likely to be abused—the ones which experience shows are most abused, and about which cluster the most evil associations. The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light. Men do not care to counterfeit a coin of inferior value; and the world is very clear-sighted to discern the best and richest sources of worldly pleasure, and utterly unscrupulous in appropriating them entirely to itself. The amusements which are most abused, are commonly those which, from their intrinsic value, call most loudly upon virtue to rescue them from their abuses.

The above method of reasoning, in short, will not stand the test of plain common sense. It is trifling, ignoring all distinctions which rest on [pg 016] principles, and substituting factitious ones; and Christians who assume this ground, lay themselves open without defense to the logic and ridicule of any intelligent man of the world who may be disposed to test the reasons for their scrupulousness. They condemn themselves in those things which they allow. The amusements they approve cannot, in many cases, be compared with those which they deprecate, either in elegance, profit, or the amount of intelligence they require.

What point then shall we take for the consideration of this subject? We are confined to one—the stand-point of the Bible. As Christian associations we have but one question to ask: “What saith the Word.”

In the New Testament we find little said about the degrees of sin. The thought which it throughout tries to impress is, that sin is everywhere; and under any form, or in any degree, is a horrible and fatal thing. The tares are gathered in bundles and burned; no matter if one grows a little shorter, and another a little longer. The lustful glance is placed in the same category with the licentious act. The angry thought is of the same piece with the act of murder. The gospel contemplates the sins of the race very much as a man looks at an orange: the rind is full of little [pg 017] protuberances, and a close scrutiny will show that some of these rise higher than others. But nobody pretends to notice these variations; they all spring from one spherical surface, and their variation is not such as to destroy the general effect of roundness. So all these fearful developments of sin spring from one plane, and God hath concluded the whole sinful world in unbelief.

The gospel, therefore, wastes no time in making distinctions between sins, but aims straight at remedying the great fact of sin as it exists everywhere. Nor does it leave us in doubt as to its method. It assumes its own power to purify anything, and therefore lays down as its great law of operation, the law of contact.

This law it sets forth under a parable: The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened. The great truth here illustrated, is the innate power of the gospel to pervade and assimilate to its own nature the whole worldly order of things, just as leaven thus pervades and assimilates the lifeless lumps of dough. This then, is its simple lesson: Put the gospel into contact with everything sinful—the heart of man, the life of man, the employments of man, the amusements of man—into [pg 018] society, its customs, laws, institutions, and it will purge them of evil, and bring them into harmony with the Divine order.

But be sure and note, that the entire success of this action depends upon the contact—upon the putting the leaven into the lump. Fail in this, and the lump remains heavy. It matters very little whether the salt have lost his savor or not, if the meat remain in one dish and the salt in the other.

How thoroughly and beautifully this truth was carried out in the life and teachings of Christ, will appear to us more clearly, if we shall recognize the uniform policy of the gospel to work for the destruction of evil, chiefly through the lodgment and development of good. Both Christ and his apostles are exhibited in the gospel story as engaged chiefly in asserting and illustrating the truth, and not in combating error. Christ comes into a world lying in wickedness—besotted by it, plagued and tormented by it; full of abominations starting boldly out without pretense of concealment, from every phase of private, social and civil life. But he does not approach these as a mechanic would an old building, saying, “this beam is rotten and must come down; this roof is decayed and must be stripped off; this [pg 019] floor is unsafe and must be pulled up.” He does not propose to his disciples to enter upon a wholesale denunciation of profanity and licentiousness. He points out and condemns many of these things it is true; but the main lever of his teaching is the assertion of the great gospel principles. For these he seeks a place of lodgment everywhere. The old tables of the law contained but one commandment that was not prohibitory. Every line portrayed a crime, with a law standing on guard beside it, and warning men away with its “Thou shalt not!” Christ asserts the authority of the law; but in the new table it is seen beckoning toward the commandment, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart.” His instructions to his disciples do not so much concern the things which they are to avoid, as they tend to fix upon their minds right conceptions of his character and mission. So, I repeat, Christ's work is less a crusade against evil, than an assertion of good by precept and example as the surest means in the end of removing evil. Look, too, at Paul at Athens, surrounded by heathen temples, statues and altars. He does not proceed to demonstrate to the curious multitude that the philosophies of Zeno or Epicurus are wrong; or that the worship of Hermes or Athene is absurd. [pg 020] He throws out at once, bold and stern as a mountain headland, the assertion of the Divine unity, and follows it up with the doctrines of salvation through Christ, the resurrection, and the final judgment. In a few bold strokes he delineates to the astonished skeptics some salient points of natural and revealed religion, and then leaves the truth to germinate and crowd out the evil in its own way and time.

There is indeed a sublimity in this invincible faith in the power of truth exhibited by the Son of Man. In the calmness with which he moves amid the moral ruin that encompasses him, without that anxious haste, and longing for immediate results, which characterize so many modern reformers. The world would have expected a direct and tremendous onslaught upon evil. It would have said that the dropping of a seed of positive truth here and there, would never result in anything. Christ knew better. He knew the latent power of truth; its inherent capability of growth; and he knew that wherever it should find a lodgment, it would grow; and wherever it should grow, it would shake down from its branches, like the mighty tree of the tropics, the germs of a thousand growths like itself. Now it is this very faith in the power of gospel truth, as the most effective [pg 021] destroyer of evil, prompting to put the good boldly into the evil to leaven it, which is sorely needed in the moral movements of the age. Bring the subject of amusements to this test. Compare the action of the church upon it, with the principles so evidently regulating Christ's dealing with evil, and see whether it gains by the comparison. Is it not true, rather, that the Christian world has, to a very large extent, acted upon an entirely opposite principle? It has spent much time in peering into amusements to see what evil they contained, and has kept digging away at this, instead of putting Divine grace into them, in simple faith in God, and letting that at once purge and regulate them. It has been so absorbed in ferreting out and declaiming against the evil, as to have forgotten measurably that a corresponding duty lay upon it to develop the good. Overlooking, or at least slighting the great philosophical truth, that amusement is as necessary to man as bread, and fixing its gaze upon the fact that it is capable of perversion, it has most signally failed in the regulation of popular amusements, and in teaching how to use, without abusing them. It has withdrawn utterly from many most innocent sources of pleasure; crying, “come out from among them;” they are not safe; [pg 022] Christians must have nothing to do with them. And with its withdrawal, the Devil has come in and taken full possession, and their last state is worse than the first. When the church has touched the subject of amusements, it has generally done so, I think, in a censorious spirit. It has selected certain amusements as sinful, and issued decretals and resolutions against them; it has prescribed penalties against church members who should engage in them; leaving the question in its broader relations untouched. It has fenced off this and that corner of the field of recreation, and put up signs: “all church members are warned against trespassing on these grounds, under penalty of the law,” instead of trying to teach Christians how to avail themselves, with profit and safety, of any part of the field. We are cut off from Hamlet, and Lear, and Othello and Macbeth. We cannot avail ourselves of the interpretation of these by the best histrionic talent, because the theater has been suffered to fall so completely into the Devil's hands, that a Christian cannot countenance what is good in it, without at the same time countenancing much that is profane, licentious and indecent. But if the intelligence and culture of a community endeavor to apply the principle I have been advocating, and, in the shape of private [pg 023] theatricals, to furnish a refined, beautiful, and instructive dramatic exhibition, the outcry is little less than if they had leased Wallack's or Niblo's, with a first class troupe; and those Christians who witness it, are condemned as inconsistent and backsliders. Just so with dancing. The idea of Christianity having the remotest connection with this amusement has been scouted as absurd. A procrustean law has been enacted—“Thou shalt not dance.” And surely, one would think from some exhibitions of this amusement, that Christian leaven had been pretty thoroughly withdrawn from it. One cannot much wonder at the disgust excited by those importations from Paris brothels, the round dances, which, with the present style of female attire, really leave modest men at some loss what to do with their eyes. Let us have as much thundering at these as you will. Let us not mince words. Let ridicule, and sarcasm, and denunciation exhaust their armories, for these are abuses; positive evils. But these abuses are not inseparable from the amusement, which, in proper forms, is healthy, graceful, innocent, and highly commendable. Just here an incident occurs to me which so forcibly illustrates this last remark that I must relate it as the involuntary testimony of an enemy. An amiable [pg 024] and most excellent clergyman of this state, happened to be present one evening when some young ladies went through a quadrille. He looked on with great apparent pleasure. The next morning he was rallied by some of his townsmen on having countenanced dancing by his presence; when he roundly denied the charge, and asserted that no dancing had taken place, but only, as he expressed it, “a most beautiful exercise.” Now, I ask, in the name of common sense, why not devote a little Christian care to separating from its abuses, and regulating in its conduct an exercise which improves the bearing of our youth, tends to relieve their natural awkwardness in society, and gives them innocent exhilaration? But no! Thou shalt not dance. That is Alpha and Omega. Dancing is liable to abuse, and therefore, O most astoundingly consistent logic, leave it to become a prey to all manner of abuses and abominations. So, if a Christian household makes the attempt to leaven this unfortunate lump, and claims that it can, and does introduce graceful and modest dancing into its family gatherings and social reunions, it is too often denounced as an enemy of Christ and a corrupter of the young. For one I am glad that certain Christian families of high standing in the church of all denominations, [pg 025] have at last asserted their right to act out their own convictions in this matter, and have demonstrated that even this much berated amusement may be elevated, refined, and made a source of social pleasure and profit by the infusion of Christian principle.