CHAPTER XX.[ToC]
BE GOOD TO YOURSELF.
I witnessed the other day a parting between two men. The elder, as he took the younger by the hand, said, "Good-by, my boy; be good to yourself;" and the younger responded, heartily, "Oh, there is no danger but I'll be that." I wondered, as I saw the laughing face, so full of the indications of the love of pleasure, if he really would be good to himself, or if he would interpret it to mean to indulge himself in all kinds of sensuous gratification. It is a great thing to be truly good to one's self, and I would give the injunction with the highest ideal. Be good to your real self with that true goodness that sees the end from the beginning, that realizes the tendency of certain forms of pleasure, and that claims the privilege of being master of the senses, and not their slave.
"Well," you say, rather deprecatingly, "you can't expect young people to act as staid and wise as you old folks. We want some fun." So you do, and that is perfectly right. You should want fun and have fun. All I ask is that you shall try to understand what real, true fun is.
I have seen young folks pull the chair from under some one "for fun," and the result was pain and perhaps permanent injury to the object of the joke.
I have known young men to imagine they were having "fun" when they went on a spree, to get "gloriously drunk," as they phrased it. You can see no fun in this. You realize that it is a most serious tragedy, with not an element of real fun in it, involving, as it does, the loss of health, the risking of life, the possibility of crime, the heart-break of friends, and perhaps even death. It is altogether a wrong idea of fun.
I have known girls in the secrecy of their rooms to smoke cigarettes "for fun," and in that I am sure that you see no amusement. It was a lowering of the standard of womanhood; it was tampering with a poison; it was something to be ashamed of, rather than something to call fun.
I have known young men and women to enter into flirtations "for fun." I knew a girl whose chief delight seemed to be in getting young men in love with her, only to cast them aside when tired of their adoration. She called this fun, but it was cruelty. In olden times men amused themselves by throwing Christians to wild beasts and watching them while being torn to pieces. This was their idea of fun, and the flirt's idea of amusement seems to be of the same order. She plays with the man as the cat with the mouse, and experiences no pangs of conscience when, torn and bleeding in heart, she tosses him aside for a new victim.
There are other young people who would not enter into such serious flirtations, and yet are unduly familiar with each other. They mean nothing by their endearments and familiarities, and neither will suffer any pangs when the pleasant intimacy is ended. Can we not call this innocent fun? They have indulged in some unobserved hand-pressures, or a few stolen kisses; but neither believed the other to mean anything serious. It was only fun; what harm could there be in that?