What amusements are lawful to
people who wish to live a holy life by R.W. Dale from Amusements 1895 What amusements are lawful to
people who wish to live a holy life is one of the questions
by which many godly people are sorely perplexed. Many yield
to the current customs of the times, but yield with hesitation,
discomfort, and apprehension. At first sight, some of the distinctions
which have been drawn between amusements which are permitted
and amusements which are forbidden appear to be altogether arbitrary.
They seem to originate in no moral or spiritual principle.
Why should card-playing, stamper manners, worldly, and chess be
perfectly consistent with devoutness? Why should people take their
children to a circus who would be horrified at their going to
a theatre? The things allowed are so like
the things forbidden that the distinction which has been drawn
between them will probably be pronounced by many people to
be altogether irrational. Many of the broad moral distinctions
which evangelical Christians make between amusements which
are very much alike receive an easy explanation when we consider
the very different accessories with which either in our own
days or in former days they have been associated. There can be
no more harm in playing with pieces of coloured cardboard
than with pieces of carved ivory, but cards have always been associated
with gambling, and chess has not. The traditions of what is
allowable and what is forbidden which have come down to us are
explicable. And, if we are people of sense,
we shall ask whether the same circumstances which made certain
amusements objectionable a hundred years ago or fifty years ago
make them objectionable now. Profanity, impurity, and cruelty
are always evil, whether connected with our amusements or with the
common business and habits of life. Whatever tends to these
things is evil too. If any recreation, however pleasant,
involves a clear breach of moral laws, then it must be bad for
all men and under all circumstances. Or, if, though harmless in itself,
immorality has become inseparably connected with it, Every good
man will avoid and condemn that particular amusement. Prize-fighting,
cock-fighting, and bull-baiting are plainly barbaric sports.
It is utterly disgusting that men should be able to find any
pleasure in them, and the right feeling of English society has
made them all utterly disreputable. But there are amusements, which
cannot be called immoral, either in themselves or their accessories,
about which a good man will have serious doubts. The object of
all recreation is to increase our capacity for work, to keep
the bodily health strong, and the brain bright, and the temper
kindly and sweet. If any recreation exhausts our
strength instead of restoring it, or so absorbs our time as
to interfere with the graver duties of life, then it must
be condemned. Amusements are objectionable,
which interfere with regular and orderly habits of life, and
which instead of increasing health and vigour produce weariness
and exhaustion. The common reason alleged for
condemning certain amusements in which no moral evil can be
shown to exist is that they are worldly. But there is no word
in our language which is more abused than this. The sin of
worldliness is a very grave one, but thousands and tens of thousands
of people are guilty of it, who are most vigorous in maintaining
the narrowest moral standards. One would imagine, from the habits
of speech common in some sections of religious society, that worldliness
has to do only with our pleasures, while in truth it has to do with
the whole spirit and temper of our life. To be worldly is to
permit our transcendent relation to Jesus our Lord to be overborne
by inferior interests. There is a worldliness of the
counting house as fatal to the true health and energy of the
soul as the worldliness of the ballroom, and there are more
people whose loyalty to Christ is ruined by covetousness than
by love of pleasure. There is a worldliness in the
conduct of ecclesiastical affairs quite as likely to extinguish
the divine fire which should burn in the church as the worldliness
which reveals itself in the frivolity of those unhappy people whose
existence is spent in one ceaseless round of gaiety. Let no man think
that he ceases to be worldly, ceases, that is, to belong to
that darker and inferior region of life from which Christ came
to deliver us, merely by abstaining from half a dozen of his old
recreations. Not thus easily is the great
victory won, which is possible only to a vigorous and invincible
faith, Not thus artificial are the boundaries between the heavenly
commonwealth of which the Christian man is a citizen and the kingdom
of evil from which he has escaped.