The Spirit of National Games

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Nov 16, 1911

The Spirit of National Games

SATAN cares not how he may turn men to destruction, provided only that he accomplishes his purpose. Different means are employed to attract various minds. He fills the hearts of some with the love of money. Everything else is forgotten in the wild scramble for worldly wealth. With others it is the desire for position. Fame is the desired goal, and no effort is spared in order to achieve it. Questionable means are employed, and God is forgotten. With others it is the pleasures of the world. There are scores of men and women whose chief pleasure is found in races and other great national games. This spirit amounts to a sport-loving madness. Men and women lose their reason. They are carried away by the spirit of the occasion. Of the spirit attending some of the great national baseball games, the following, taken from a Philadelphia daily, is a good illustration:—

As the swift-running second baseman preceded Baker across the plate, a roar from twenty-six thousand throats rocked the steel cantilever on its concrete foundations. The vast throng literally went mad for the nonce. Facile pen is entirely inadequate to fittingly describe the wild, barbaric scene that was enacted in all parts of the huge baseball arena. Men were at a loss for ways and means to express their violent emotions. For the instant, women forgot the gentleness of their nature. All was a babel of confusion. Thunder reechoed thunder, scream followed scream, hats were tossed high in the air, never to be returned to their owners. Men actually fought each other in the ecstasy of the frenzied minute, women clutched and hugged their escorts in an instant of pardonable impropriety. It seemed as if the human reason had been dethroned. Great was the hit, cyclonic the ovation.