Lovers of Pleasure

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 1, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 37.

Lovers of Pleasure.

"Lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God." 2 Tim. 3:4.

LARGE doors turn on little hinges; great thoughts turn on small words. The Old Version makes Paul say, "Lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God." The New Version reports him as saying, "Lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God." A change of a single word, yet changing the sense of the teaching entirely. The former is inclusive, God and pleasure; the latter is exclusive, God or pleasure; the one is true to human nature, the other to Paul's thought. "No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon." Matt. 6:24. It is either God or pleasure, not God and pleasure.

"The seed is the word of God." "And that which fell among thorns are they, which, when they have heard, go forth, and are choked with cares and riches and pleasures of this life, and bring no fruit to perfection." Luke 8:11, 14. "For we ourselves also were sometime foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures." Titus 3:3. "But these, as natural brute beasts made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of the things that they understand not; and shall utterly perish in their own corruption; and shall receive the reward of unrighteousness, as they that count it pleasure to riot in the daytime." 2 Pet. 2:12, 13.

Note the classification of Paul. "Men shall be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, haughty, railers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, implacable, slanderers, without self-control, fierce, no lovers of good, traitors, headstrong, puffed up, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God; holding a form of godliness, but having denied the power thereof; from these also turn away." All this cluster hangs upon the stem of self; every grape drawing juice from that stem is poisonous. Challenge the pleasure-seeker, and you will find his whole aim in life is self-gratification. One theater is chosen rather than another, because it suits him better; one play is preferred to another, because it pleases him better; all the choices of life are made with an eye to self. It may be pleasure sought to drown sorrow, to kill time, to give pleasurable sensations, but all is for self, all for self. A boy begins the use of tobacco because it ministers to a false ideal; he thinks he will be more manly; the end is the satisfaction of this ideal in himself; soon the appetite is formed, then he must minister to that, regardless of the privileges and rights of others, it is enough that it satisfies him. The same is true of alcoholic liquors. The main reason for the beginning and continuation of their use lies in their ministry to self. Love of pleasure excludes love of God.

Discriminate sharply between recreation and pleasure. Recreation is a means to an end, pleasure is an end in itself. Recreation is legitimate, needful, it re-creates, renews, restores, refits for service; pleasure wastes energy, dissipates force; the lover of pleasure is "without self-control." Men must rest; they cannot, like the brook, "go on forever." The wheels of industry must be stopped. Even the Master must needs go aside into the desert place to rest awhile. Elijah is as near to God beneath the juniper bush as on Mount Carmel. Recreation is rest or change of action for renewed service; pleasure is an end in itself, and is unworthy thoughtful creatures. A moment's comparison of recreation-seekers and pleasure-seekers, at the beginning of the working season, will show a gulf between the two in motive and in result. The one comes back, like the bee, laden; the other, like the butterfly, on empty wing. The root of pleasure is love of self; the fruit is loss of self-control; the power to enjoy self is taken from the man who seeks pleasure. Every man commends usefulness, and condemns selfishness; the essence of the love of pleasure is love of self. Anything that is loved purely and simply because it ministers to self shuts out love to God. Not a parent of us all but that trains our children to live for others and for God; but that would count a selfish child a fit subject for correction. "The heavens declare the glory of God." Surely man was not made to declare his own glory, to live for self, to seek pleasure.

Let us now apply our principle to two special cases, the rink and the theater. The first objection to the rink is that people seek it for pleasure. There may be exceptions, but I am persuaded that most of those who haunt the rink, do so for purely selfish reasons. It ministers a present pleasure to them, without regard to ultimate end, this way or that. The rink substitutes one form of pleasure for another. "Lovers of pleasure" turn from the old dissipation to the new, as the Athenians turned from the old teaching to the new. An argument constantly urged in favor of the rink is that it draws people from the bar-room and the theater. As a higher form of pleasure, this may be an advantage; but so long as it is simply for pleasure as an end, it comes under the condemnation of the text. While the rink may draw some up to a higher form of pleasure, it draws many others down to the level of pleasure-seekers. I have yet to learn that scholars are better students, clerks are more faithful, mothers more devoted to the family, Christians more active for Christ, or the lost drawn any nearer to God, because of the rink.

The second objection to the rink is that it is built and run simply and solely as a money-making scheme. Some one will at once reply, "Men go into business to make money." If men go into business to make money simply, if the business does not add to the sum total of human well-being, if any particular line of manufacturing or trade is sought for the sake of money, and not in part for the good of man, then the seeker comes under the condemnation of a "lover of money." "They that desire to be rich fall into a temptation and a snare and many foolish and hurtful lusts, such as drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." The men who object to this argument would be the first to say, "A man ought not to enter the ministry for money," and yet the ministry is only one way of serving God. Any institution that ministers to lovers of pleasure on the one hand, and lovers of money on the other, and finds its reason for being in this twofold ministry, deserves condemnation. The next objection is physiological. Says a writer in a recent number of the Congregationalist:—

"Personal inquiries from no less than six physicians, some of them leading practitioners, have elicited the strongest condemnation of the rink.

"Said one: 'Is any exercise conducive to health that is carried on in an ill-ventilated room, where the atmosphere is poisoned with scores of breaths, some redolent with tobacco, some foul with disease, and some scented with strong drink? Is it conducive to health to exercise violently in an intolerable heat, and then take a sudden cooling draught from an open window?'

"Said another: 'In most cases nowadays, when misses come to us for medical advice in regard to some new form of illness, the first question we put is, "Have you been to the

skating rink?"' He also added that the late Dr. Thorndike, one of the most eminent physicians of Boston, remarked to him shortly before his death, that he had attended no less than fifteen cases of spinal affection coming directly from the skating rink.

"Another said: 'The movements of skating on rollers are all injurious. The ankles stiffen, and often swell badly from the severe strain, and the knee joint loses its ease of action; the spine sometimes suffers greatly, especially among girls and women, in whom the dangers of future disease are much greater from all such exercise.'

"Says Dr. Frank Hamilton: 'The exercise is violent. Those who practice it are exceedingly liable to fall, much more so than in ice-skating with the ordinary skate, and it calls into action muscles which are unused to severe strains. Scarcely a day passes that I do not see or hear of some one who has suffered injury in a skating rink. In the majority of these cases the injury has proved to be a severe strain through the loins, or the muscles of the upper part of the thigh and the region of the groin, accompanied with swelling and severe pains in the latter region. For women and girls especially, I consider it a dangerous pastime. If one were to make it the business of a lifetime to walk on roller skates, no doubt his or her muscles and joints would become used to it, and eventually suffer no harm. But there is much danger, and there are many chances that before they would have arrived at this immunity from harm they would meet with many serious accidents and permanent injuries. It is a most dangerous form of amusement, and the sooner the craze subsides the better.'

"Dr. Sayre, the famous surgeon, and Dr. Boseman, both talked in the same strain; and called attention to the many serious accidents attendant upon roller skating. Dr. Sayre explained the tendency of the roller skate to fly forward and let the skater fall in a sitting posture, or strike the back of the head, and how, owing to the construction of the skate, it was liable to produce bunchy and loose-jointed knees and ankles, and consequently an ungraceful carriage."

Another objection is on the ground of its mental effect. The rink has a peculiar fascination over the minds of those who frequent it. It is bad enough when a man is in a rink, but far worse when the rink gets into a man. The mind is filled with memories of yesterday's sport and hopes of to-morrow's fun. The body may be in the school-room or office, but the mind is in the rink. The mind has its "protracted vision" as well as the eye. "Lovers of pleasure" see everything through the medium of the pleasure. "The harvest of a quiet eye" is denied; the rink dissipates mental energy, unfits the mind for the serious business of life.

The chief objection to the rink, based upon its effects, is the moral. The rink grades down and not up. It is not merely that bad men have abused it, but that the whole tone of the place is demoralizing; not merely that here a man and there a woman have broken the bounds of decency, but that a malaria hangs over the institution as an institution. The mayors of Boston and Philadelphia have put the rink under police surveillance. The New York Senate has passed a bill limiting the hours and ages in the case of children, and insisting upon guardians or parents being present with them. An institution that has by natural gravitation struck the danger-line so speedily has in it something morally wrong. Where men and women meet for pleasure, the lower and baser element in the company will debase and debauch the higher.

Christian people have no right to meet the "children of this world" in their own chosen temple of pleasure. They cannot do it as ambassadors for Christ; the place, the conditions, the spirit, are all hostile to that kingdom which is "first pure, and then peaceable." The result will evermore be, not to elevate the worshipers you mingle with, but to degrade you. It is the old story of Peter by the fire in the palace yard: first the mingling with the enemies of Christ, then the denial; in too many cases the bitter blasphemy; and then, if restoration at all, along the line of penitence and tears.—Rev. O. P. Gifford, in Watchman.