Things Miscalled Amusements.
No QUESTION is exciting more interest in the moral and religious world at the present time than that of amusements. Under this name many things of the most questionable nature are making encroachments even upon the church, bewitching the young, and too often bewildering the aged. The following remarks place this matter in a very just light, by making a proper distinction between amusements and excitements. We recommend it to all. Read carefully, and then rigidly examine everything coming as an amusement—if it is an excitement, scrupulously avoid it, as a step on the way to ruin. J. H. W. The popular amusements of the day are grievously misnamed. They should be called excitements. The Anglo-Saxons and the Celts, the races that give character to our American civilization and religion, know little of amusement in its proper sense. It does not content them. The dance, the evening party, the card table, the theater and opera, the race course, the billiard saloon and the ten-pin alley, are either in their very nature, or by their almost invariable associations, excitements of the most unwholesome, inordinate, and pernicious sort. Such a party as that given by a prominent New England Representative in Washington last winter, when after the usual gayeties and feasting and drinking had extended to one o’clock in the morning, we are told “the German” was commenced, and kept up till near daybreak, and the whole was finished by a champagne breakfast—could this be rightly called amusement? By no means. It was a piece of real business of the hardest and most trying nature, cruel to body and to soul, as severe a draft upon the nerve-force as a forced march or a total rout and pell-mell retreat of an army. Nay, we believe the downright butchery of a battlefield is less barbarous and more truly amusing than the orgies of such a first class all-night party at the Metropolis. The theater is also the scene of wearying, demoralizing, embruting excitement, more enfeebling and corrupting than a miasm. The fierce passions, the gorgeous lewdness, the unmitigated sensuality of spectacle and costume and situation and plot of the staple performances of the drama—what refreshment is there in all this, what refreshment indeed on the very crater of hell, inhaling the sulphurous fumes of the pit! Men do not go to those places for the innocent and wholesome thing properly called amusement; they go for excitement. They go not to be entertained, but to be inflamed. So in games, which of themselves are innocent and pure, as billiards and nine pins (we cannot include cards, as the element of chance enters too largely into the game). Americans are not content until, by connecting the excitements of betting, loss and gain of money, and above all, drinks, with the play, they have fairly shut it out of the list of amusements, and made it a snare to character and possessions, a swift path to dissipation and ruin. Amusement, relaxation, innocent gayety, hilarity, sportiveness, is a gospel duty. There is a time to laugh. But it is one of the gravest mistakes of our age and country, that it knows so little of amusements, and has gone almost exclusively into dissipation in their stead. With that, the true Christian plainly has nothing to do, but to discountenance, and if the way is hedged up against reformation, to withdraw from it utterly. Dissipation is not among things indifferent. Gay parties lasting till past midnight, in which everybody is overdressed, or under-dressed, in which dances handed down from those of the children of Israel around the Golden Calf, are the main attractions; theaters, operas, and races, these are not things indifferent, these are not amusements, but gross abuses, by which, in the false guise of amusement, body and soul, are damaged, spirituality rendered impossible, and our eternal well-being put in jeopardy. Toward all these, a Christian has but one simple duty: Touch not, taste not, handle not. Come out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing.—American Presbyterian.