The Folly of “Just This Once”
ONE of the chief dangers in any one’s life-course is the inclination to experiment in sin. In that direction is unexplored territory, with a touch of excitement in the excursion. Sin invites a trial, promises quick returns in self-gratification, and keeps any thought of the after-cost as far out of sight as possible. One of sin’s most alluring forms of invitation is the call to an alleged harmless experiment in real life, a single excursion into that beckoning land. And devilish skill has invented no more plausible and no more destructive plea than the frank, open-faced, cheery call to “try it just once.” Some of us like to think that we are no longer affected by such a call as that. There was a time when the keen curiosity of youth, the passion for experiment, the longing for anything forbidden, might have caused a great commotion of spirit within us. But all that is a thing of the past. We are buried now in a press of work. Life lacks the glamour it once had. The blood flows slowly where once upon a time it leaped. And we flatter ourselves that Satan’s schemes for our downfall have seen their best days, and a lull has come in the warfare of good and evil in us, especially in the tug of that old desire to experiment in forbidden things. But the fight is not over. The form of the testing may be changed; the varieties of sin that once charmed us may have become detestable and loathsome, yet ears that are deaf to the call of these remote and hated sins are still capable of listening to the call of other sins, in the old and strangely plausible approach with their plea of “just this once.” It is a curiously effective plea. After all we have learned about our proneness to become creatures of habit, after all we have observed in the failing lives of others, after all the agony we have suffered in the struggle to recover ground lost through experiments in evil, it would seem that sane men and women, young and old, would be as cautious against the approach of the old “just-this-once” plea as against the approach of a pleasant-faced thug and cutthroat well known to his intended victim. We know what he is after. But we let him come on to close quarters—well, just this once. And what more could he want? The persistence of temptation is such that no man can comfortably assure himself that this method of testing has ceased in his case. A man of established principle, of upright life, will by no means escape the testings of “just this once.” Every strong principle he has will be attacked again and again, and many an argument will be pressed upon him to prove that while his principle is right enough in its way, he oughtn’t to be so hidebound, so strait-laced,7as to stick to that principle in this case, when his own interests and the interests of others will suffer by his peculiar notions. A Christian college student at the end of a long and taxing course found himself face to face with a Monday examination for an important professional position. A long, quiet Sunday offered a rare opportunity for study, and yet that student, on principle, had not studied on Sunday during his whole college course. What should he do? He might break his rule just this once. He was keenly anxious about the examination. The struggle was severe. But he determined to spend that Sunday in rest and in Christian work as usual. In a letter to a friend he wrote: "About my chance, I don't think I have much. Whatever comes I shall accept in good grace, realizing that it is not my will, but His." That student did not secure the desired position, but he had already passed with honors a severer test than any professional examination, and he is unshaken in his conviction that he had no right to let go his principles to get more preparation for the test. In contrast to this type of man is the man who assents to the rightness of certain principles, and practises them nearly always, almost without a break, hardly ever turning aside from them. He can not fairly be called a man of principle, because you can not be quite sure that he will think it desirable to stand by those principles under all circumstances. Once in a great while he has chosen to ignore in an open-eyed, perfectly frank way what he has been known in general to hold. To do what he did "just once" seemed to count for so little with him that you wondered how often the "just once" might be repeated if the desire were strong enough. The American total abstainer who takes wine in Europe need not wonder at the lifting eyebrows and incredulous smile of some of the home folks who saw him dining over there, and who listen to his total abstinence pronouncements at home. The American Sabbath-keeper who is strict with himself and his family at home, need not be surprised to find himself and his nation lowered in the eyes of the Italian Christian who is asked to guide him to shops and shows on Sunday. The teacher who on principle never goes to the theater at home, but who decides to go when on a visit to the metropolis, just to see what it is like, understands only too thoroly the folly of "just this once" when she is greeted from the next row by one of her scholars whom she has been trying to help in the overcoming of the theater-going habit. And even tho no one in our acquaintance ever knows of these deliberate departures from our principles, what a fearful loss there is in our inability henceforth to say squarely that these things we have wholly let alone! A reformed man was once telling at Northfield some of his terrible experiences of sin, and pressing home upon the spellbound audience the reclaiming power of Christ, when a minister on the platform leaned over to Mr. Moody and whispered, "I wish I had such a story as that to tell." "O!" exclaimed Moody, "don't say that! Thank God you haven't. Thank God you haven't!" No single experiment in sin can possibly be made without bitter results. We must not, as we value our allegiance to Christ, even begin to get used to the notion that the curse of sin is in its continuance. The true testing quality of "just this once" lies in its appeal to us to consider a single wrong act as morally unimportant, easily put into the background of life, and well worth experiencing while it lasts. We can assent to this, and set in motion a long procession of regrets, and wrestlings, and ugly personal problems; or we can meet the sinister sophistry with a rock-ribbed "No." Who of us in his right mind would not choose the clear, high levels of the land entered by that stout refusal, in preference to the tangled swamps of an experiment in sin?—Sunday School Times.