Amusement Mad | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Aug 3, 1915

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 42, No. 30.

"Amusement Mad"

MRS. MARY A. TEATS, of Chicago, in addressing the Purity Congress assembled at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, San Francisco, a few days ago, said:

"The American home is passing, because women are amusement mad, and the home is just a place where we eat, sleep, and change our clothes. Feeding the babies candy, circus lemonade, chewing gum, and teaching children the theater habit, together with the deadly sins of indulgence in liquor, cocoa, tea, and cigarettes, are slowly destroying the American home."

People who are not blinded to facts recognize that the world is crazed by the pursuit of pleasure. As expressed by Mrs. Teats, it is "amusement mad." The "theater habit" is formed in the very infancy of most children; and running after pleasure, to the neglect of home and the many other useful things of life, is characteristic of the age. If we will stop long enough to reflect seriously, we may recognize this, just as thousands of good men and women are recognizing it; but how many of us realize that through the inspiration of prophecy, the apostle Paul has predicted, with unmistakable plainness, that one of the things that will make the last days perilous is that the people will be lovers of pleasures rather than lovers of God?

With the pleasure mania of the age before the mind, did you ever carefully study the first part of the third chapter of 2 Timothy? This one thing, taken by itself, would not be sufficient to cause us to know that we are in the last days; but when the multitude of prophecies that God's word contains are brought together, we see evidence that is overwhelming, and it is a unit in telling us that the mad follies of this time will soon meet their destruction in the great day of the Lord.