Amusements | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 7, 1865

Amusements.

When Martin Luther threw his cares aside from time to time, and played on his flute, and jested with his friends, gambled with his children, or gave himself up to the songs of birds, and all the joyful restorative influences of nature, he thus kept his soul sweet, and his powers fresh, so as to renew at the fitting time and finish the work which had been given him to do.

Here we see the true place and office of amusements. They are not the business of life, but interludes, recreations, refreshments, thrown in at intervals to save us from being utterly broken down by unceasing and perpetual toil. While we study or labor, while we do our part to work or to prepare ourselves for work, it is right, nay it is our duty as well as our privilege, to give ourselves up, from time to time, to amusements.

But when amusements become the chief thing, when they take the place of the serious duties which God has imposed on every man whom he has created, then they undermine our principles, and impair our faith in whatever is noblest in virtue, or most holy in religion. The soul that lays upon itself no obligations and seeks no higher ends is lost. Even poetry, and music, and art, so beautiful in their places as the handmaids of religion, only lead into paths of death, when they withdraw from her guidance, and demand for themselves the worship which is due to God alone.

"This, too, is the effect of an education wholly of the accomplishment. The education of taste, and the cultivation of the feelings, in undue proportions, destroys the masculine tone of the mind. An education chiefly romantic or poetical, and unbalanced by hard practical life, is simply the ruin of the soul."

And when such has become the character of the community, when æsthetic tastes have greater influence than the love of truth, and amusements are allowed to stand in the place of better things, then no matter what external show of prosperity and refinement there may be, the doom of that community is sealed.

For, in the language of an able historian, "neither in sacred or profane history, neither in the monarchies of the East, or in the free Commonwealths of the Western world, neither in Egyptian, Grecian, Roman, Italian, Sardonic, or any other chronicles—can an exception be found to the law which dooms to ruin any people who, abandoning the duties for the delights of this transitory state, live only in the frivolities of life, and find only the means of dissolute and emasculate self-indulgence in God's best gifts to man—in wealth, and leisure, and society; in erudition, and art, and science; in literature, and philosophy, and eloquence; in the domestic affections which should bless our existence, and in the worship by which it should be consecrated."