AMUSEMENTS.

would determine without Richard Baxter's assistance,
by the help of a certain rough instinct, teaching them
that when

"Adam, the goodliest man of men since born
His sons; the fairest of her daughters, Eve,"

Good Words, May 1, 187.

different accessories with which, either in our own days or in former times, they have been associated. For instance, it is no doubt quite as easy to play at chess for money as to play at whist for money; but people who want the excitement of gambling are impatient of the tedious length to which the one

were created, they appeared to the angels, whether game often extends, and prefer the more rapid movegood or bad,

"Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed;
For contemplation he and valour formed,
For softness she and sweet attractive grace;
He for God only, she for God and him.
His fair large front and eye sublime declared
Absolute rule."

And if a text was needed, the unhappy "gentleman
would be likely to remember what St. Paul said
about the husband being the "head of the wife," even
as Christ is the Head of the Church."

But if, in our days, and among English evangelical Christians, a casuist happened to appear, I do not know that he could, in any way, more usefully or more pleasantly employ the resources of his science than in discussing the subject of this paper. What amusements are lawful to persons who wish to live a religious life, is one of the questions by which many good people are sorely perplexed. The stricter habits of our fathers are being everywhere relaxed, and there are very many who wish to do right, who know not what to think of the change; they yield to the current of the times, but yield with hesitation, discomfort, and apprehension.

At first sight, some of the distinctions which have been drawn between amusements which are permitted, and amusements which are forbidden, appear to be altogether arbitrary. They seem to originate in no moral principle-in no spiritual instinct. Why, for instance, should bagatelle be played on winter evenings in very strict families, and billiards be sternly condemned? Why should whist stamp a man as "worldly," and chess be perfectly consistent with devoutness? Why should draughts be allowed, and backgammon abjured? Why should fishing be permitted even to clergymen, and shooting be regarded by many as a sign of unregeneracy? Why should people take their children to a circus, who would be horrified at their seeing a pantomime?

ment of the other. The two games are equally games of skill, and require an equal amount, though a different kind, of intellectual effort; but by the one a clever player may win a good number of sixpences or half-crowns in an evening, while the other is too solemn and slow to be made subordinate to the pecurival players as the fortunes of the game ebb and niary profits of success. Professionals may play for a heavy stake, and heavy bets may be laid on the flow; but under ordinary circumstances chess is not a convenient disguise for gambling. This is probably hundreds of houses where the difference between spades and diamonds is quite unknown. There can the reason that a chess-board may be found in pasteboard than with pieces of carved ivory; but cards have been always associated with gambling, be no more harm in playing with pieces of coloured

and chess has not.

allowed and billiards are forbidden. A billiard table is a large and costly piece of furniture. It needs Nor is it difficult to explain why bagatelle is room for itself, and a room such as few families belonging to the middle classes have ever been able to spare for the purpose. It must be treated as tenderly perature, if it is to be of any real use. billiards, therefore, people have had to go to a public as a new-born infant-kept in an unvarying temtable, and generally to an hotel. come to be associated with late hours and brandy. To play at and-water. Public playing has brought gambling with it. But bagatelle boards, sufficiently accurate The game has to afford considerable amusement, are cheap enongh means; and they have been made of a form and size which render a special room unnecessary. to be within the reach of persons of very moderate telle, therefore, has been dissociated from the evils made home pleasant; the girls and the boys have played with their father. While the nobler game which have given an evil name to billiards; it has ferior game has kept its honour almost stainless. has lost its reputation from bad company, the in

Baga

The things allowed are so like the things abjured, that the distinction which has been drawn between them will probably be pronounced by many persons look kindly upon the rod and the line, though they to be altogether irrational. No sensible man, how-regard a man that carries a gun (unless he happens Again, there are large numbers of good people who ever, will ever suppose that strong convictions which to be an African missionary or a Western settler) as extend through large communities are altogether belonging to the devil's regiment. without foundation in reason or experience. If he Has Isaac Walton made all the difference? Would cannot understand them, he will acknowledge that it shooting have been as innocent as fishing, if its may perhaps be his own fault. Nothing lives without praises had been sung by a spirit as pure and simple How is this? a real root somewhere; if not in the nature of things, as that of the biographer of the saintly George yet in the accidental history of the people among Herbert? Hardly. Perhaps the root of the diswhom it has sprung up. Many of the broad moral tinction lies in this-that men commonly go alone to distinctions which evangelical Christians make be- the river, and in parties to the stubble. tween amusements which are very much alike, receive an easy explanation when we consider the very solitary, and gentle; he "handles his worm tenis generally a quiet, meditative man; he is silent, The angler

derly;" half his enjoyment lies in penetrating into the secret places of nature, in surprising her shy and hidden beauties, in watching the pleasant wooing which is always going on in shady places in summer time between the murmuring, rippling waters, and the ash, the beech, and the willow, which stoop to kiss them as they pass. He loves stillness and peace. The country parson may think over his text while his float drifts lazily with the current, or while he wanders by the stream watching for the silver flashes which tempt him to throw his fly. The men that delight to hear the whirr of the partridge are generally of another sort. Anyhow, September brings shooting dinners as well as birds; and with many people heavy drinking is inseparably associated with heavy bags of game. They do not object to eat the partridges when they are shot, but they have the impression that the men who shoot them are a roystering, rollicking set, with whom it is undesirable that their sons should be too intimate. All this is rapidly changing; in many parts of the country it has quite disappeared; but I am inclined to thinkspeaking of those whom I know best-that though a Nonconformist minister, with a cast of flies on his hat, and a rod on his shoulder, would feel no shyness at meeting accidentally the very gravest of his deacons, he would rather be on the other side of the hedge if he happened to have on his gaiters and to be carrying his gun.

reading Mrs. Behn, have had the same objection to Miss Muloch? Would the traditional veto on works of fiction, which drove some of us when we were boys to read "Ivanhoe" and the "Heart of Mid-Lothian" on the sly, have ever been uttered if George MacDonald had been writing "David Elginbrod" and "Alec Forbes" a hundred and fifty years ago? There are curious corners of English society where the pleasant fact has not yet been discovered that Sir Walter Scott regenerated fiction; and some of the brightest and noblest creations of modern genius are regarded with distrust, on the ground of what was said "by them of old time," about books which every good man would thrust into the fire with disgust at their impurity, or fling into his waste-paper basket with contempt for their frivolity.

We are bound to understand the judgments of our fathers before we appeal to their authority; and while we should be guilty of presumptuous folly if we did not honour the cautions suggested by the experiences of wise and devout men who have lived before us, we must take care to ask what that experience really was.

Profanity, impurity, and cruelty are always evil, whether connected with our amusements or with the common business and habits of life. Whatever tends to these things is evil too. If any recreation, however pleasant, involves a clear breach of moral laws, it must be bad for all men and under all circumstances. Or if, though harmless in itself, immorality has become undoubtedly connected with it, every good man will avoid and condemn it.

Prize-fighting, cock-fighting, and bull-baiting are plainly inhuman sports. It is utterly disgusting that men should be able to find any pleasure in them; and the right feeling of English society has made them all utterly disreputable. As for horse-racing, there can be no intrinsic harm, I suppose, in the magnifi

The traditions which have come down to us are explicable; and if we are men of sense we shall ask whether the same circumstances which made certain amusements objectionable a hundred years ago, or fifty years ago, make them objectionable now. I believe in reverence for the deliberate judgments of good men; what they have generally shrunk from and condenmed must have had some evil in it. Their spiritual experience, not merely their theoretical opinions, is embodied in the habits of life which they have transmitted to their descendants and followers. But we bring them into contempt if we do not try to under-cent contest for the St. Leger or the Derby; cruelty stand what it was they really objected to. If they censured particular amusements because of the accessories with which, in their days, those amusements were associated, and not because of any evil in the amusements themselves, we are actually imperilling their reputation for moral discernment and good sense, by appealing to their authority in condemnation of what is plainly harmless, when the evil accessories have disappeared.

In some instances, the very things which they condemned have changed, and yet their condemnation remains uncancelled. Novel reading may, perhaps, be legitimately considered an amusement. A hundred years ago devout people were, I suppose, almost unanimous in excluding novels from their houses. Nothing, they thought, could be more ruinous to their children than this captivating, ensnaring, and exciting literature. But what kind of novels did they condemn? Would the men who would as soon have seen their girls drinking poison as have seen them

to the horses is not necessary to the sport. But
horse-racing has become a more pretext for gambling;
and if a tithe of what is reported of Doncaster and
Epsom during race-week is to be believed, our
"Isthmian games" are disgraced by drunkenness
and abominable profligacy. A well-known member
of Parliament, a man of the world, making no preten- |
sions to religion, told me, that on being applied to im-
mediately after his election for the usual subscription
to the "Members' Plate," he wrote at once to say that
in his judgment there was no institution which inflicted
greater moral injury on the community than horse-
racing, and that sooner than subscribe a single guinea
to encourage it he would forfeit his seat.
You can
not see the horses run without becoming a party to
the gambling, and to the vices worse than gambling
which races every where encourage; if, so long as the
sport remains, the wickedness associated with it
must remain too, no refinements of casuistry are
necessary to show that the sport is unlawful.

But there are amusements which cannot be called

immoral either in themselves or their accessories, about which a good man will have serious doubts. The object of all recreation is to increase our capacity for work, to keep the blood pure, and the brain bright, and the temper kindly and sweet. If any recreation exhausts our strength instead of restoring it, or so absorbs our time as to interfere with the graver duties of human life, it must be condemned. How does this principle affect the great English field sport? There are many men to whom hunting is the best possible exercise; one day out of seven after the hounds doubles their energy during the remaining six. Putting aside questions which belong to economy rather than to ethics-questions about the injury that hunting inflicts on the land there seems to be no good reason why such men should not hunt. The horses like the sport; the dogs like it; and as for the fox, he lives such a roguish life that I think he may be sacrificed with an easy conscience for the general good. But if a man must hunt three days a week all through the season, instead of one; if half of his waking life during a great part of the year must be spent on horseback in the field, he is surely forgetting the very object of recreation. Now it is hardly possible to maintain a great hunting establishment like the famous one at Tedworth, for instance, without making hunting one of the supreme objects of existence; and, with all respect for enthusiasm, whatever grotesque form it may assume, it is rather hard to accept the faith of one of the late Mr. Assheton Smith's dependents, that "the noblest of hall hoccupations is keeping dogs." If any one can hunt a single day a week, and so keep himself in better condition for his work in the House of Commons, the manufactory, the counting-house, or the study, no one has a right to blame him; but when a man begins to keep hunters, it seems hard to practise moderation. Nor should Richard Baxter's sixteenth test to determine the lawfulness of an amusement be forgotten in connection with this recreation-"Too costly recreation also is unlawful: when you are but God's stewards, and must be accountable to Him for all you have, it is sinful to expend it needlessly on sport."

T

t

false, and yet there may be very adequate grounds
for discouraging balls. It is very pleasant to see a
dozen or a score of graceful children, daintily dressed,
dancing on a lawn in summer time, or with the
bright red berries and rich green leaves of the holly
and the pale white misletoe about them on Twelfth
Night, Children were made to dance, as birds were
made to sing. They sleep sounder for it, and wake
up all the fresher the next morning. And if young
men and women find themselves getting chilly on a
snowy winter's day, or if their spirits are very
exuberant, I cannot see why they may not push the
tables aside, and ask some one to sit down at the
piano and play the Lancers. But for people to leave
home deliberately at ten o'clock at night, with the
intention of dancing for three or four hours, appears to
me to be a violation of all the laws and principles which
should determine the choice of our pleasures. There
is something, too, absolutely grotesque in it. At six
o'clock in the evening a grown-up woman goes to her
dressing-room, spends three or four hours in array-
ing herself in gorgeous or beautiful raiment, in clouds
of lace or in shining silk; at nine or ten, perhaps at
eleven, her carriage comes to the door, and she is
driven off, it may be through hail, or snow, or
rain, to a room which soon becomes intolerably hot;
and there, in the middle of the night, with four
or five score, or four or five hundred people, she
spends her time in graceful gymnastics, Gym-
nastics at midnight! Gymnastics in a crowd!
Gymnastics in tarletan! Gymnastics
8 for matrons
of five-and-forty, and solemn serious-looking gentle-
men of fifty.

But it is not the gymnastics for which the throng assembles. It is for social intercourse. Well, are the conditions and circumstances favourable to social intercourse of a really pleasant and healthy kind If we must meet our neighbours, is this rational way of meeting with them? If young gentlemen and young ladies must come to know each other, is a ball-room, with its heat, and excitement, and flirtation, the most desirable place for bringing them together? If we were savages still, dancing with each other might probably be the best possible way of Amusements are objectionable which interfere with spending our time together; but to say that civilised, regular and orderly habits of life, and which, instead educated people are not able to do something better of increasing health and vigour, produce weariness than this, is a grim irony on the last and highest reand exhaustion. What time do young ladies break-sults of our national culture. I got tedt fast the day after a ball? How do young gentlemen I have spoken, only of balls which are free from feel at eight or nine o'clock on Friday morning, who obvious moral objection. It is hardly, necessary to were dancing till a couple of hours after midnight on remind the readers of Good Words that in all Thursday? Dancing itself need not be wrong; and large commercial and manufacturing towns, there are the sweeping moral objections to it which have public rooms for dancing, much frequented by assissometimes been urged from the pulpit are unpardon- tants in shops, both young men and women, dy able insults to thousands of women who are as pure-clerks, by milliners, by girls employed in factories, minded as any in the country. There may be some dances which good taste and delicate moral feeling disapprove, but so long as high-minded English ladies find pleasure in the ball-room, no one shall persuade me that the offensive and indiscriminate charges which have been recklessly flung out against dancing have any truth in them. But these charges may be all

which have been the moral ruin of thousands.

our

Perhaps of all amusements, the theatre involves | the most intricate and perplexing questions for any one who wishes to do right. That for the last two hundred years there should have been a storn and deep antagonism to dramatic representations, among

carnestly religious people, 'need excite no surprise. The plays which were acted before Charles II. and the aristocracy of the Restoration, and which retained their popularity for many a long year after the last of the Stuarts had become an exile, are a sufficient explanation of the horror with which, at least in evangelical families, the stage has been universally regarded. But it is urged that all plays are not immoral. Dramatic genius-the very highest form of genius, perhaps, belonging to the province of pure literature-need not stain its glory by pandering to the most corrupt passions of corrupt men. Well, let the play be unexceptionable; purify the theatre from all the evil accessories which cling to it in this country and in the great cities of continental Europe, but from which, if I mistake not, it is perfectly free in the smaller cities of Germany; what shall we say then? Would it still be a sin to laugh at Lord Dundreary? Would it still be a crime to weep over the sorrows of Ophelia? and to be moved more deeply still by the desolation which comes upon the pride and splendour of Wolsey? To sedentary, careworn men, a brilliant light comedy is almost as refreshing as a day on Snowdon or Helvellyn; must conscience forbid them the most exhilarating recreation within their reach?

sence will cause the evil to disappear. For themselves, indeed, there may be no serious danger. Our presence with them may shield them from all contact with what would harm them. They may be as safe in their box from the men and women, from whose lightest touch we should wish them to recoil, as when they are in our own drawing-rooms. But if they go, hundreds and thousands more will go who have no parental shelter, and whose purse keeps them in the gallery or the pit. Are these young men and women exposed to no perils? Moreover, if report does not greatly deceive me, there are still plays acted on the English stage whose moral tendencies can hardly be approved by a sensitive conscience. Such plays, it is alleged, would disappear if the better class of society attended the theatre in large numbers. Perhaps they would; meanwhile, I do not choose to recommend my friends to sit down to a table where they are likely to find poisoned dishes, with the hope that by-and-by their influence will lead to the production of better fare. 13

"

There is another consideration which appears to deserve great weight, though it would take too much space fully to develop it. How does it happen that actors and actresses have so often been persons of questionable character? I am infinitely far from thinking that there have not been, that there are not now, men and women on the stage of whom it would be an atrocious slander to whisper or to insinuate an injurious suspicion. Not merely the distinguished names of Kemble, Macready, Young, Siddons, Faucit, refute the libels which are sometimes uttered against their profession; there are many less illustrious instances of honour unstained and virtue untainted by the perils and excitements which beset the actor's life. But are not those perils very serious and grave? They may defy analysis, but do they not exist? Should we honour with such warmth of admiration those who do not fall, if experience had not proved how hard it is to stand? We do injustice to those whose lives are blameless, if we think that their blamelessness is no proof of exceptional moral

The question is not so simple as it looks. There are people of quick moral sensibility and vigorous good sense, who argue that original dramatic genius is a divine gift, and that dramas, from their very nature, should be seen, not read; that the powers necessary to a great actor are divine gifts too, and that it cannot be wrong to derive enjoyment from witnessing their exercise; that the craving for the kind of excitement which is produced by seeing a good play well acted is as natural, and therefore as innocent, as hunger and thirst; that for good people to condemn amusements which satisfy a universal and harmless instinct, is to engage in a perilous contest with the very constitution of human nature, and must issue in most lamentable results; that the accidental evils now connected with the theatre would never have existed, or would long ago have disap-strength. Now, if any amusement involves grave peared, had religious people not given up all control of the stage, so that their alleged mistake has actually created, or at least perpetuated, all that is morally perilous in the actual condition of the institution; that the real alternative presented to the practical wisdom of those who are anxious to promote the morality of the community, is not, whether theatrical representations shall continue to exist or not for while men continue to be what God made them, the passion for the drama will be inextinguishable but whether theatrical representations shall be separated and cleansed from the associations which now make the theatre the haunt of vice, and the very centre of all the corruption that curses and disgraces great cities,

But, after all, we have to take things as they stand. It is not our duty to send our sons and daughters into a region of moral evil, with the hope that in the course of a generation or two their pre

moral danger to those who provide it, a good man will shrink from it; just as a gentle, kindly man shrinks from witnessing feats of skill which imperil the lives or the limbs of the performers.

What the theatre may be in the next century or the century after that, we cannot tell. It is hard to think that the genius of great dramatists will disappear when the moral condition of society shall have been regenerated by the influence of the Christian faith, or that the noble physical gifts and intellectual susceptibilities of great actors will then have a place only in the history of the darker times of the human race. It may then be found that a profession which appears to be singularly perilous to those who enter it, has been perilous only from the circumstances with which it has been accidentally connected, and that the neighbourhood of a theatre may be as decont and respectable as the neighbourhood of a church. Mean. while, it is at least safer to deny ourselves the plea

sant excitement which the stage, and the stage alone, can give, rather than incur the responsibility of encouraging the evils which have so long been associated with its fascinations.

man will find himself ill at ease in many circumstances in which the purest and most upright of his friends, who is destitute of religious earnestness, will be conscious of no discomfort. Excitements and pleasures may be morally harmless, and may yet be dis

"recollections" and unbroken communion with God. Saintly men do not impose as duties on others the exercises which they know are essential to the intensity and depth of their own devotional life; nor should they impose as a duty on others abstinence from certain pleasures which have become distasteful to their own spiritual instincts, or which spiritual prudence leads them to avoid. Let it be granted that a man who is trying to be earnestly religious will shrink from some of the amusements in which no one can discover any moral evil, does it follow that he is at liberty to require his children to avoid these amusements too? By no means. He rightly thinks it to be his own duty to spend a couple of hours every morning in reading the Holy Scriptures, and meditating on the glory of God, but he does not insist upon all his children doing the same. He knows that the protracted religious solitude which to him, with his religious intensity, is blessedness and strength, would be to them an injurious formality. Can he not see that the very same principle should restrain him from enforcing on them abstinence from pleasures which, not his moral sense, but the sympathies and exigencies of his spiritual life alone, have led him to renounce ?

I have discussed the questions raised in this paper solely on moral grounds; and I have done this inten-covered by experience to be unfavourable to spiritual tionally. The common reason alleged for condemning certain amusements in which no moral evil can be shown to exist, is that they are "worldly." But there is no word in our language which is more abused than this. The sin of worldliness is a very grave one; but thousands and tens of thousands of people are guilty of it, who are most vigorous in maintaining the narrowest traditions they have received from their fathers. One would imagine, from the habits of speech common in some sections of religious society, that worldliness has to do only with our pleasures, while in truth it has to do with the whole spirit and temper of our life. To be "worldly" is to permit the higher laws to which we owe allegiance, the glories and terrors of that invisible universe which is revealed to faith, our transcendent relations to the Father of spirits through Christ Jesus our Lord, to be overborne by inferior interests, and by the opinions and practices of those in whom the life of God does not dwell. There is a worldliness of the counting-house as fatal to the true health and energy of the soul, as the worldliness of the ballroom; and there are more people whose loyalty to Christ is ruined by covetousness than by love of pleasure. There is a worldliness in the conduct of ecclesiastical affairs quite as likely to extinguish the divine fire which should burn in the church, as the worldliness which revcals itself in the frivolity of those unhappy people whose existence is spent in one ceaseless round of gaiety. There is a worldliness in politics-an oblivion of what God has revealed concerning the brotherhood of mankind, and the social and national duties which arise from the common relationship of all men and all nations to Him-quite as hostile to the manifestation of the Kingdom of Heaven in human society, as the worldliness which openly defies the real or conventional distinctions which churches have drawn between lawful and forbidden, amusements. Let no man think that he ceases to be worldly-ceases, that is, to belong to that darker and inferior region of life from which Christ came to deliver us-merely by abstaining from half a dozen of his old recreations. Not thus easily is the great victory won which is possible only to a vigorous and invincible Faith. Not thus artificial are the boundaries between the heavenly commonwealth, of which the spiritual man is a citizen, and the kingdom of evil from which he has escaped.

But let it be granted that certain amusements are really "worldly," and it is still important to remind sincerely religious persons, that they have no right to condemn as morally wrong amusements which are simply distasteful to the higher instincts of their own nature; nor must they translate into moral precepts, for the guidance of their families and dependents, the higher laws of their spiritual life. A very devout

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Incomplete as this discussion of a very wide subject must necessarily be, it would be unpardonably defective if I did not, in closing, remind my readers that our Lord's precept, "Judge not," has peculiar authority in relation to such questions as have been treated in this paper. There are amusements which are ruinous to some people, which others can enjoy without danger. When the infallible, guidance of great moral laws fails us, and we have to trust to the suggestions of expediency, we should be very cautious || how we condemn the habits of our neighbours. 肆 That may be safe to them which is perilous to us. If it is not intrinsically wrong we have no right to censure them. It may be a sin to me to eat roast veal, because it injures my health and unfits me for duty; but all men are not to avoid the luscious dish because one man suffers from it. Are the weak always to give laws to the strong? Must Professor Tyndall never ascend Monte Rosa because my head is weak and my footing uncertain? No doubt the strong will sometimes avoid what they know to be lawful for themselves, that their weaker brethren may not be betrayed into sin; but there are limits to this selfabnegation. Weakness is a bad thing; and if a constant homage to it tends to make me and others weak too, I may think it right, for the sake of my own moral vigour and for the sake of the moral vigour of those who are in danger of becoming morbidly scrupulous, to live the bolder and freer life, which my own conscience approves. The sick room is good for