o this test. Compare the action of the church upon it, with
the principles so evidently regulating Christ's dealing with evil, and see
whether it gains by the comparison. Is it not true, rather, that the
Christian world has, to a very large extent, acted upon an entirely
opposite principle? It has spent much time in peering into amusements to
see what evil they contained, and has kept digging away at this, instead
of putting Divine grace into them, in simple faith in God, and letting
_that_ at once purge and regulate them. It has been so absorbed in
ferreting out and declaiming against the evil, as to have forgotten
measurably that a corresponding duty lay upon it to develop the good.
Overlooking, or at least slighting the great philosophical truth, that
amusement is as necessary to man as bread, and fixing its gaze upon the
fact that it is capable of perversion, it has most signally failed in the
_regulation_ of popular amusements, and in teaching how to use, without
abusing them. It has withdrawn utterly from many most innocent sources of
pleasure; crying, "come out from among them;" they are not _safe_;
Christians must have nothing to do with them. And with its withdrawal, the
Devil has come in and taken full possession, and their last state is worse
than the first. When the church has touched the subject of amusements, it
has generally done so, I think, in a censorious spirit. It has selected
certain amusements as sinful, and issued decretals and resolutions against
them; it has prescribed penalties against church members who should engage
in them; leaving the question in its broader relations untouched. It has
fenced off this and that corner of the field of recreation, and put up
signs: "_all church members are warned against trespassing on these
grounds, under penalty of the law_," instead of trying to teach Christians
how to avail themselves, with profit and safety, of any part of the field.
We are cut off from Hamlet, and Lear, and Othello and Macbeth. We cannot
avail ourselves of the interpretation of these by the best histrionic
talent, because the theater has been suffered to fall so completely into
the Devil's hands, that a Christian cannot countenance what is good in it,
without at the same time countenancing much that is profane, licentious
and indecent. But if the intelligence and culture of a community endeavor
to apply the principle I have been advocating, and, in the shape of
private theatricals, to furni