| Week-Day Religion |
Chapter 25 |
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Wherever this conception prevails it gives its lovely color, its sunny brightness, to the lives of those who love and worship Christ. It unbinds the iron fetters of ascetic piety. It does not make men boisterous. It tames wild nature. It represses excessive levity. It makes life earnest and serious, charging it with a deep consciousness of responsibility. But it does not restrain the innocent play of nature. It does not put out the light of joy. There is no inconsistency between holiness and laughter. It is no sin to smile. Indeed, a sombre religion is unnatural. Gloom is morbidness. Our lives should be sunny and songful. The type of religion in the New Testament is joyous even amid sorrows. There is not a tinge of ascetic severity or misanthropic hardness in one of the saints whose pictures are preserved. We hear songs in the night. There is a flower that is most fragrant when the sun has set, and in the darkness pours its richest aroma on the air. So true religion grows in sweetness as shadows deepen. He misrepresents Christianity and the likeness of the Master whose piety is cold, rigid, colorless, joyless, or who frowns upon innocent gladness and pure pleasure.
True Christlike piety does not, therefore, condemn all amusements. It does not look with disapproval upon the sports of the children or call youth’s glad heartedness sinful. There are proper amusements in which the truest Christian may indulge without grieving Christ, even enjoying his gracious benediction and conscious of his presence. It is not my intention to designate specifically what amusements are proper for a Christian, or to do more than lay down certain general principles relation to the subject. This is all that the Scriptures do, leaving the responsibility of discrimination upon the individual conscience.
The necessity for amusement and recreation is written in our nature. No man or woman can endure the incessant strain of hard and intense life, day after day, month after month, without some relaxation. God ordained sleep, the Sabbath and home as quiet resting places in which we may pause and build up what toil and care and struggle have torn down. And we need, not rest only, but pleasure also, to unbind for a little the stiff harness of duty, to relax the strain of responsibility and to lubricate the joints of life. All work and no play make older people, as well as Jack dull. One that reads Luther’s private and home life, and sees how he could laugh and how he played with his children even when carrying the greatest burdens, learns where he found much of the inspiration for his gigantic toils and stern and Herculean tasks.
It is necessary for all earnest and busy people to have seasons of relaxation and diversion. But to what extent may we indulge? Life has its duties and responsibilities, and these we must never neglect. If we must give account for every idle word we speak, must we not also for every idle moment, and for every moment wasted in pleasure? How far, then, are we at liberty to spend time in amusement or relaxation? Clearly, only so far as it is needed to give us required rest and to fit us for the most efficient work. It is right to sleep; but when we give more time to sleep than is necessary to restore tired Nature, to “knit up the raveled sleeve of care,” and to fit us for the duty, we become squanderers of precious time. The same principle must be applied to time spent in any kind of relaxing pleasure however innocent. Life is not play. It is very serious. It has its responsibilities and duties, which press at every point and fill every day and hour. He who would succeed in the exciting life of today cannot afford to lose a moment. Every hour must be made to count. And he who would fill up the measure of responsibility implied in consecration to God must redeem the time. Amusements are lawful, therefore, only so far as they are necessary to reinvigorate life’s wasted energies, or to put fresh buoyancy and elasticity into powers wearied or worn by the strain of physical or mental toil.
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