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sood andjbad sport. ' R TALMAGE’S SERMON ABOUT THE AMUSEMENTS OF THE HOUR. wh en the * u “ d O,d «**“* 8®““°“ W “ Called Vorth *® Amuee the Wicked of G»«e - «*• Chrtrti»n Who Recreatee Deadly "Good Time.- £p yriaM, XtfonY 10 ™ Press A “°' Washington, June 19.—From an un ggual standpoint Dr. Talmage in this discourse discusses amusements and ap plies tests by which they may be known as good or bad. The text is Judges xvi, 2 5 t “And it came to pass, when their hearts were merry, that they said, Call for Samson, that he may make us sport. And they called for Samson out of the prison house, and he made them sport ’ ’ V There were 8,000 people assembled in the temple of Dagon. They had come to make sport of eyeless Samson. They w ere a ll ready for the entertainment They began td clap and pound, imp'i for the amusement to begin, and they cried: “Fetch him Out! Fetch him on t!’’ Yonder I see the blind old giant coming, led by the hand of a child into the very midst of the temple. At his first appearance there goes up a shout of laughter and derision. The blind old giant pretends he is tired and wants to rest himself against the pillars of the house, so he says to the lad who leads him, “Bring me where the main pillars are. ” The lad does so. Then the strong man puts his hands on one of the pil lars, and, with the mightiest push that mortal ever made, throws himself for ward until the whole house comes down jn thunderous crash, grinding the audi ence like grapes ip a wine press. “And io it came to pass, when their hearts were merry, that they said, Call for Samson, that he may make us sport. And they called for Samson out of the prison house, and he made them sport. ’’ In other words, there are amusements that are destructive and bringdown dis aster and death upon the heads of those who practice them. While they laugh and cheer they die. The 8,000 who per ished that day in Gaza are nothing com pared with the tens of thousands who have been destroyed, body, mind and soul, by bad amusements and by good amusements carried to excess. In my sermons you must have noticed that I have no sympathy with ecclesias tical straitjackets, or with that whole sale denunciation of amusements to which many are pledged. I believe the church of God has made a tremendous mistake in trying to suppress the sport fulness of youth and drive out from men their love of amusement If God ever implanted anything in us, he implanted this desire. But instead of / providing for this demand of our fiature the church of God has for the main part ignored it. As in a riot the mayor plants a battery at the end of the street and has it fired off, so that everything is cut down that happens to stand in the range, the good as well as the bad, so there are men in the church who plant their batteries of condemnation and fire away indiscrimi nately. Everything is condemned. They ' talk as if they would like to have our youth dress in blue uniform, like the children of an orphan asylum, and march down the path of life to the tune of the dead march in "Saul. ** They hate a blue sash, or a rosebud in the hair, or a tasseled gaiter, and think a man almost ready for the lunatic asy lum who utters a conundrum. Young Men’s Christian associations of the country are doing a glorious work. They have fine reading rooms, and all the influences are of the best kind, and are now adding gymnasiums and bowling alleys, where, without any evil surroundings, our young men may get physical as well as spiritual im provement We are dwindling away to a narrow chested, weak armed, feeble voiced race, when God calls us to a work in which he wants physical as well as spiritual athletes. I would to God that the time might soon come when in all our colleges and theological seminaries, as at Princeton, a gymna sium shall be established. We spend seven years of hard study in preparation for the ministry and come out with bronchitis and dyspepsia and liver com plaint, and then crawl up into the pul pit, and the people say, “Doesn’t he look heavenly!** because he looks sickly. Let the church of God direct rather than attempt to suppress the desire for amusement. The best men that the world ever knew have had their sports. William Wilberforce trundled hoop with his children. Martin Luther helped dress the Christmas tree. Ministershave pitched quoits, philanthropists have gone a-skating, prime ministers have, played ball. Our communities are filled with men and women who have in their souls un measured resources for sportfulness and frolic. Show me a man who never , lights up with sportfulness and has no sympathy with the recreations of oth ers, and I will shew you a man who is a stumbling block to the kingdom of God. Such men are caricatures of reli gion. They lead young people to think that a man is good in proportion as he groans and frowns and looks sallow, tod that the height of a man’s Chris tian stature is in proportion to the length of his face. I would trade off 500 «uch men for one bright faced, radiant Christian on whose face are the words, “Rejoice evermore!” Every morning his cheerful face he preaches 50 ser “h^ 8 - I will go further and say that 1 have no confidence in a man who a religion of his gloomy looks. *hst kind of a man always turns out gfr- I would not want him for the treasurer of an orphan asylum. The or ■ Phans would suffer. Among 40 people whom I received “fio the church at one communion there ; only one applicant of whose piety **•B suspicious. He had the longest j “tory to tell, had seen the most visions 1 gave an so wonderful * a * Gie other applicants were dis- couraged. I was not surprised the year after to learn that ho had run off with the funds of the bank with which he was connected. Who is this black angel that you call religion—wings black, feet black, feathers black? Our religion is a bright angel—feet bright, eyes bright, wings bright—taking her place in the soul. She pulls a rope that reaches to the skies and sets all the bells of heaven a-ohiming. There are some persons who, when talking to a minister, always feel it politic to look lugubrious. Go forth, O people, to your lawful amusement! God means you to be happy. But when there are so many sources of innocent pleasure, why tamper with anything that is dangerous and polluting? Why stop our ears to a heaven full of songsters to listen to the hiss of a dragon? Why turn back from the mountain side, all a-bloom with wild flowers and a-dash with the nimble tor rents, and with blistered feet attempt to climb the hot sides of Cotopaxi? Now, all opera houses, theaters, bowl ing alleys, skating rinks and all styles of amusement, good and bad, I put on trial 'today and judge of them by cer tain cardinal principles. First, you may judge of any amusement by its healthful result or by its baneful reac tion. There are people who seem made up of hard facts. They are a combina tion of multiplication tables and statis tics. If you show them an exquisite pic ture, they will begin to discuss the pig ments involved in the coloring; if you show them a beautiful rose, they will submit it to a botanical analysis, which is only the post mortem examination of a flower. They never do anything more than feebly smile. There are no great tides of feeling surging up from the depth of their soul in billow after bil low of reverberating laughter. They seem as if nature had built them by contract and made a bungling job out of it. But, blessed be God, there are people in the world who have bright faces and whose life is a song, an an them, a paean of victory. Even their troubles are like the vines that crawl up the side of a great tower on the top of which the sunlight sits and the soft airs of summer hold perpetual oarnival. They are the people you like to have come to your hpuse; they are the people I like to have come to my house. Now it is these exhilarant and sympathetic and warm hearted people that are most tempted to pernicious amusements. In proportion as a ship is swift it wants a helmsman; in proportion as a horse is gay it wants a strong driver, and these people of ex r überant nature will do well to look at the reaction of all their amusements. If an amusement sends you home at night nervous so you cannot sleep, and you rise in the morning, not because you are slept out, but because your duty drags you from .your slumbprs, you have been where you ought not to have been. There are amusements that send a man next day to his work bloodshot, yawning, stupid, nauseated and they are wrong kinds of amusements. There are entertainments that give a man dis gust with the drudgery of life, with tools because they are not swords, with working aprons because they are not robes, witly'cattle because they are not infuriated bulls of the arena. If any amusement sends you home longing for a life of romance and thrilling adven ture, love that takes poison and shoots itself, moonlight adventures and hair breadth escapes, you may depend upon it that you are the sacrificed victim of unsanctified pleasure. Our recreations are intended to build us up, and if they pull us down as to our moral or as to our you may come to the conclusion that they are obnox ious. Still further, those amusements are wrong which lead into expenditure be yond your means. Money spent in recre ation is not thrown away. It is all folly for us to come from a place of amuse ment feeling that we have wasted our money and time. You may by it have made an investment worth more than the transaction that yielded you SIOO or SI,OOO. But how many properties have been riddled by costly amuse ments? The table has been robbed to pay the club. The champagne has cheated the children’s wardrobe. The carousing party has burned up the boy’s primer. The tablecloth of the corner saloon is in debt to the wife’s faded dress—excursions that in a day make a tour around a whole month’s wages; ladies whose lifetime business it is to "go shopping” have their counterpart in uneducated children, bankruptcies that shocMthe money market and appall the church and that send drunkenness staggering across the riohly figured car pet of the mansion and dashing into the mirror and drowning out the carol of music with the whooping of bloated sons come home to break their old mother’s heart. When men go into amusements that the£ cannot afford, they first borrow what they cannot earn, and then they steal what they cannot borrow. First they go into em barrassment and then into theft, and when a man gets as fy on as that he does not stop short of the penitentiary. There is not a prison in the land where, there are not victims of unsanctified amusements. How often I have had parents come to me and ask me to go and beg their boy off from the conse quence of crimes that he had committed against his employer—the taking of funds out of the employer’s till or the disarrangement of the accounts. Why, he had salary enough to pay all lawful expenditure, but not enough salary to meet his sinful amusements. And again and again I have gone and implored for the young man—sometimes, alas, the petition unavailing! How brightly the path of unrestrain ed amuserSnt opens! The young man says: "Now lam off for a good time. Never mind economy. I’ll get money somehow. What a fine road! What a beautiful day for a ridel Crack the whip, and over the turnpike! Come, boys, fill high your glasses I Drink! Long life, health, plenty of rides just like this!” Hardworking men hear the clatter of the hoofs and look up and say: "Why, I wonder where those fellows get their money from. We have to toil and drudge. They do nothing ” To these gay men life is a thrill and an ex citement. They stare at other people and in turn are stared at The watch chain jingha The cup foams. The cheeks flush. The eyes flash. The mid night hears their guffaw. They swag ger. They jostle decent men off the side walk. They take the name of God in vain. They parody the hymn they learned at their mother’s knee, and to. all pictures of coming disaster they cry out, "Who cares!” and to the counsel of some Christian friend, "Who are you?” Passing along the street some night you hear a shriek in a grogshop, the rattle of the watchman’s club, the rush of the police. What is the matter now? Oh, this reckless young man has been killed in a grogshop fight Carry him home to his father’s house. Parents will come down and wash his wounds and close his eyes in death. They for give him all he ever did, though he can not in silence ask it The prodigal has got home at last Mother will go to her little garden and get the sweetest flow ers and twist them into a chaplet for the silent heart of the wayward boy and push back from the bloated brow the long locks that were once her pride. And the air will be rent with the fa ther’s cry, “Oh; my son, my eon, my poor son; would God I had died for thee, oh, my son, my son!” You may judge of amusements by their effect upon physical health. The need of many good people is physical recuperation. There are Christian men who write hard things against their im mortal souls when there is nothing the matter with them but an incompetent liver. There are Christian people who seem to think that it is a good sign to be poorly, and because Richard Baxter and Robert Hall were invalids they think that by the same sickness they may s come to the same grandeur of char acter. I want to tell Christian people that God will hold you responsible for your invalidism if it is your own fault and when through right exercise and prudence you might be athletic and well. The effect of the body upon the soul you acknowledge. Put a man of mild disposition upon the animal diet of which the Indian partakes, and in a little while his blood will change its chemical proportiona It will become like unto the blood of the lion or the tiger or the bear, while his disposition will change and become fierce, cruel and unrelenting. The body has a pow erful effect upon the soul. There are people whose ideas of heaven are all shut out with clouds of tobacco smoke. There are people who dare to shatter the physical vase in which God jewel of eternity. There are men with great hearts and intellects in bodies worn out by their own neglects. Mag nificent machinery capable of propelling a great Etruria across the Atlantic, yet fastened in a rickety North river pro peller. Physical development which' 1 merely shows itself in a fabulous 'lift ing or in perilous rope walking or in pugilistic encounter excites only our contempt, but we confess to great ad miration for the man who has a great soul in an athletic body, every nerve, muscle and bone of which is consecrated to right uses. Oh, it seems to me out rageous that men through neglect should allow their physical health to go down beyond repair, spending the rest of their life not in some great enterprise for God and the world, but in studying what is the best thing to take for dys pepsia. A ship which ought with all sails set man at his post to be carrying a rich cargo for eternity, em ploying all its men in stopping up leak ages. When you may through some of the popular and healthful recreations of our time work off your spleen and your querulousness and one-half of your physical and mental ailments, do not turn your back from such a grand med icament. Again, judge of the places of amuse ment by the companionship into which they put you. If you belong to an or ganization where you have to associate with the intemperate, with the un clean, with 'the abandoned, however well they may be dressed, in the name of God quit it They will despoil your nature. They will undermine your moral character. They will drop you when you are destroyed. They will not give one cent to support your children when you are dead. They will weep not one tear at your burial They will chuckle over your damnation. But the day comes when the men who have ex erted evil influence upon their fellows will be brought to judgment Scene, the last day. Stage, the rocking earth. En ter dukes, lords, kings, beggars, clowna No sword No tinsel. No crown. For footlights, the kindling flames of a world For orchestra, the trumpets that wake the dead For gallery, the clouds' filled with angel spectators. For applause, the clapping floods of the sea. For curtains, the heavens rolled togeth er as a scroll. For tragedy, the doom of the destroyed For farce, the effort to serve the world and God at the same time. For the last scene of the fifth act, the tramp of nations across the stage—some to the right, others to the left. Again, any amusement that gives you a distaste for domestic life is bad How many bright domestic circles have been broken up by sinful amusements? The father went off, the mother went off, the child went off. There are all aroupd us the fragments of blasted" households. Oh, if you have wandered away, I would like to charm you back by the sound of that one word, "home!” Do you not know that you [gave but little more time to give to domestic welfare? Do you not see, father, that your chil dren are soon to go out into the world and all the influence for good you are to have over them you must have now? Death will break in on your con jugal relations, and alas if you have to stand over the grave of one who perished from your neglect! I saw a wayward husband standing at the deathbed of his Christian wife, and I saw her point to a ring on her finger and heard her say to her husband, "Do you see that ring?” He replied, “ Yea, I see it” "Well*” said the, "do you remember who put it there?” "Yea,” said he, "I put it there.” And all the past seemed to rush upon him. By the memory of that day, when in the pres ence of men and angels you promised to be faithful in joy And sorrow and in sickness and in health; by the memory ts those pleasant hours when you sat to gether in your new house talking of a bright future; by the cradle and the ex cited hour when one life was spared and another given; by that sickbed, when the little one lifted up the hands and called for help and you knew be must die, and he put one arm around each of your necks and brought you very near together in that dying kiss; by the lit tle grave in tho cemetery that yon never thing of without a rush of tears; by the family Bible, where in its stories of heavenly love is the brief but express ive record of births and deaths; by the neglects of the past and by the agonies of the future; by a judgment day when husbands and wives, parents and chil dren, in immortal groups will stand to be caught up in shining array or to shrink down into darkness—by all that, I beg you to give to home your best at • factions. I look in your eyes today, and I ask you the question that Gehazi ask ed of the Shunammite: "Is it well with thee? Is it well with thy husband? Is it well with thy child?” God grant that it may be everlastingly welll Let me say to all young men your style of amusement will decide your eternal destiny. One night I saw a young man at a street corner evidently doubting as to which direction he had better take. He had his hat lifted high enough so you could see he had an in telligent forehead. He had a stout chest; he had a robust development Splendid young man. Cultured young man. Honored young man. Why did he stop there while so many were going np and down? The fact is that every man has a good angel and a bad an gel contending for the mastery of his spirit. And there was a good angel and a bad angel struggling with that young man’s soul at the corner of the street. “Come with me,” said the good an gel, "I will take you home. I will spread my wing over your pathway. I will lovingly escort you all through life. I will bless every cup you drink out of, every couch you rest on, every doorway you enter. I will consecrate your tears when you weep, your sweat when you toil, and at the last .1 will hand over your grave into the hand of the bright angel of a Christian resur rection. In answer to your father’s pe tition and your mother’s prayer I have been sent of the Lord out of heaven to be your guardian spirit Come with me, ” said the good angel in a voice of unearthly symphony. It was music like that which drops from a lute of heaven when a seraph breathes on it. “Na not” mid the bad. angel, “come with me. I have something better to offer. Tho wines I pour ate from chalices of bewitching carousal. The dance Plead is over floor tessellated with unrestrain ed indulgences. There is no God to frown on the temples of sin where I worship. The skies are Italian. The paths I tread are through meadows daisied and primrosed. Come with me.” The young man hesitated ata time when hesitation was ruin, and the bad angel smote the good angel until it departed, spreading wings through the starlight upward and away, until a door flashed open in the sky and forever the wings vanished. That was the turn ing point in that young man’s history, for, the good angel flown, he hesitated no longer, but started on a pathway which is beautiful at the opening, but blasted at the last. The bad angel, leading the way, opened gate after gate, and at each gate tho road became rougher and the sky more lurid, and, what was peculiar, as the gate slammed shut it came to with a jar that indicated that it would never open. Passed each portal, there was a grinding of locks and a shoving of bolts, and the scenery on either side the road changed from- gardens to - deserts, and the June air became a catting De cember blast, and the bright wings of the bad angel turned to sackcloth, and the eyes of light became hollow with hopeless grief, and the fountains, that at the start had tossed wine, poured forth bubbling tears and foaming blood, and on the right side of the read there was a serpent, and the man said to the bad angel, “What is that serpent?” and the answer was, "That is the serpent of stinging remorse. ” On the left side of the road there was a lion, and the man asked the badangel, “What is that lion?” and the answer was, “That is the lion of all devouring despair. ” A vulture flew through the sky, and the man asked the bad angel, “What is that vulture?” and the answer was, "That is the vulture waiting for the carcasses of the slain.” And then the man began to try to pull off of him the folds of‘something that had wound him round and round, and he said to the bad angel, "What is it that twists me in this awful convolwtion?” and the an swer was, "That is the worm that never dies, ” and then.the man said to the bad angel: “What does all this mean? I trusted in what you said at the comer of the street that night. I trusted it all, and why have you thus deceived me?” Then the last deception fell off the charmer, and it* said: "I was sent forth from the pit td destroy ycjr soul. I watched my chance for many a long year. When you hesitated that nightjon the street, I gained my triumph. Now you are here. Ha, ha! You are here Come, now, let us fill these two chalises of fire and drink together to darkness find woe and death. Hail, hail!” Oh, young man, will the good angel sent forth by Christ or the bad angel sent forth by sin get the victory over your soul? Their wings are interlocked this moment above you, contending for your destiny, as above the Apennines eagle and condor fight midsky. This hojr piay decide your destiny. God help you. Tb hesitate is to die. AN OPEN LETTER To MOTHERS. ■ WE ARE ASSERTING IN THE COURTS OUR BIGHT TO THE EXCLUSIVE USE OF THE WORD “CASTORIA,” AND M PITCHER’S CASTORIA,” AS OUR TRADE MARK. J t DR. SAMUEL PITCHER, (f Hyannis, Massachusetts, was the originator of “PITCHER'S CASTORIA,” the same that has borne and does now on bear the facsimile signature of wrapper. This is the original “PITCHER’S CASTORIA, ’’ which has been used in the homes of the Mothers of America for over thirty , 4 J years. LOOK CAREFULLY at the wrapper and see that it is the kind you have always bought J"* On and has the signature of wrap- per. Ho one has authority from me to use my name ex cept The Centaur Company of which Chas. H. Fletcher is President. # * March 8,1897. .p. Do Not Be Deceived. Do not endanger the life of your child by accepting a cheap substitute which some druggist tfrhy offer yc>” (because he makes a few more pennies on it), the in- , gradients of which even he docs not know. “The Kind You Have Always Boughf’ BEARS THE FAC-SIMILE SIGNATURE Or . .... Mb Insist on Having The Kind That Never Failed You. THE CENTAUR COMPANY, TY MURRAY CT REIT. 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