Vilas County news. [volume] (Eagle River, Vilas County, Wis.) 1896-1927, 1898-06-27

visions, and gave an experience SO
wonderful that all the other applicants
were discouraged. was not surprised
the year after to learn that he 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 q bright angel
feet bright. eyes bright, wings
bright, taking her place in the soul.
She pulls rope that reaches to the
skies and sets all the bells of Heaven
a-chiming. There are some persons
who, when talking to minister, al
ways feel it polite to look lugubrious.
Go forth, oh people, to your lawful
amusement. God means you to be hap
Ply. But, when there are so many
sources of innocent pleasure, why tam
per with anything that is dangerous
and polluting? Why stop our ears to a
Heaven full of songsters to listen to
the hiss of dragon? Why turn back
from the mountain-side all abloom
with wild flowers and adash with the
nimble torrents, and with blistered
feet attempt to climb the hot sides of
Cotopaxi?
Now, all opera houses, theaters,
bowling alleys, skating Kinks and all
styles of amusement, good and bad, 1
put on trial to-day and judge of them
by certain cardinal principles. First,
you may judge of any amusement by
its healthful result or by it's baneful
reaction. There are people who seem
made up of hard faces. They are a
combination of multiplication tables
and statistics. If you show them an
exquisite picture they will begin to
discuss the pigments involved in the
coloring; if you show them beautiful
rose, they will submit 1t to botanical
analysis, which is only the post-mortem
examination of 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 billow of reverber.
ating laughter. They seem as if ma
ture had built them by contract and
made bungling job out of it. But,
blessed be to God, there are people in
the world who have bright faces and
whose life is song, an anthem, a
paean of victory. Even their troubles
are like the vines that crawl up the
side of great tower on the top of
which the sunlight sits and the soft
airs of the summer hold perpetual
carnival. They are the people you
like to come to your house; they are
the people [ 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 ship is swift it wants strong
helmsman; in proportion as horse is
gay it wants strong driver; and these
people of exuberant nature will do
well to look at the reaction of all their
amuSements. If an amusement sends
you home at night nervous so you can
not sleep and you rise in the morning,
not because you are slept out,
bat because your duty drags
you from your slumbers, you
have been where you ought not
to have been. There are amuse-
ments that send man next day to
his work bloodshot, yawning, stupid,
nauseated, and they are wrong
kinds of amusements. There
are entertainments that give
a man disgust with the drudgery of
life, with tools because they are not
swords, with working aprons because
they are not robes, with cattle be-
cause they are not Infatuated bulls of
the arena. If any amusement sends
you home longing for life of romance
and thrilling adventure, love that
takes poison and shoots itself, moon
light adventures and hairbreadth es-
capes, you may depend upon it that
you are the sacrificed victim of un-
sanctifed pleasure. Our recreations
are intended to build us up, and if they
pull us down as to our moral or as to
our physical strength, you may come
to the conclusion that they are OBJ
noxiouS.
Still further: Those amusements are
wrong which lead into expenditure be-
yond your means. Money spent IN
recreation is not thrown away. 1t is
all folly for us to come from place of
amusement feeling that we have wasted
our money and time. You may by it
have made an investment worth more
than the transaction which yielded
you hundred or thousand dollars.
But how many properties have been
riddled by costly amuse1nents? The
table has been robbed to pay the club.
The champagne has cheated the
children's wardrobe. The carousing
party has burned up the boys primer
The table-cloth of the corner sa-
loon is in debt to the wife's faded
dress. Excursions that in day make
a tour around whole months wages;
ladies whose lifetime bushes it is to
''go shopping" have their counterpart
in uneducated children, bankruptcies
that shock the money market and ap-
pail the church, and that send drunk
enness staggering across the richly
figured carpet of the mansion and
dashing into the mirror, and drowning
out the carol of music with the whoop-
ing of bloated sons come home to break
II 4