The L'Anse sentinel. (L'Anse, L.S., Mich.) 18??-current, 1898-07-02

Our religion is bright angel
feet bright, eyes bright, wings
bright, taking her place in the soul.
skies and sets all the bells of Heaven
a-chiming. There are some persons
who. when talking to a minister, al
ways feel 1t 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 pollutingp 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 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, l
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 its 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
I, rose, they will submit 1t 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
soutin 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
helmsnan; 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
| 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 a 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 a thousand dollars.
But how many properties have been
riddled by costly amusements? 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
Ego shopping" have their counterpart
in uneducated children, bankruptcies
that shock the money market and APP
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
their old mothers heart. When men
go into amusements that they can
not afford, they first borrow what
they can not earn. and then they
steal what they can not borrow.
First they go into embarrassment
and then into theft, and when a man
gets as far as that he does not stop
short of the penitentiary. There is
not prison in the land where there
are not victims of unsanctified amuse-
ments. How often 1 have had parents
come to me and ask me to go and beg
their boy off from the consequence of