PLEA FOR AMUSEMENT.

SERMON

BY

O. B. FROTHINGHAM,

PREACHED IN

LYRIC HALL,

SIXTH AVENUE, BETWEEN FORTY-FIRST AND FORTY SECOND STREETS,

January 18th, 1874.

NEW YORK:

D. G. FRANCIS, 17 ASTOR PLACE

mith-18 Oct.

A PLEA FOR AMUSEMENT.

I take as the subject of my discourse this morning -Amusements. I would make a plea for amusements. I have searched the Bible in vain for a text to introduce it. There is none that meets the case. The Bible is not a book of sports. It was written with other aims, and in other interests, by men who were concerned with priestly institutions and the lofty interior states of the mind. That amusement is not commended there no more reflects on the value of amusement than to have no mention there reflects on science or art. The men of the Old Testament had little leisure for play, and little disposition to laugh. Their work was serious; they were by nature earnest, grave, intense, passionate with a passion for luxury, dominion, splendor, but with tastes uncultivated in the direction of entertainment. Their appetite for pleasurable excitement was fed by their religion. That gave them music, color, scenic display, dramatic incident and variety. The frequent festi

heis, he

vals, the elaborate ritual, the splendid costumes of the priests, the glad processions, the noisy songs, the ringing of harps, the blowing of trumpets, did for them what public amusements do for us, only more successfully and for a greater proportion of the people.

The New Testament men did not care for even so

much diversion as this. They were absorbed in the business of spiritual reform to such a degree that existence seemed too short for the ordinary concerns of life, home duties, household affairs, the interests of society and the state. All time not spent directly for Christ and the world to come was time wasted. they, too, had their recreations in social gatherings and love feasts, where they gave vent to the joyous emotions of their hearts.

Yet

In the Middle Ages, the Church gladdened the desolation of popular existence with the "miracle plays," as they were called, which blended piety with amusement, and served at once the religious purposes of the priests, and the object of lightening life's heavy burdens. The little mountain village of Oberammergau, picturesque in summer, a dream of loveliness during the short season when the grass is green, and the rivulets dance, and the mountains display their endless glories of light and shadow, in the long winter's gloom, with loneliness, cold and poverty, is gladdened by the preparations for the Passion Play, in which all

the villagers join. To practise the music, allot the parts, arrange the tableaux, group the crowds, cut the garments, rehearse the libretto, occupies the long dreary evenings that would be cruelly oppressive without the recreation thus afforded.

The Puritans frowned on amusements as frivolities quite unworthy of people who in their fleeting lifetime must find their eternal salvation. Life was too short and too awful for play. They said of laughter, “it is mad." The most refined entertainments would possibly have been despicable in the sight of men inflamed as they were with zeal for divine things. It was, perhaps, quite true that they discouraged bearbaiting because it amused the people-not because it tormented the bears; for their preachers were perpetually insisting on the brevity of human life, and the sin of wasting one of its precious moments; and no high-minded Henry Bergh had arisen, the saviour of the brute creation, to remind men of their duty to the subject creatures. But their antipathy was fairly justified by the character of the popular amusements of their time. They were brutal and licentious to a degree which we can scarcely imagine. The amuse

ments of the people were ruffianly; the bear-baiting, the cock-pit, the prize-ring: the amusements of the gentry, though more elegant, were even more indecent. Such asthetic art as existed was associated with