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We are planning on making some changes in our donation structure in 2000, so you might want to email me, hart@pobox.com beforehand. *END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END* Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes. J. M. Judy Introduction by George H. Trever, Ph.D., D.D. The manuscript of This book was not submitted to any publisher, but was put in its present form by JENNINGS & PYE, for a friend of the author. Address. Chicago: Western Methodist Book Concern, 1904. INTRODUCTION. BY GEORGE H. TREVER, PH.D., D.D. Author of Comparative Theology, etc. A BOOK on "Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes" is timely to-day. Such a grouping of subject matter is in itself a commendation. Possibly we have been saying "Don't" quite enough without offering the positive substitute. The "expulsive power of a new affection" is, after all, the mightiest agency in reform. "Thou shalt not" is quite easy to say; but though the house be emptied, swept, and garnished, unless pure angels hasten to occupy the vacated chambers, other spirits worse than the first will soon rush in to befoul them again. The author of these papers, the Rev. J.M. Judy, writes out of a full, warm heart. We know him to be a correct, able preacher of the gospel, and an efficient fisher of men. Having thoroughly prepared himself for his work by courses in Northwestern University and Garrett Biblical Institute, by travel in the South and West of our own country, and by a visitation of the Old World, he has served on the rugged frontier of his Conference, and among foreign populations grappling successfully with some of the most difficult problems in modern Church work. The following articles aroused much interest when delivered to his own people, and must do good wherever read. In style they are clear and vivid; in logical arrangement excellent; glow with sacred fervor, and pulse with honest, eager conviction. We bespeak for them a wide reading, and would especially commend them to the young people of our Epworth Leagues. WHITEWATER, WIS., March 2, 1904. PREFACE. PART I. 6 "QUESTIONABLE Amusements and Worthy Substitutes" is a consideration of the "so-called questionable amusements," and an outlook for those forms of social, domestic, and personal practices which charm the life, secure the present, and build for the future. To take away the bad is good; to give the good is better; but to take away the bad and to give the good in its stead is best of all. This we have tried to do, not in our own strength, but with the conscious presence of the Spirit of God. The spiritual indifference of Christendom to-day as one meets with it in all forms of Christian work has led us to send out this message. "Questionable Amusements," form both a cause and a result of this widespread indifference. An underlying cause of this indifference among those who profess to be followers of Jesus Christ, is lack of conviction for sin, want of positive faith in the fundamental truths of the Scriptures, too little and superficial prayer, and lack of personal, soul-saving work. Is the class-meeting becoming extinct? Is the prayer-meeting lifeless? Is the revival spirit decaying? Is family worship formal, or has it ceased? However some may answer these questions, still we believe that the Church has a warm heart, and that signs of her vigorous life are expressed in her tenacious hold for high moral standards, and in her generous GIVING of money and of men. Our point of view has been that of the person, old or young, regardless of sect, race, party, occupation, or circumstances, who has a life to live, and who wants to make the most out of it for himself and for his fellowmen, and who believes that he will find this life disclosed in nature, in history, and in the Word of God. J.M.J. ORFORDVILLE, WIS., March, 1904. CONTENTS PART I. QUESTIONABLE AMUSEMENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. TOBACCO,.................13 II. DRUNKENNESS,................26 III. GAMBLING, CARDS,...............53 IV. DANCING,...................70 V. THEATER-GOING,..............84 PART II WORTHY SUBSTITUTES VI. BOOKS AND READING,.............99 VII. SOCIAL RECREATION,............118 VIII. FRIENDSHIP,.................130 IX. TRAVEL,...................147 X. HOME AND THE HOME-MAKER,.........170 PART I. QUESTIONABLE AMUSEMENTS. PART I. 7 "The excesses of our youth are drafts on our old age, payable about one hundred years after date without interest."--JOHN RUSKIN. I. TOBACCO. Tobacco wastes the body. It is used for the nicotine that is in it. This peculiar ingredient is a poisonous, oily, colorless liquid, and gives to tobacco its odor. This odor and the flavor of tobacco are developed by fermentation in the process of preparation for use. "Poison" is commonly defined as "any substance that when taken into the system acts in an injurious manner, tending to cause death or serious detriment to health." And different poisons are defined as those which act differently upon the human organism. For example, one class, such as nicotine in tobacco, is defined as that which acts as a stimulant or an irritant; while another class, such as opium, acts with a quieting, soothing influence. But the fact is that poison does not act at all upon the human system, but the human system acts upon the poison. In one class of poisons, such as opium, the reason why the system does not arouse itself and try to cast off the poison, is that the nerves become paralyzed so that it can not. And in the case of nicotine in tobacco the nerves are not thus paralyzed, so that they try in every way to cast off the poison. Let the human body represent the house, and the sensitive nerves and the delicate blood vessels the sleeping inmates of that house. Let the Foe Opium come to invade that house and to destroy the inmates, for every poison is a deadly Foe. At the first appearance of this subtle Foe terror is struck into the heart of the inmates, so that they fall back helpless, paralyzed with fear. When the Intruder Tobacco comes, he comes boisterously, rattling the windows and jostling the furniture, so that the inmates of the house set up a life-and-death conflict against him. This is just what happens when tobacco is taken into the human system. Every nerve cries out against it, and every effort is made to resist it. You ask, Will one's body be healthier and live longer without tobacco than with it? We answer, by asking, Will one's home be happier and more prosperous without some deadly Foe continually invading it, or with such a Foe? When the membranes and tissues of the body, with their host of nerves and blood vessels, have to be fighting against some deadly poison in connection with their ordinary work, will they not wear out sooner than if they could be left to do their ordinary work quietly? To illustrate: A particle of tobacco dust no sooner comes into contact with the lining membrane of the nose, than violent sneezing is produced. This is the effort of the besieged nerves and blood vessels to protect themselves. A bit of tobacco taken into the mouth causes salivation because the salivary glands recognize the enemy and yield an increased flow of their precious fluid to wash him away. Taken into the stomach unaccustomed to its presence, and it produces violent vomiting. The whole lining membrane of that much- abused organ rebels against such an Intruder, and tries to eject him. Tobacco dust and smoke taken into the lungs at once excretes a mucous- like fluid in the mouth, throat, windpipe, bronchial tubes, and in the lungs themselves. Excretions such as this mean a violent wasting away of vitality and power. Taken in large quantities into the stomach, tobacco not only causes an excretion of mucus from the mouth, throat, and breathing organs, but it produces an overtaxing of the liver; that is, this organ overworks in order to counteract the presence of the poison. But one asks, If tobacco is so injurious, why is it used with such apparent pleasure? A small quantity of tobacco received into the system by smoking, chewing, or snuffing is carried through the circulation to the skin, lungs, liver, kidneys, and to all the organs of the body, by which it is moderately resisted. The result is a gentle excitement of all these organs. They are in a state of morbid activity. And as sensibility depends upon vital action of the bodily organisms, there is necessarily produced a degree of sense gratification or pleasure. The reason why these sensations are pleasurable instead of painful is, in this state of moderate excitement the circulation is materially increased without being materially unbalanced. But as with every sense indulgence, when the craving for increased doses becomes satisfied, when larger doses are taken the circulation becomes unbalanced, vital resistance centers in one point, congestion occurs, then the sensation becomes one of pain instead of one of pleasure. This disturbance or excitement caused by tobacco is nothing more nor less than disease. For it is abnormal action, and abnormal action is fever, and fever is disease. It is state on good authority, "that no one who smokes tobacco before the bodily powers are developed ever makes a strong, vigorous man." Dr. H. Gibbons says: "Tobacco impairs digestion, poisons the blood, depresses the vital powers, causes the limbs to tremble, and weakens and otherwise disorders the heart." It is conceded by the PART I. 8 medical profession that tobacco causes cancer of the tongue and lips, dimness of vision, deafness, dyspepsia, bronchitis, consumption, heart palpitation, spinal weakness, chronic tonsilitis, paralysis, impotency, apoplexy, and insanity. It is held by some men that tobacco aids digestion. Dr. McAllister, of Utica, New York, says that it "weakens the organs of Digestion and assimilation, and at length plunges one into all the horrors of dyspepsia." *Tobacco dulls the mind.* It does this not only by wasting the body, the physical basis of the mind, but it does it through habits of intellectual idleness, which the user of tobacco naturally forms. Whoever heard of a first-class loafer who did not e-a-t the weed or burn it, or both? On the rail train recently we were compelled to ride for an hour in the smoking-car, which Dr. Talmage has called "the nastiest place in Christendom." In front of me sat a young man, drawing and puffing away at a cigar, polluting the entire region about him. In the short hour enough time was lost by that young man to have carefully read ten pages of the best standard literature. All this we observed by an occasional glance from the delightful volume in our own hands. The ordinary user of tobacco has little taste for reading, little passion for knowledge, and superficial habits of continued reasoning. His leisure moments are absorbed in the sense-gratification of the weed. But if as much attention had been given in acquiring the habit of reading as had been given in learning the use of tobacco, the most valuable of all habits would take the place of one of the most useless of all habits. When we see a person trying to read with a cigar or a pipe in his mouth, Knowing that nine-tenths of his real consciousness is given to his smoking, and one-tenth to what he is reading, we are reminded of the commercial traveler who "wanted to make the show of a library at home, so he wrote to a book merchant in London, saying: "Send me six feet of theology, and about as much metaphysics, and near a yard of civil law in old folio." Not a sentimentalist, a reformer, nor a crank, but Dr. James Copeland says: "Tobacco weakens the nervous powers, favors a dreamy, imaginative, and imbecile state of mind, produces indolence and incapacity for manly or continuous exertion, and sinks its votary into a state of careless inactivity and selfish enjoyment of vice." Professor L. H. Gause writes: "The intellect becomes duller and duller, until at last it is painful to make any intellectual effort, and we sink into a sensuous or sensual animal. Any one who would retain a clear mind, sound lungs, undisturbed heart, or healthy stomach, must not smoke or chew the poisonous plant." It is commonly known that in a number of American and foreign colleges, by actual testing, the non-user of tobacco is superior in mental vigor and scholarship to the user of it. In view of this fact, our Government will not allow the use of tobacco at West Point or at Annapolis. And in the examinations in the naval academy a large percentage of those who fail to pass, fail because of the evil effects of smoking. Tobacco drains the pocketbook. "Will you please look through my mouth and nose?" asked a young man once of a New York physician. The man of medicine did so, and reported nothing there. "Strange! Look again. Why, sir, I have blown ten thousand dollars--a great tobacco plantation and a score of slaves--through that nose." The Partido cigar regularly retails at from twenty-five to thirty cents each. An ordinary smoker will smoke four cigars a day. Three hundred and sixty-five dollars a year, besides his treating. A small fortune every ten years! A neighbor of ours on the farm used to go to town in the spring and buy enough chewing tobacco to last him until after harvest, and flour to last the family for two weeks. Among all classes of people this useless drain of the pocketbook is increasing. In our country last year more money was spent for tobacco than was spent for foreign missions, for the Churches, and for public education, all combined. Our tobacco bill in one year costs our Nation more than our furniture and our boots and shoes; more than our flour and our silk goods; one hundred and forty-five million dollars more than all our printing and publishing; one hundred and thirty-five million dollars more than the sawed lumber of the Nation. Each year France buys of us twenty-nine million pounds of tobacco, Great Britain fifty millions, and Germany sixty-nine million pounds, to say nothing of how much these nations import from other countries. Never before has the use of tobacco been so widespread as to-day. "The Turks and Persians are the greatest smokers in the world. In India all classes and both sexes smoke; in China the practice--perhaps there more ancient--is universal, and girls from the age of eight or nine wear as an appendage to their dress a small silken pocket to hold tobacco and a pipe." Nor can the expense and widespread use of tobacco be defended on the ground that it is a luxury, for the abstainer from tobacco counts it the greater luxury not to use it. The only explanation for its use is, that it is a habit which binds one hand and foot, and from which no person with ordinary will power in his own strength PART I. 9 can free himself. Tobacco blunts the moral nature. It is not certain how long tobacco has been used as a narcotic. Some authorities hold that the smoking of tobacco was an ancient custom among the Chinese. But if this is true, we know that it did not spread among the neighboring nations. When Columbus came to America he found the natives of the West Indies and the American Indian smoking the weed. With the Indian its use has always had a religious and legal significance. Early in the sixteenth century tobacco was introduced into England, later into Spain, and still later, in 1560, into Italy. Used for its medicinal properties at first, soon it came to be used as a luxury. The popes of Italy saw its harm and thundered against it. The priests and sultans of Turkey declared smoking a crime. One sultan made it punishable with death. The pipes of smokers were thrust through their noses in Turkey, and in Russia the noses of smokers were cut off in the earlier part of the seventeenth century. "King James I of England issued a counterblast to tobacco, in which he described its use as a 'custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fumes thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.'" As one contrasts this sentiment with the practice of the present sovereign of England, his breath is almost taken away in his great fall from the sublime to the ridiculous! While we do not believe a moderate use of tobacco for a mature person is necessarily a sin, yet we do believe that it does blunt the moral sense, and soon leads to spiritual weakness and indifference, which are sins. To love God with all one's heart, mind, soul, and strength, and one's neighbor as himself, means not only a denial of that which is questionable in morals, but a practice of that which is positively good. However noble or worthy in character may be some who use tobacco, yet by common consent it is a "tool of the devil." Every den of gamblers, every low-down grogshop, every smoking-car, every public resort and waiting-room departments for men, every rendezvous of rogues, loafers, villains, and tramps is thoroughly saturated with the vile stench of the cuspidor and the poisonous odors of the pipe and cigar. "Rev. Dr. Cox abandoned tobacco after a drunken loafer asked him for a light." Not until then had he seen and felt the disreputable fraternity that existed between the users of tobacco. Owen Meredith gives us a standard of strength and freedom, which is an inspiration to every lover of rounded, perfected manhood and womanhood: "Strong is that man, he only strong, To whose well-ordered will belong, For service and delight, All powers that in the face of wrong Establish right. And free is he, and only he, Who, from his tyrant passions free, By fortune undismayed, Has power within himself to be, By self obeyed. If such a man there be, where'er Beneath the sun and moon he fare, He can not fare amiss; Great nature hath him in her care. Her cause is his." Only let the "will," the "powers," the "freedom," and the "self" of which the writer speaks become the "Christ will," the "Christ powers," the "Christ freedom," and the "Christ self." Then the strongest chains of bondage must fly into flinters. For "if the Son make you free, ye are free indeed." (John viii, 36.) II. DRUNKENNESS. I. A TEMPERANCE PLATFORM. WE bring to you three words of counsel with respect to this subject. First, Beware of the Social Glass; second, Study the Drink Evil; third, Openly oppose it. This is a Temperance Platform upon which every sober, informed, and conscientious person may stand. Would it be narrow or uncharitable to assert that not to stand upon this platform argues that one is not sober, or not informed, or not conscientious? The crying need of PART I. 10 to-day is, that men and women shall be urged into positions of conviction and activity against this most colossal evil of our time. In our country the responsibility for drunkenness rests not with the illiterate, blasphemous, ex-prison convicts who operate the 250,000 saloons of our Nation, nor yet with the 250,000 finished products of the saloon who go down into drunkards' graves every year, but with the sober, respectable, hard-working, voting citizens of our country. Nor does this exempt women, whose opportunity to shape the moral and political convictions of the home is far greater than that of the men. When the women of America say to the saloon, You go! the saloon will have to go. The moral and political measures of any people are easily traceable to the sisters and wives and mothers of that people. You and I and every ordinary citizen of our country had as well try to escape our own shadow, as to try to escape the responsibility that rests upon us for the drunkenness of our people. To help us to do our whole duty in our day and generation in this matter is the purpose of our message. II. BEWARE OF THE SOCIAL GLASS. The first and least thing that one can do to destroy drunkenness, is to be a total abstainer. Beware of the social glass! But quickly one replies, "Why should there be any social glass?" "Why allow sparkling, attractive springs of refreshing poison to issue forth in all of our social centers, and then cry to our sons and daughters, to our brothers and sisters, Beware?" My friend, we must deal with facts as they are. There should not be a social glass; but what has that to do with the fact that the social glass is here? You answer, "Why allow these fountains of death to exist?" while we cry to our loved ones, "Beware!" We do not advocate the presence of these fountains; but while we seek to destroy them beseechingly we cry, "Beware!" The social factor in the liquor traffic is its Gibraltar of defense. Rare is the young man who has the intellectual stamina and moral courage to resist the invitations to take a social drink. And in our frontier and foreign towns many of our bright and respected girls use the social glass. But in its use is the beginning of a fateful end. The subtlest thing in this world is sin. Listen! "Sin is a monster of so frightful mien; To be hated needs but to be seen; But seen too oft, familiar with the face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace." The subtle thing about it is, that the first embracing of any sin seems to be but a trifling, an occasional affair. For one who lives in an ordinary city of a thousand inhabitants or upwards, unless he is an "out-and-out" Christian and selects only associates like himself, it becomes a real Embarrassment not to indulge in a social drink. It seems polite, clever, the kindly thing to do. And the sad fact is, that the majority of unchristian young people and many older ones do not decline. To prove this we have but to look at the human wrecks along the shore. Two young men lived near our home. Their parents were well-to-do. The family grew tired of the farm and moved to town. The boys fell in with bad company. They did not decline the social glass. Soon they furnished other young men with drink from their own pocket. This was fifteen years ago. To-day one of them is a hardened sinner, violent in his passions and blasphemous against God. The other one, having spent a term in our Illinois State University at Champaign, married a beautiful neighbor girl and moved to Missouri. Here he lived off the money of his father's estate, practicing his early-learned habits of drinking, gambling, and loafing. He moved from State to State until, finally left in poverty, he tended bar in a saloon. While visiting with relatives in his old neighborhood a few years ago he stole a watch and some money from his own nephew, and was tried in the courts, and sentenced to the penitentiary for one year. His wife, having carried the burden of disgrace and want through all these years, with the seven unfortunate children were released from him to struggle alone. All this we have seen with our own eyes as the years have come and gone. The downfall and ruin of this young man, and the unsaved fate of his brother, easily may be traceable to the "social glass" and the boon companions of the social glass--tobacco and playing-cards. Last year I met a man who had prided himself in the fact that he could drink or let it alone, and thought that it was all right to take a "social glass" occasionally. Election time came around; he fell in with his friends, and, as one always will do sooner or later who tampers with it at all, went too far. Before he knew it he was as low in the gutter as a beast. It was three days before he was a sober man again. He work had ceased, he had disgusted his fellow-workmen, disgraced his Christian family, and had humiliated himself so that he was ashamed to look