Next Part 3 YOUTH WARNED!
Back to YOUTH WARNED!
1. If sensual pleasure be pursued as the object of youthful years—see how it will influence all your PURSUITS. Where young men live in this way, it directs their reading, which is not pious or improving—but light, trifling, and polluting. Inflammatory novels, stimulating romances, lewd poetry, immoral songs, satires against pious characters, and arguments against Scripture and biblical morals—are in general the works consulted by corrupt and wicked youth, and by these they become still more wicked. Never did the press send forth streams of greater pollution than at this time. Authors are to be found, of no small abilities, who pander to every corruption of the youthful bosom. Almost every vice has its high-priest—to burn incense on its altar, and to lead its victims, decked with the garlands of poetry or fiction, to their ruin.
(As for Byron, his exquisite pathos and almost peerless beauty, can make no atonement for his vices, and should have no power to reconcile us to his works. He is, indeed, as he has been styled, the master of a satanic school. Infidelity and immorality never before received such patronage from the poetic muse. Never before was genius seen in closer union with vice. His works are enough to corrupt the morals of a nation, and seem to have been written for the purpose; and he appears to have been stirred up by an evil spirit, to attempt, by his poems that mischief which the wit of Voltaire, the subtleties of Hume, and the popular ribaldry of Paine, had in vain endeavoured to effect. If young men would not be cursed by the infidelity and immorality which lurk within his pages, let them beware how they touch his volumes—as they would a beautiful person infected with the plague.)
2. A love of sinful pleasure will give the tone to your CONVERSATION—which will be vain, loose and unprofitable; if not obscene, filthy and profane. Jests against religion; sneers at the piety of the godly; irreverent and shocking swearing; and a boastful parade of the immoralities they have committed—the females they have seduced, or the revels they have shared in—make up the conversation, I fear, of some circles. Young men, is this the reason why the noble faculty of speech was given to you—that distinction of man from the brute creation; that exquisite vehicle of thought and medium of communication between mind and mind? Can you think of the strains of conversation to which you have often listened, and in which you have often joined, without horror? Could the discourse of a single evening be written down just as it occurred, in all its mindlessness, silliness, obscenity and profanity—and then read over to you; surely, surely, if every spark of shame was not extinguished in your nature, your faces would be covered with blushes, and your soul filled with confusion at the shocking recital.
There is something most disgusting and most horrible, to hear a man boast of the crimes which he has committed, and with bragging, set forth the pains which he has taken to blast the prospects of others—and ruin his own immortal soul. The Scripture makes it a sin even to be proud of good deeds; but to be proud of evil ones is a disposition truly hellish! For young men to study first to excel in deeds of riot and debauchery, and then to proclaim their feats, is to brag who shall be at once most brutalized and most diabolical, and then to be proud of the hellish attainment!
As for swearing, I scarcely know anything which more decidedly proves a depraved heart; since it gratifies no passion and indulges no appetite—but is unmingled wickedness against God. Probably there is nothing which has a more polluting effect on the imagination, or a more hardening influence on the heart—than filthy, obscene, and profane conversation; and the man who can ever listen to it with pleasure must already have become very vile, and is hourly becoming more so!
3. A love of sensual pleasure will, of course, direct young men in the choice of their COMPANIONS; and these will not be the moral and serious—but the thoughtless, the mirthful, and the wicked. Comradeship seems necessary to give zest to vice. There is something cowardly in sin. It does not desire 'solitude' and 'contemplation'. To the sinner's perturbed mind, 'solitude' soon fills the mind with frowning forms; and 'contemplation' is broken by threatening voices. He rushes, therefore, into company to recruit his courage and gratify his lusts; not to persuade himself that he is doing right—but to get rid of the consciousness that he is doing wrong, and drown the clamours of his conscience in the uproar of his companions; at once to be wicked and merry.
Young men, if you determine to live in the gratification of your passions and the indulgence of your sinful appetites, you will soon have associates suited to your taste, and that will never disturb your conscience with the language of warning or reproof. And will these be wicked fools, blaspheming scoffers, apostate people, hardened sinners, degraded sots, dissolute infidels, abandoned prostitutes! Look at the mirthful party. Can you approve it? Are there not moments, when you feel the last dying remains of moral feeling stirring within you in sickening revulsion at such society as this? But even these 'dying, lingering signs of a conscience' which are not quite dead, will soon vanish—and you will yield yourself without a struggle to all the corrupting, damning influence of bad company!
4. The recreations and amusements of young men who live in sinful pursuits are of the same nature as their reading, conversation, and company—polluted and polluting!
The THEATER is generally frequented by them; the theatre, that corrupter of public morals; that school where nothing good and everything bad is learned; that resort of the wicked and school of vice; that broad and flowery avenue to the bottomless pit! Here a young man finds no hindrances to sin, no warnings against wickedness, no mementos of judgment to come! But, on the contrary, everything to inflame his passions, to excite his immoral desires, and to gratify his appetites for vice! The language, the music, and the company, are all adapted to a sensual taste—and calculated to demoralize the mind!
Multitudes of once comparatively innocent and happy youths have to date their ruin for both worlds, from the hour when their feet first trod within the polluted precincts of a theatre. Until then they were ignorant of many of the ways of vice. That fatal night was the dreadful season of their initiation into the 'mysteries of iniquity'! Afterwards they fell from morality and respectability, and continued falling deeper and deeper in vice, until earth, tired of the sickening load of their corruption, heaved them from her lap—and hell, from beneath, moved to gather them at their coming! When, therefore, a young man acquires and gratifies a taste for theatrical representations, I consider his moral character in imminent peril.
It is by no means the author's intention to affirm that all who frequent the theater are wicked people. Far be it from him to prefer an accusation so extensive and unfounded as this. No doubt many amiable and moral people are among the admirers of dramatic representation. That they receive no contamination from the scenes they witness, or the language they hear, is no stronger proof that the stage is not immoral in its tendency and effects, than that there is no contagion in the plague, because some constitutions resist the infection. That people fenced in by every conceivable moral defence and restraint, should escape uninjured, is saying little; but even in their case, I will contend that the mind is not altogether uninjured. Is it possible for an imperfect moral creature (and such are the best of us,) to hear the irreverent swearing, the filthy allusions, the anti-Christian sentiments, which are uttered during the representation of even our purest plays, and hear these for amusement, without some deterioration of mental purity?
And it should be remembered that none but the pure in heart shall see God. But let us think of a young man going alone and unprotected to a theatre, or in the company only of others of his own age, and after having his passions inflamed with all he has seen and heard within, then returning home through the crowds of scantily dressed prostitutes which infest the surrounding areas of every theatre. Is this a school to improve his morals? Yes, the morals of the whorehouse! The advocates of the stage should be candid, and instead of talking about its improving the taste or the morals of the age, should frankly confess (as they cannot be ignorant of it), that it is indeed a very dangerous place for young people—but that it is an amusement of which they themselves are very fond, and that they are determined to enjoy it whatever havoc it may make in the character of others.
If it were admitted that occasionally some one person had been improved by theatrical satires on vice, (though, by the way, to laugh at vice is not the best way of becoming virtuous), will they not confess that for this one case of improvement, a thousand cases of ruin could be found?
Mirthful PARTIES, where eating, drinking, and revelry, are carried on until midnight, or until morning, are another source of ruin! Meetings, not for the interchange of the civilities and courtesies of life, and restrained within due limits of time, sobriety, and expense; not for the feast of reason and the flow of soul; not for the cultivation and enjoyment of friendship—but for the celebration of Bacchanalian orgies! Young men, such meetings unfit you not only for the serious pursuits of godliness—but even for the duties of business. Their expense impoverishes your purse, their influence impairs your health, and their guilt ruins your soul!
Back to YOUTH WARNED!