heir abuse. I can safely tell you some things which God's word will teach
you as to this matter. It will tell you that where you make pleasure the
end and rule of your life, and duty the exception, you are guilty of
abuse. It will tell you that when pleasure saps the fountains of your
health, when it steals away your hours of sleep, and tempts you to
excessive indulgence of appetite at an hour which nature prescribes for
the rest and recuperation of your organs, when it leads you to expose
yourself to sickness by inadequate clothing--it is a gross abuse for which
God will hold you accountable. It will tell you that when any description
of pleasure trenches on the limits of modesty, it is an abuse; that the
public embracing of young men and women in the vile dances of the day, is
an offense against decency, an abomination against which manly nobleness
and maidenly delicacy ought to cry out with all their power. It will tell
you that when pleasure of any kind interferes with your covenant
obligations to the church, and keeps you from the ordinances of God's
house, it is an abuse; a conformity to the world, against which God warns
you in this text.

Come then and give yourselves to Christ, not repelled by any false,
ascetic views of his religion, but believing, as his word entitles you to
believe, that it is the promoter of innocent joy, of healthy and grateful
recreation, of the highest and purest pleasures. Come, and he shall show
you by his own life how to be in the world, yet not of it. How to live in
strictest conformity to duty, and yet be free indeed, and exhibit to the
world a broad, noble, generous Christian life--a life in the spirit and not
in the letter. He shall teach you to live by the insight of love, and not
by the prescriptions of a bare scheme of duty. Oh, that you may grow to
the stature of perfect men and women in Christ; that you may be living
examples of a reasoning service, models of a piety, enthusiastic yet
judicious; all aglow with the love of Christ carried into every detail of
your lives, into your pleasures, your conversation, your business;
bringing everything, great and small, into conformity with the law of
Christ, and making the whole life move sweetly and harmoniously round him.
You will not then be a worldly church. You will not then be stumbling
blocks to the kingdom of Christ. You will be living epistles, read and
known of all men, and they, seeing your good works, shall glorify your
fat