The Necessity of Recreation

Games, gayeties, sports, spectacle, there will be as long as men have limbs, or eyes, or ears. The development here is as natural as it is in the arts.

You might as well talk of extirpating music and painting, as of driving the common amusements out of the world. Now there are abuses of these things. What are we to say of these abuses?

“Let them crush down and destroy the things themselves,” do we say? But they cannot. Then let them be cut off. There is really nothing else to be done. Elevate, refine, purity the public amusements. Let religion recognize and restrain them.

Let it not, as it is too common, drive them to license and extravagance; but let it throw around them its gentle and holy bonds, to make them pure, cheerful, healthful – helpful to the great ends of life. What a blessed thing for the world were it, if its amusements could thus be rescued, redeemed, and brought into the service of its virtue and piety!