indulgence. Whenever merriment serves by its reaction to depress the mind, and lower it below its ordinary and habitual peacefulness, it is excessive, and has overleaped the limits of Christian propriety and prudence. But further, merriment may destroy happiness when it is drawn from sinful sources. Indulgence in excessive merriment has often ruined the healthy taste for innocent and rational pleasures. The morbid love of excitement craves for its gratification, and sin alone perhaps can give it. For instance, if a man has no pleasure in the sweet affections of home, and wishes for what will make him forget himself in temporary excitement, he will find it in the riotous revelling of the drunkard, in the orgies of yonder public-house, or the wild licence of the throng of reeling men and shameless women, who make the theatre echo with their screams and laughter-scenes fit only for night and darkness, and from which seen in the glare of day even the morality of the world turns away in abhorrence. The love of merriment may become a master feeling, reckless of anything else so long as the merriment can be procured. It is, therefore, a sin in itself, and a nursing mother of sins. It leads to vice by a thousand paths, all alike gay and tempting to the eye, all alike leading down into the pit. Such merriment is but like poison in a sweetened cup, where the sweetness soon passes away from the lips, but the poison enters into the very blood. It is like taking an opiate, lulling the sensations into imaginary bliss for an hour to create both real and imaginary horrors afterwards. Here is the second distinction between the merriment of the wise and the fool. If it be supplied from sin it is the fool's, not the wise man's, pleasure. "There is no peace, saith the Lord, unto the wicked" (Isa. xlviii. 22). Further, merriment is false if it be simply outward, and derived from outward sources. Happiness is inward. Its spring must be in the heart, however much outward things may add to it. So long as the inward happiness and the outward merriment go hand in hand, the one but the expression and result of the other, all may be well. But directly they are separated, and we are merry without being happy, or perhaps the more merry because we are not happy, then all is wrong. Not only has the merriment itself no true life, but it is transient as a shadow, and becomes the source of positive evil. For it enables the mind to forget its real unhappiness, and forgetting it, to neglect the only true means of curing it. It is a kind of sop, a stupefying draught, that helps a man to lay to rest, and forget in the excitement of the moment the causes of abiding sorrow that exist within. The mistake may be made, and often is made, even in temporal things. Men have suffered some great grief, and instead of seeking consolation in Him who is the author of peace and the God of all comfort, and so laying to the heart his blessed teaching that the balm of Gilead may heal the soul's wounds, they try to bear grief by forgetting it in some outward merriment. I have known a case, so strange is human nature, where a man has plunged into fatal sin out of grief for a dead wife. But though this depth may not be reached, the thing itself is equally a folly and a sin. It is a sin because it rejects the lessons God would teach by sorrow, and refuses its Divine and only proper comforter. It is a folly, because it only exasperates the wound. The painful thought recurs only the more painfully for the effort to forget it, and the bleeding sore festers even unto death where, under wiser treatment, the very bones which God has broken might have rejoiced. But if this be true in regard to things of earth, it is still more signally true in regard to things of eternity. Thousands of men try to forget God and their souls, their sins and their Saviour, their death and the judgment beyond, in the mad merriment of the hour. The temporary forgetfulness is broken, meanwhile, by the stings of awakened remorse, and will end in an everlasting woe hereafter. Truly, to be merry is not to be happy. The forced excitement may be but a flimsy veil to hide an endless agony beneath. "Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness" (Prov. xiv. 13). Lastly, it is the merriment of the fool, not of the wise, when it depends upon neglect of Christian hopes and Christian obligations. There. is a certain seriousness and solemnity, a certain reserve and caution even in the innocent merriment of a wise man. He never can forget those great truths in regard to his soul, and God, and eternity, that make up the prominent features of his life. He never can lose sight of his own condition here below as a sinner saved by grace, and as a sworn soldier and servant of the Lord Jesus Christ. He ever acts and ever enjoys himself as one who remembers the transient nature of all our life below, and that it is appointed unto all men once to die, but after death the judgment. His merriment, therefore, must be such as becomes a sinner in a world of temptation, as befits an immortal being in his brief journey to his everlasting home. To suppose that the remembrance of such truths is fatal even to enjoyment, is a great mistake. To forget them is fatal to happiness, to remember them only deepens it. The recollection may indeed chasten and moderate the possible excesses of our merriment, but it will at the same time sweeten and perpetuate it. It will prevent, through the grace of God, our forgetting to be wise as well as merry. It will set us on our guard against sin and its subtle temptations. It will keep alive the dignity of our calling as sons of God and heirs of glory, and so doing will throw fresh brightness over all human pleasures, while we draw our merriment from its true source, and fulfil the Apostle's injunction, "Rejoice in the Lord alway, and again I say, rejoice." |