Chapter 34—Useful Occupation Better Than Games
[
Portion of a letter addressed to a college student, written from Napier,
New Zealand, October 2, 1893. Appeared in Notebook Leaflets,
Education, No. 6
]
Educate men and women to bring up their children free from false,
fashionable practices, to teach them to be useful. The daughters should
be educated under the mothers to do useful labor, not merely indoor
labor but out-of- door labor as well. Mothers could also train the sons,
to a certain age, to do useful things indoors and out-of-doors.
There are plenty of necessary, useful things to do in our world that
would make the pleasure-amusement exercise almost wholly unnec-
essary. Brain, bone, and muscle will acquire solidity and strength in
using them to a purpose, doing good hard thinking, and in devising
plans which shall train them [the youth] to develop powers of intellect
and strength of the physical organs, which will be putting into practical
use their God-given talents with which they may glorify God.
This was plainly laid out before our health institution and our
college as the forcible reason why they should be established among
us; but as it was in the days of Noah and Lot, so it is in our time. Men
have sought out many inventions and have widely departed from God’s
purposes and His ways.
[322]
The Danger in Sports
I do not condemn the simple exercise of playing ball; but this, even
in its simplicity, may be overdone. I shrink always from the almost
sure result which follows in the wake of these amusements. It leads to
an outlay of means that should be expended in bringing the light of
truth to souls that are perishing out of Christ. The amusements and
expenditures of means for self-pleasing, which lead on step by step to
self-glorifying, and the educating in these games for pleasure, produce
a love and passion for such things that is not favorable to the perfection
of Christian character.
293