VI

PHOEBE’S PERPLEXITY

I

‘PHOEBE DRYDEN wants you in the study, father! She seems dreadfully upset about something or other.’

To the study I accordingly hastened: and, as I had been given to expect, found poor Phoebe very agitated and perturbed. Dressed in a becoming brown costume, she sat in the big study arm-chair, her muff on her lap, her fur thrown lightly about her shoulders, a letter in one hand and her gloves in the other.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ she exclaimed, plaintively, as soon as I was seated. ‘I received this invitation from Katie Milligan yesterday-you know Katie; you remember meeting her at our place on the night of Gerald’s party-and I’ve been in trouble about it ever since. Mother and Hettie think I ought to go; and, really, I don’t know what Katie will think of me if I don’t. But father says that he was never allowed to go to anything of the kind. I showed the invitation to Mr. Bellamy, who takes our Sunday afternoon Bible class; and he says that I certainly ought to decline it. What do you think?’

Poor little Phoebe! As she sat there, the picture of misery, her pretty face turned pleadingly towards me, I felt very sorry for her. I felt sorry, too, for Katie Milligan. She is a nice girl, overflowing with life and merriment; she had made an honest attempt to give Phoebe pleasure; and this was the measure of her success!

What was it, you ask, to which Katie had invited her friend? That, if you please, is Katie’s business!

Did Phoebe accept or decline the invitation? That is Phoebe’s business.

How did I advise her? That is my business!

But the general principles involved? They are everybody’s business. It is with them, therefore, that I propose to deal.

II

Laughter, merriment and fun, were quite evidently intended to occupy a large place in this world. Yet on no subject under the sun has the Church displayed more embarrassment and confusion. One might almost suppose that here we have discovered an important phase of human experience on which Christianity is criminally reticent; a terra incognita which no intrepid prophet had explored; a silent sea upon whose waters no ecclesiastical adventurer had ever burst; a dark and eerie country upon which no sun had ever shone. Dr. Jowett tells us of the devout old Scotsman who, on Saturday night, locked up the piano and unlocked the organ, reversing the process last thing on the Sabbath evening. The piano is the sinner; the organ the saint! Dr. Parker used to wax merry at the man who regarded bagatelle as a gift from heaven, whilst billiards he deemed to be a stepping-stone to perdition. The play we condemn; it is anathema, to us. The same play-or a vastly inferior one-screened on a film we delightedly admire. One Christian follows the round of gaiety with the maddest of the merry; another wears a hair shirt, and starves himself into a skeleton. One treats life as all a frolic; another as all a funeral. We swerve from the Scylla of aestheticism to the Charybdis of asceticism. We swing like a pendulum from the indulgence of the Epicurean to the severities of the Stoic, failing to recognize, with the author of Ecce Homo, that it is the glory of Christianity that, rejecting the absurdities of each, it combines the cardinal excellencies of both. We allow without knowing why we allow we ban without knowing why we prohibit. We

Compound for sins we are inclined to By damning those we have no mind to.

We are at sea without chart or compass. Our theories of pleasure are in hopeless confusion. Is there no definite doctrine of amusement? Is there no philosophy of fun? There must be! And there is!

III

Gideon was the first man to state the doctrine clearly. His army is approaching the valley in which the Arab host lies encamped. The stream separates them from the foe. For aught they know, the reeds and rushes of that stream may be alive with ambushed Midianites. It is an hour for a quick eye and a cood head. But, in that hour, some of the men so far forget their soldierly duties as to lie down, with a fearful abandon, and drink of the stream, rendering their necks an easy prey to a hidden sword. These men Gideon dismissed, taking with him only those who, vigilant and alert, watching as they walk and walking as they watch, dip up water in their hands to refresh and recreate them. The application is obvious. If I dip up my pleasure as I press on, and in order to give me new zest and energy in pressing on, my pleasure is good. I simply enjoy it:

As the rider that rests with the spur on his heel- As the guardsman that sleeps in his corselet, of steel-

But if, on the contrary, my pleasure necessitates a period of abandonment-a distinct interval and parenthesis aside from, and inconsistent with, my main character and duty-then I can only indulge it by hazarding my infidelity, as did Gideon’s men, and I shall be counted unworthy.

There is nothing wrong, I see, about the stream; nor in the men drinking of the stream. Even warriors weary, and must be refreshed. The evil is in the manner and the extent of their indulgence. That is surely what John Bunyan means when he writes of the arbor at the summit of the Hill Difficulty. As a place of rest and refreshment for tired pilgrims, it was as welcome and as providential as Gideon’s stream; but Christian never forgave himself for having slept and lost his roll in the hospice which the Prince of the Pilgrims had provided for his recreation. Vinet says that every enjoyment too much indulged impoverishes us spiritually, and he can understand that it might be said. ‘That armchair has kept in its cushions a portion of my soul!’ That is the doctrine according to Gideon.

IV

David was the second man to state the doctrine clearly. At the risk of their lives three valiant men fought their way through the ranks of the enemy and brought David the water, from the old well at Bethlehem, for which his soul had longed. But when they brought it, the water seemed to turn crimson in the cup. It was like drinking the blood of the men who had hazarded their lives to obtain it. And he poured it out upon the ground. David’s is a somewhat searching test. It clearly concerned a matter of pleasure. It was not a matter of necessity arising from thirst, or any water would have satisfied him. David longed for the water of this particular well. It was a whim, and these men risked their lives to gratify it. And, when they gave it him, the clear water seemed as red as blood before his eyes. He would not drink of it. And all ages have admired his stern refusal. Here, then, is a standard to which I may safely submit my pleasures. I have no right to enjoy a pleasure that can only be had at the risk of another man’s life. That is a principle capable of very wide application. If a proposed pastime will not satisfactorily pass the ordeal of this crucible it is, at any rate, safer to abjure it. Life consists not in self-indulgence, but in self-denial. Balzac has given us the fable of the Magic Skin. He who wore it possessed the power to obtain anything he craved, but, every time he availed himself of that mysterious power, the skin shrank and compressed him, until at length it crushed his very life out. Some particular performances are often very plausibly defended on the ground that they minister to the highest instincts of the aesthetic and the beautiful. But David’s test shows that there is another aspect of the question to be considered before the case is complete. The performance may be the finest fun in the world to the audience; but it may be a tragedy worse than a thousand murders to the performers. And if that be so, the Church has her doctrine clear-cut and imperative. That is the doctrine according to David.

V

Solomon was the third man to state the doctrine clearly. The wise man, who perhaps bought much of his wisdom dearly, puts the case unmistakably. Here it is: ‘Hast thou found honey? Eat so much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith and vomit it.’ First of all, that is to say, make sure you have found honey. It must be not only sweet, but pure, nutritious, natural, wholesome. It must neither injure nor besmirch. Sophronius, according to the old story, had a fair daughter named Eulalia. She came to him one day and asked his permission to visit the gay Lucinda. The father regretfully, but firmly, forbade it.

‘You must think me very weak!’ retorted the daughter petulantly; ‘in what way would it hurt me to go?’

Sophronius picked a dead coal from the hearth and held it towards Eulalia. She hesitated to accept it.

‘Take it, my child,’ he said, ‘it will not burn you!’

‘It may not burn,’ she replied, ‘but it will blacken!’ and, even as she uttered the words, she saw their parabolic significance, the significance which had moved her father to his strange action.

There is a sense in which the pleasures that blacken are worse than the pleasures that burn. A burned hand will not burn the hand that it clasps; but a blackened hand will spread broadcast its defilement.

Pleasure must be recreation, or it fails of its purpose. ‘If,’ said Dr. Arnold, whose religion was of so robust a type that he made a thousand school-boys almost worship him, ‘if your pleasures are such that they prejudice your next day’s duties; if they are such that the main business and interest of life suffer in consequence, they are not pleasures- they are revellings!’ Make sure, says Solomon, that you have found honey. The pathetic aspect of much of our modern pleasure-seeking is that men and women who earn and richly deserve pleasure fail to find it, simply for lack of observing Solomon’s advice. They are, as Cowper would say:

Letting down buckets into empty wells, And growing old with drawing nothing up.

The tragedy of the age is, not that people are getting too much pleasure, but that they are not getting enough. The appetite is jaded; the soul is blasé. The halls of amusement are thronged by eager multitudes in the frantic quest of pleasure; yet it is notorious that a really satisfying delight is only occasionally found there.

It is clear, then, that an application of the doctrine according to Solomon would save men and women from many a fruitless quest. Make sure that you have found honey! And, says the sage, even if you are certain that you have found it, eat only as much as is sufficient for your recreation, ‘lest you be filled therewith and vomit it.’ We are told that, in France, where tons of the loveliest flowers are piled in heaps for the production of perfumeries, the girls engaged in the manufacture suffer from a peculiar disease induced by the volume of fragrance which they perpetually inhale. Even if the pleasure be wholesome and pure, beware of excess. You can have too much even of a good thing. That is the doctrine according to Solomon.

VI

Petronius dreamed a dream. He was chasing Pleasure. He hunted her up hill and down dale, but could not clutch her skirts. He gave up the chase in despair. And lo, as he abandoned it, he saw One approaching him with marks of wounds in His hands and in His feet, and with scars as of thorns on His brow. ‘My ways are ways of pleasantness,’ He said, ‘and all My paths are peace!’ And he took the Stranger’s hand and they walked together. And, as they walked, Pleasure returned and took his other hand, and he found that, by yielding to the persuasions of the Christ, he had obtained the company of Pleasure too. And Petronius awoke, and learned by long and happy experience that the dream that he had dreamed was true.

Boreham, F. W. Wisps of Wildfire. The Abingdon Press, 1924. pp. 70-78.