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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 74

Pleasure the Christian's Only Motive ?

Pleasure the Christian's Only Motive ?

Destroyed! Why, the consideration which is supposed to does it forms the very basis of our appeal. How could we urge upon Christian, as Christian, the abandonment of what was to [unclear: him] poison? What Christian merit could there be in a self-denial [unclear: with] page 15 declined the painful only while cleaving to the pleasant ? "Do not even the publicans the same?" Instead of pleading the supposed harm-lessness of moderate indulgence as an excuse for its continuance, Mr. Hutton and Mr. Balfour ought rather to rejoice that, as followers of Christ, they have such an opportunity of imitating his love by sacrificing their own pleasure for his sake and for the sake of those objects of his love to the source of that pleasure is the source of "much misery, much much crime." Or have nineteen centuries of Christianity really brought us to this—that, as Carlyle said of the French Eevolution that "in the wreck of human dubitations this remains indubitable that Pleasure is pleasant," so now we must confess that amid all the certainties Christian's creed, amid all the hopes and aspirations that centre Rock of Ages, the pleasantness of pleasure remains the surest and potent certainty of all? When we sing in that beautiful hymn which Matthew Arnold considered to be the finest in our language :—

Were the whole realm of nature mine,

That were an offering far too small—

[unclear: do] we mean anything of what we say ? Or do we merely mean that we are only prepared to sacrifice what we shall never miss ? In the name of con-sistency if not in the name of Christ, for decency's sake if from no higher motive are we not bound to banish such lying rhetoric altogether, or else to mend our ways? to revise our Bibles, or else to revise our practice? With Christ's own words I will not tamper, but let us amend a text of Paul to show where it is we stand:—"And now abideth faith, hope, charity, Appetite, these four; but the greatest of these is Appetite."