Philanthropists in prison cells, missionaries to the Fiji
Islanders, people doing rescue work in the worst sections of
great cities, Livingstone in Africa, all these, through zeal,
can work till midnight to save lost men, but the votary of
pleasure will toil on up and down a waxed floor till daylight,
until the head reels and the whole heart is sick. In his
“Confessions” Tolstoi says that for ten years he went from
banquet to banquet, drinking rich wines, feasting, following
his tailor, concocting flatteries, lies, sleeping by day and
dissipating at night, and he adds, “My observation is that
no galley-slave or apostle like Paul has to toil as hard as
a society man and a society woman,” and both have lost their
beauty, their happiness and their health before the life
course is half run. So pleasure makes its disciples become
galley-slaves. But pleasure promised a velvet path, air heavy
with roses, the wine and nectar of Venus and Bacchus. Pleasure
promised perfumed bowers, days of happiness, nights of laughter
and song. But pleasure is a deceiver. (Text.)--N. D.
HILLIS.
(2977)
=Sleeping in Church=--See SELF-BLAME.