God, and it makes them symbols of God's deeper benevolence. Nor does the Bible ever condemn play. On the contrary, it represents the streets of the Holy City as filled with playing children. The trouble, then, must have been in the lack of proportion as well as in the lack of a good motive. The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play. This is to say that the two constant movements of life were monopolized by appetite and sport. The Israelites ate to play, and they played to eat. Two things intended to be legitimate portions of life became its illegitimate entirety. Designed to be preludes, eating and drinking and playing became the whole program. Life consisted in the satisfaction of two ranges of desire. The demand of Moses and Paul was not that eating and drinking and playing should be abolished, but that they should be pushed back into their just proportions as worthy departments of living. The glutton of food and the glutton of play are both condemned by the Bible. There are those who say that one of the crying evils of our own day is that the people are appetite-mad and pleasure-mad. Probably some men in every age have brought this charge against their time; and the charge is true as applied to some persons in each period. For such the Bible has its repeated warning. They who are lovers of pleasure more than of God fall under condemnation. Mankind has never long admired the eaters and players of history. If it remembers Beau Brummel and Beau Nash at all, it enrolls them in its lists of ridicule. An epitaph which recorded that "He ate much of the time and played the rest of the time," would not serve to enroll a man among the earth's heroes! The Bible and humanity are against the unbalanced devotees of the table and the parlor and the field of sports. But the Bible and humanity unite again in their estimate of the other extreme. The mere ascetic secures curiosity rather than admiration. He has not learned how to follow Him who often went to feasts and who sat down with his friends at the supper which they gave him at Bethany. It is said of him that "he was anointed with the oil of joy above his fellows." Jesus entered into the normal joys of life. He came eating and drinking, until his enemies seized upon his conduct and exaggerated it into a charge against him. He was present at weddings where joy reigned supreme. In all his teaching and by all his example he never proved himself an enemy to the normal pleasures of life. This particular emphasis is occasionally needed. It may not have as large a mission as has the warning against overdone appetite and play; but it has its message to that smaller circle of the deceived who would drive joy from the world in the name of Christ. One of the hymns declares: The brightest things below the sky Yield but a flattering light; We should suspect some danger nigh Where we possess delight.