The World's Great Sermons, Volume 04: L. Beecher to Bushnell
Religion
The World's Great Sermons, Volume 04: L. Beecher to Bushnell
Sermons
paltry. It is not such a demonstration of vanity as this that will
force her away from her dear and delightful occupation. The habit
can not so be displaced as to leave nothing but a negative and
cheerless vacancy behind it--tho it may be so supplanted as to be
followed up by another habit of employment, to which the power of
some new affection has constrained her. It is willingly suspended,
for example, on any single evening, should the time that is wont to
be allotted to gaming be required to be spent on the preparations of
an approaching assembly.
The ascendant power of a second affection will do what no
exposition, however forcible, of the folly and worthlessness of the
first, ever could effectuate. And it is the same in the great world.
You never will be able to arrest any of its leading pursuits by a
naked demonstration of their vanity. It is quite in vain to think of
stopping one of these pursuits in any way else but by stimulating
to another. In attempting to bring a worthy man, intent and busied
with the prosecution of his objects, to a dead stand, you have not
merely to encounter the charm which he annexes to these objects,
but you have to encounter the pleasure which he feels in the very
prosecution of them. It is not enough, then, that you dissipate
the charm by your moral and eloquent and affecting exposure of
its illusiveness. You must address to the eye of his mind another
object, with a charm powerful enough to dispossess the first of its
influence, and to engage him in some other prosecution as full of
interest and hope and congenial activity as the former. It is this
which stamps an impotency on all moral and pathetic declamation
about the insignificance of the world. A man will no more consent
to the misery of being without an object, because that object is
a trifle, or of being without a pursuit, because that pursuit
terminates in some frivolous or fugitive acquirement, than he will
voluntarily submit himself to the torture, because that torture
is to be of short duration. If to be without desire and without
exertion altogether is a state of violence and discomfort, then the
present desire, with its correspondent train of exertion, is not to
be got rid of simply by destroying it. It must be by substituting
another desire, and another line or habit of exertion in its place,
and the most effectual way of withdrawing the mind from one object
is not by turning it away upon desolate and unpeopled vacancy, but
by presenting to its regards another object still more alluring.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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