RECREATION.

RECREATION.

VII.

RECREATION.

PROPOSE to speak to you this evening on what must be a uni

versally interesting subject, "Recreation." Recreation is one of the deepest needs of our nature. Next to self-preservation and the family instincts our two most powerful impulses are towards religion and recreation. The two have been foolishly severed, but they are closely related, for religion, whatever else it is, is the highest form of recreation. Recreation means being born again, and so does religion. It is the imperative mood of our nature, "Ye must be born again;" but with the highest form of recreation, with religion properly speaking, I am not concerned

to-night. I shall use the word recreation in its more ordinary sense of amusement—common bodily and mental refreshment and relaxation.

You all remember the story of the old horse employed in the limekiln. Every day of the week he went round and round all one way; and when the day of rest came he was turned out to grass, and the best thing he found to do was to go round and round the other way, in order to unwind himself. Well, we all want unwinding. A reverse process is needed to recreate or make anew the exhausted tissues of the brain; you rest the brain by working it the other way round. Whatever you have been doing on a week-day, it is advisable to do something else on Sunday. Have you had little time for religion, or social, intellectual, imaginative, or emotional culture, or, let us say, fresh air and bodily exercise? When the time comes, you fly at it, your nature cries out for it; it is the food you want. You have seen animals a little out-of-sorts seek about the hedgerows, in among the long grasses, and find by their instinct the kind of herb that suits them. A similar instinct will guide you to the kind of thing which is good for your mental

and physical health, in the way of wholesome recreation.

268. Next to Religion, Family Life is the best and greatest recreator. No doubt the best rest for a hard-worked man at the end of the day is to go home to his bonnie wife and his bonnie bairns, but that you say is beyond some people's reach. So it is, but it is often owing to their own fault.

A great many more people might enjoy the wholesome recreation of family life if they were a little less bent on catching at every straw of pleasure, wholesome and unwholesome. Perhaps some people don't think of the enormous amount of money that might be saved by a little self-restraint. The fact is, the season when you ought to save is youth; but that is the season when there is least selfrestraint. A young man told me last week that since he had given up his drink he had saved about ten shillings per week; so there he was, making a little income of twenty-five pounds a year out of simply giving up an indulgence he was better without.

I have not come here to advocate total