Unearned Pleasures

“The motive of most forms of sin is the desire to make a short cut to happiness. Temptation promises pleasure without the effort of earning it.”

With this observation, previously cited, David Starr Jordan suggests some supposed “short cuts”⎯including indolence⎯that people are tempted to take in an effort to “secure the pleasures of rest without the effort that justifies [it].”

He then mentions gambling, “the desire to get money without earning it.” But more insidious, he says, “is the search for the unearned pleasures of love, without love’s duties, or love’s responsibilities. . . . Just as honest love is the most powerful influence for good that can enter into man’s life, so is love’s counterfeit the most disintegrating.”

He further says that there is real meaning behind the conventions of society and that the man “who tries to lead a double life is either a neurotic freak or the prince of fools . . . That society is so severe it its condemnation of the double life is an expression of the bitterness of its own experience . . . The equal marriage demands equal purity of heart and equal chastity of intention. . . . >Even the angels,’ Emerson says, >must respect the properties.’ [And] the basis of the properties . . . is that no man should shrink from the cost of what he desires . . . To [partake] . . . of love, in pure selfishness, without an atom of altruistic responsibility is . . . to poison . . . life . . . The strongest forces of human life are not subjects for idle play. The real heart and soul of a man are measured by the truth he shows to woman.”

Another forthright source has this to say: “The one great truth . . . is . . . that what a man sows that shall he also reap . . . No [one] can touch sin without defilement . . . whatever . . . the philosophic point of view . . .” For everyone “there is still the ultimate choice between purity and impurity, between truth and falsehood, between life and death.”

“So long as a man is alive and free, he will, in one way or another, seek that which gives him pleasure,” or happiness, but it does not⎯cannot⎯come unearned, and the seeming short cuts simply are not what they seem.