It was Pastor Drury who suggested the explanation for all these forms of
profitless and often dangerous amusement. He was chatting with the whole
group one night, and merely happened to address himself first to J.W.,
Jr.

Your great namesake, J.W., was so much a part of his day that he
believed with most other great religious thinkers of his time that play
was a device of the devil. His belief belonged to eighteenth-century
theology and psychology. But even more it grew out of the vicious
diversions of the rich and the brutalizing amusements of the poor. Both
were bad, and there was not much middle ground. But here on Main Street
we see people, most of them young, who feel, without always
understanding why, that they simply must be amused. They feel it so
strongly that they will pay any price for it if circumstances won't let
them get it any other way. And Main Street is ready to oblige them.
There could be no amusement business if people were not clamoring to be
amused. And we know now why we have no right to say that all this clamor
is the devil's prompting. Isn't it queer that the church is only now
beginning to believe in the genuineness and wholesomeness of the play
instinct, though it is a proper and natural human hunger? Literally
everybody wants to play.

"People pay more for the gratification of this hunger than they do for
bread or shoes or education or religion. They take greater moral risks
for it than they do for money. We have seen people who undoubtedly are
going to the devil by the amusement route, unless something is done to
stop them. They go wrong quicker and oftener in their play than in their
work. Are we going to be content with denouncing the dance hall and the
poolroom and the vile pictures and the loose conduct of the soft-drink
places and Electric Park? Haven't we some sort of duty to see that every