Helen's Light Reading by Dinnie Macdole Hayes

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Aug 31, 1882

Helen's Light Reading.

By Dinnie Macdole Hayes

It was in a college for both sexes, in Iowa, and a great revival was in progress.

Dear, noble Mrs. Roberts, the preceptress, had gone from student to student, urging all to an interest in Christ. The Christians were aroused; and from a Sunday-morning meeting in her recitation-room, there had grown to be two or three daily, and the interest was at white heat. Timid girls dared to plead for Jesus; scholarly professors told with tears the story of the cross, scoffers listened and believed, and the number of Christians grew daily.

It was pleasant any time to visit my college home, but coming as I did that winter from the world without, into such an atmosphere, it seemed like paradise.

Coming out of a prayer-meeting, sweet with the influence of the Spirit, one evening, Mrs. Robert's said to me, "Mary, do you remember Helen Andrews?"

"Oh, yes, I do, certainly. A nice bright girl too."

"She is one of my anxieties now. I wish you would go down to her room and talk to her about the salvation of her soul. I have tried in every way to arouse her interest, but in vain, but it may be that another might reach her when I could not."

I consented to try, and we tapped at Helen's door. After a little talk, Mrs. Roberts excused herself, telling me to come to her room soon.

The burden of a soul was upon me, and with all the warmth and tenderness which I had brought from the prayer-meeting, I urged her to come to Christ. I might as well have talked to the wall. There was a listless apathy about her which defied all efforts to arouse her.

I closed my call in a little while, and went up to Mrs. Roberts' room, where I found Addie Raynor, who shared our anxiety about Helen; and I told them of my poor success.

"Addie," said Mrs. Roberts, "what is the matter with Helen Andrews? I cannot understand her. She is neither hard nor defiant; she is generous and sweet; she is an orphan, and alone in the world. I surely thought that she, of all girls, would have been readiest to accept the Saviour, Why is it?"

"I have thought, lately," said Addie, "that it must be those books?"

"Those books," repeated Mrs. Roberts, "what books?"

"Why, she borrows every novel she can, and every spare moment she has she reads and reads. Not bad books, you know, but just interesting and exciting. I've thought about it, and it seems to me that they take all her interest."

"That explains it all," said Mrs. Roberts sadly. "That is the reason that the influences, which have stirred us all so deeply, have taken no hold upon her. Girls, girls," she said with a cry of anguish in her voice, "pray for Helen Andrews. She has stupefied her soul with that reading as surely as she would her body if she took opium. I will try to arouse her to her danger, but I confess I am disheartened. Oh, I wish girls knew what they do when they drown themselves in light reading."

I left the place the next day, and never afterward learned whether Helen became a Christian; but the memory of that visit never comes to me without a sad thought of the girl-student who drugged her soul to sleep with novels.—Dinnie Macdole Hayes, in American Messenger.