SERPENTS IN THE GRASS by Author of Home Thrusts and Home Thoughts

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 26, 1869

SERPENTS IN THE GRASS.

By Author of Home Thrusts and Home Thoughts

Beloved in the Lord, grace, mercy and peace—our acquaintance has been precious, heavenly, thus far—may we not say peaceful, joyous? May we not hope for its perpetuation and consummation in glory eternal? I do feel humbly grateful for favors past, and favors continued. The Lord bless you, brother, more and more, forever.

Since my last I have travelled some twelve hundred miles westward, and northward, scattering the good seed. My object was salvation exclusively—that is, I was determined to know nothing save Jesus Christ and him crucified. God was with me, especially and remarkably all the way out and in. Praise him, praise him!

One special object in my visitations abroad, was to counteract the works of darkness, death and damnation, the old serpent, the devil, in all his hellish plots. It is grievous, brother, to see what havoc the devil is making—what power he has over the minds and hearts of men, and how extensive his influence is! He has nearly the whole control of the thoroughfares by sea and land. He is scattering fire-brands, arrows and death, all the way on railroads, steamboats, and by the wayside. The curse of all curses is seen in almost every house and hamlet; even the log cabins in the western wilds do not escape these snakes in the grass, the light, fascinating publications—novels, romances, silly love tales—the bitter and the sweet intermingled, the “Godley’s,” “Harper’s,” “Peterson’s,” “Leslie’s”—Fashionable-plate Magazines, “New York Ledger,” comicals, &c. Did ever Satan invent a more artful stratagem to kill our piety, the life-blood of salvation? and ruin souls in hell forever? Do we exaggerate? Is it possible to depict in colors too glowingly the evils of these missiles of the pit? And yet parents do n’t see it; editors do n’t see it; ministers do n’t see it; not one in ten.

“While men slept, the enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way.”

Children and youth all through this land are growing up impatient, conscience-seared, volatile, foolish and vain, fond of show, dress and gaiety; “lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God”—dancing on the very brink of hell and dark damnation. Wherefore? Look into libraries, and on centre tables. What seest thou? the serpent coiled?

Reader, would it not be far safer to place a serpent in the hands of your children, or on your centre tables, than the light, fictitious, popular readings of the day?

A serpent, or a stinging adder, is far less dangerous. We flee from a living serpent with forked tongue, run—escape for our life; but a serpent in the form of a book or paper, though the poison is far more deadly than that of the crawling reptile, does not alarm us.

Some parents tell us a novel, a love tale, a silly romance, something fictitious and highly exciting, tends to form a taste for reading. Children will fall in love with romance and the comical, when publications of a more serious, solid, and historical character would be insipid, tasteless, or repulsive.

Thus these mixed publications of a light, novel, and vicious tendency, are placed in their hands, and a taste formed in early life, for corrupt literature, to the exclusion of the Bible, and everything of a truly virtuous and purifying tendency.

In the Sabbath-school library, and in the books purchased for children, we furnish them with the means of cultivating a taste for novel-reading, and so prepare them greedily to devour whatever fictitious trash may fall in their way, and then waste our breath in deploring their exposure to a corrupting literature. Parents and teachers seem not to know that the thirst for novel-reading is cultivated by novel-reading; or, they seem not to know that reading fiction with a little sprinkling of religion, prepares children to love to read fiction, though it may have a sprinkling of irreligion.

There is that in the character of fictitious writing, properly called novels, whether the subject be secular or religious, which forms a taste different from historical, didactic, or any of the other classes of writing, and this taste is as readily formed by holding the child upon religious novels in his younger years, as if he were supplied with secular novels.

By our religious machinery the child is piously trained to seek his gratifications of mind amid elements of grossest corruption. If the enemy of all good should set himself to devise a scheme to take children out of religious families, and from them to rear a supply of victims of this form of ruin, he could, with all his cunning, hardly contrive a better way to avoid giving alarm and to secure the result. If it be agreed that religious novels are a source of mischief, we shall find ample work in clearing out the old leaven. Our Sabbath-school libraries, and our families, and our book stores, are full of these introductions to the ‘Mysteries of Paris,’ and even our editors will be called to use their puffing apparatus with a little more caution.

Parent, when you place novels or fictitious writings, in the form of a book or paper, in the hands of your child, for the purpose of cultivating a taste for reading, you do your child an irreparable injury—peril the soul forever.

“The course of evil Begins so slowly, and from such slight source, An infant’s hand might stop the breath with clay; But let the stream get deeper, and philosophy, Aye, and religion too, shall strive in vain To turn the headlong current.”

—Author of Home Thrusts and Home Thoughts.