Skipping | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Aug 17, 1882

Skipping.

Boys, I want to ask you how you think a conqueror would make out who went through a country he was trying to subdue, and whenever he found a fort hard to take, left it alone. Don't you think the enemy would buzz wild there, like bees in a hive; and when he was well into the heart of the country, don't you fancy they would swarm out, and harass him terribly?

Just so, I want you to remember, will it be with you if you skip over the hard places in your lessons, and leave them unlearned; you have left an enemy in the rear that will not fail to harass you and mortify you times without number.

"There was just a little bit of my Latin I hadn't read," said a vexed student to me, "and it was there the Professor had to call upon me at examination. There were just two or three examples I had passed over, and one of those I was asked to do on the blackboard."

The student who is not thorough, is never well at his ease; he cannot forget the skipped problems, and the consciousness of his deficiencies makes him nervous and anxious.

Never laugh at the slow, plodding student; the time will surely come when the laugh will be returned. It takes time to be thorough, but it more than pays. Resolve, when you take up a study, that you will go through with it like a successful conqueror, taking every strong point.

If the inaccurate scholar's difficulties closed with his school life, it might not be so great a matter for his future career. But he has chained to himself a habit that will be like an iron ball at his heel all the rest of his life. Whatever he does, he will be lacking somewhere. He has learned to shirk what is hard, and the habit will grow with years.