Wild Oats | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 2, 1882

"Wild Oats."

THERE has grown up in this country within a half century a spirit of levity, and a leniency toward some forms of vice, and a general loosening of restraint on the young which tend to encourage the sowing of wild oats, regardless of the yield. The old strictness has gone out of our home life. Our young folks are left very much to their own inclinations. And society has let down the bars into all pastures, so that colts prance and browse at will. There is a freedom which verges on looseness and license, and it is looked upon as an indication of spirit and force for young people to kick over the proprieties and even try to knock the "nots" out of the commandments. It seems in many quarters to be taken for granted that youth has a deal of folly to get rid of, and must have its run of fastness as childhood is expected to have measles and chicken-pox. A smoking, swaggering, pool-playing, wine-bibbing boy, turning night into day and sleeping till noon to recover from his carouse, why, he is only sowing his wild oats, which is spoken of as sympathetically as though he were a baby cutting his teeth. Yes, wild oats! And very bad, bitter, blasting, poisonous grain they are. They are sure to injure if they do not kill. They affect the taste and constitution, and leave remorseful recollections like a canker in the mouth. Whoever has the inclination to fast ways and reckless behavior which goes under that name, should bury it under all possible thickness of good resolutions and noble conduct, and let it fertilize the soil for a finer growth of manliness instead of planting it where it will reproduce after its kind. For wild oats grow. They yield a crop of bad habits, of evil companions, of vicious tastes, of disease, and sometimes of crime and death. They produce hundreds of Jennie-Cramer deaths every year. They colonize the prison cells. They bring a heavy aftermath of remorse and wretchedness. There is no crop sown that brings forth such a harvest of sorrow, wretchedness, and shame. Yet at the present time the customs of society and the too lenient judgment of our easy-going people encourage the sowing and furnish all the conditions for raising the crop. The time has come for parents to consider whether it pays them or their children to sow wild oats, when a better kind of seed can be scattered just as well. All possible joy to the young; all possible innocent pleasure to young people; all the freedom compatible with safety. But the lines drawn across the world by the finger of the Eternal, which cannot be crossed, should be pointed out, and every precipice should be fenced against the feet of inexperience.—Christian at Work.