Are Your Children Drifting? by John N. Quinn

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 1, 1907

Are Your Children Drifting?

By John N. Quinn

JOHN N. QUINN

One very important feature of God's message of truth for the last days, is that dealing with the children of believing parents, and is expressed by the prophet as turning “the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers.” Should this work fail, the lamentable consequence will be the visitation of God's curse upon the earth.

Satan's determined purpose is to gain the hearts of the children, turning them away from the truth, and unto the beggarly elements of the world. His methods and instrumentalities are varied, chief among them being the Sunday edition of our leading newspapers. Have you noticed, my brother, how eagerly your children run for the Sunday edition, which you have ordered delivered each week, turning first to the comic section, then to the sporting page, then to the theatrical department, and on through the hotchpotch of social vice and political corruption? You call them together for worship, but how little interest they have in it, and how much behind the times seems the Word of God which you read. Satan smiles, for he notes how rapidly the hearts of the children are being drawn away from the things which the parents profess to love, and how rapidly a love for the world's tinsel and pleasures is being developed in them.

Angels mourn, and many parents to-day are mourning, wondering why their children are lost to the cause of God. I have come to the conclusion, from personal observation, that the Sunday newspapers as a class, although there is here and there an exception, should never enter the homes where the parents desire the children trained for the work and kingdom of God.

God's faithful messenger has spoken very clearly about the character of the literature which should be placed within the reach of our children, and to accept her instruction is to discard the Sunday newspaper, as at present conducted. Even men in the world, with no conception of the truth as revealed in this message, are convinced of the detriment to mind and morals caused by the Sunday paper, as witnesses the following extract from an article entitled “An Analysis of Modern Printing,” by Henry Turner Bailey, in The Printing Art, for May, 1907:—

“The Sunday edition presents one of the most serious problems of our time. It is not my purpose to discuss it here; but in passing, let me say that all we can do in the public schools to develop in children a love of truth, a respect for the aged and for law, a belief in virtue and honor, reverence for womanhood and for the great spiritual realities, an enjoyment of beauty, and a refined taste for literature and art, is opposed, vitiated, and sometimes, I am almost ready to say, nullified, by the Sunday papers. In the Sunday papers impudence is praised, the bad boy is fortunate, the police are outwitted, the foreigner, the old, the law-abiding, the virtuous, are held up to ridicule. The things we revere are made the butt of every coarse joke. The drawings are usually the grossest caricatures, and the colors are brutally crude. The incidents recorded are said to be ‘comic,’ ‘amusing,’ ‘funny.’ They are not; they rather tend to destroy the power to appreciate genuine wit and humor.”

“I lament chiefly the wretched stuff these papers provide for our children. It is simply vile. With all the wealth of modern literature; with the modern facilities for reproducing effectively views from nature, pictures of merit, charming sketches drawn by skilful artists; with all this to draw from on the one hand, and, on the other, with all the increasingly efficient graduates of our art schools, anxious for remunerative work, all, all at the disposal of newspaper syndicates, there seems to be absolutely no excuse for the stream of sewage in the Sunday papers.

“As the principal of one of our largest industrial art schools in the country recently said in my hearing, ‘The Sunday edition wastes enough good wood pulp to supply paper for a reasonable daily a whole week. Sunday editions are denuding our hillsides and endangering our water-supply, while they pour a perpetual flood of poison into the minds of the boys and girls of the country.’”

Literature which is “wretched stuff,” “simply vile,” “a stream of sewage,” and which pours “a perpetual flood of poison into the minds of the boys and girls of the country,” certainly has no claim upon those who desire their children to grow up into the matchless purity of our Lord and Master.

The influence of the public school upon our children is not healthful, nor calculated to inspire them with loyalty to our message. This came to me very forcibly recently by a conversation with a brother whose boys are in attendance at the public school. The father in teaching a recent Sabbath-school lesson, dwelt upon the fact that our government would one day persecute those who were faithful to the law of God. The boy questioned this very much; and why?—because in his school life he had been taught that this government was such an ideal one that persecution was an impossibility. The church-school is the place for our children, and when conducted by God-fearing teachers, will exert a mighty influence to lead the hearts of our children into the love of present truth. This I know from personal experience, having noted the effect upon my children of faithful work done by the teachers of the Battle Creek church-school. “Our children should be removed from the evil influences of the public schools, and placed where thoroughly converted teachers may educate them in the Holy Scriptures. The students in our schools should take the Word of God as the grand rule of their lives.”

It means to many financial sacrifice to give our children a Christian education, but what are dollars and cents in comparison to a soul saved in the kingdom of God? Let us bring our children in close touch with every means of grace, excluding everything detrimental. Then we can consistently invite the Holy Spirit to brood over their lives, and he will do so, transforming them in his own way and in his own time into the image of the divine.