p. 11 | Sin’s Fascination

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 26, 1903

Sin’s Fascination

WHEN once a man has done a wrong thing, it has an awful power of attracting him and making him hunger to do it again. Every evil that I do may, indeed, for a moment create in me a revulsion of conscience, but, stronger than that revulsion of conscience, it exercises a fascination over me, which it is hard to resist. It is a great deal easier to find a man who has never done a certain wrong thing than to find a man who has done it only once.

If the wall of the dyke is sound, it will keep the water out, but if there is the tiniest hole in it, it will all come in. So the evil that you do asserts its power over you; it has a fierce, longing desire after you, and it gets you in its clutches. Beware of the first evils; for as surely as you are living, the first step taken will make the second seem to become necessary. The first drop will be followed by a bigger second, and the second, at a shorter interval, by a more copious third, until the drops become a shower, and the shower becomes a deluge.

The course of evil is ever wider and deeper, and more tumultuous. The little sins get in at the window, and open the front door for the big house-breakers. One smooths the path for the other. All sin has an awful power of perpetuating and increasing itself. As the prophet says in his awful vision of the doleful creatures that make their sport in the desolate city, “None shall want her mate.” “The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island.”

Every sin tells upon the character, and makes the repetition of itself more and more easy. “None is barren among them.” And all sin is linked together in a slimy tangle, like a field of seaweed, so that the man once caught in its oozy fingers is almost sure to drown.—Dr. Alexander Maclaren.