Something Easy | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 1, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 37.

Something Easy.

WHAT most people are anxious to find in the way of regular employment, is something easy to do. And yet the things which are easy to do are often the things which are not worth doing. It is a long struggle to make a great reputation as a lawyer; one can gain local notoriety as a lawbreaker in a week, or perhaps in an hour, and with hardly any effort. It may take the hard work of a dozen years to give a man a limited reputation for wisdom; the easy act of a moment, in a suitable place, may give a man immediately a national reputation for folly. Building requires wisdom and care. The deadly beauty of the basilisk’s eye is the true type of much earthly beauty; its fatal gleam arrests the victim’s gaze, and holds him motionless until fangs sink into the flesh, and venom is carried into the very life. The charm with which so many wrong actions are invested, the glamor which makes so many things which are known to be evil still attractive to us,—this is the real basilisk eye, this the true beauty of the serpent. The tempter never comes, for the first time of tempting, in a repulsive shape; nor do the lamps burn blue at his appearing. When he comes, he is most likely to conform himself to our habits and tastes; to the cultivated and polite, he will appear most delicately refined; to the jovial and the hearty, he will come in the shape of the “good fellow,” after their own heart; to the student in Faust, he appeared as a finished and worldly wise scholar; to some he may even appear in a winsome and beautiful human face. But, however he appears, he is more to be feared the more attractive he seems; and we, who are not ignorant of his devices, ought to have more than beauty or attractiveness to judge by ere we pronounce as good that which Satan offers, and that evil which, perhaps, God is offering.—S. S. Times.