Men and Things by Dudley Marvin Canright

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 26, 1871

Men and Things.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

MOVING.

Dear brother, are you becoming uneasy in your old home, or may be, your new one? Are you dreaming of riches of the West and imagining you can live there so easily? Are you about to break up old and dear and hallowed associations, and leave friends and brethren and all that has been sacred to you? Stop, I pray you, and take a word of advice from the thousands who have tried it to their sorrow. Read this:

“GET A HOME AND KEEP IT.

“This little bolus of good advice is rolling around in the exchanges, and the sentiment is heartily endorsed by The Tribune. We have so many letters from men in Kansas who would go to Oregon, and from settlers in Oregon who would know more of orange-growing in Florida, that we beg our restless readers to remember the just old saw about the rolling stone.—[Ed. Tribune.

“A large proportion of the American people are restless, roving, scattering, driven about from place to place by every spring freshet of popular excitement. Their desire for quick gains and their perpetual motion wears them out prematurely. They build houses for life-time residences, and are ready to sell out their newly-built homestead a week after it is finished—for perhaps less than it cost—and off they go, perpetually swinging around the circle of chronic change. To the pleasures of home and neighborhood attachment, to repose of feeling and content of mind, and love of objects around them, they are strangers. The fruition of trees they plant they rarely witness. Of all their possessions, they have nothing home-like to gladden their hearts. The gardens they lay out, the furniture they buy, and the houses they build, afford no home-loving memories. After wearing out half a life-time in perpetual change of habitation, with little gain and great loss, they see in their past career nothing but failure! Habits wayward, the mind perplexed, the purpose cowed, their energies baffled and disappointed, they surrender to fate, and accept in moody despair their abject situation; and often, with conscience seared and morals wrecked, without friends or home, they settle down too late, and die among strangers.”

Almost every day I find families here in the West who exactly fill the above bill. Peace and contentment are strangers to their homes, if they have any; there are no sacred places, around which their memories can linger. An uneasy, dissatisfied feeling has come over them which darkens all their life. To me, this is the hardest and saddest part of my life. I have to be continually breaking off old associations, the dearest friendships, and the most sacred attachments, and form new ones. Often my heart murmurs and almost rebels against it and I can bear it only from a sense of duty. Let me advise you, friends, from the depths of my soul to “Get a home and keep it.”

DIGNITY OF SPIRITUALISM.

That spiritualism is rapidly gaining ground is sufficiently evident from the respect with which eminent men are coming to speak of it. Beecher says of it:

“One would think that a delusion which, for the magnitude of its pretensions, the number of its victims, and the duration of its power to baffle the scrutiny of the shrewdest, is the most extraordinary in the history of humanity, might be deemed worthy of some more serious notice than the contemptuous jest with which Prof. Huxley dismisses it. And this all the more because the boasted expose by the great English Faraday was really such a pitiable display of learned weakness.”

A SAD CASE.

A clergyman, writing of the Chicago fire, relates this sad case:

“One very sad case is related. A lumber merchant received news the week before that the great fire in Northern Wisconsin had destroyed his pine woods and his saw mills, losing him $300,000. Sunday night his lumber yard in this city was burned, and on Monday morning his residence on the North Side was swept away and his two children perished. He was taken to the asylum, insane.”

Alas! how unstable, how insecure, is all earthly joy. How unwise to build our hopes in a world like this!

D. M. CANRIGHT.