Trifles | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 22, 1874

Trifles.

OUR lives, or rather their happiness or misery, are in a great measure made up of trifles, just as time is made up of moments. The discomfort of having to wait for a meal beyond its regular hour, of finding slovenliness and discomfort where a little thought and pains might have introduced ease and even elegance, or of being brought up sharp at every turn by want of punctuality or of method—these are ills more difficult to bear than the uninitiated imagine. Yes, elegant! for comfort consists in finding everything where and as it should be; elegance in adding to what should be there that which need not be there, but whose presence surprises, attracts, and gratifies.

There is often neither comfort nor elegance in the richer mansions, while both are found in the laborer's cottage. A jug filled with flowers, a neat white curtain, a couple of flower-pots, may effect what the expenditure of hundreds of dollars has not achieved. Let it not be said that these are mere trifles, unworthy of attention. Distrust the pretense of that spirituality whose eyes are too lofty for the common things of life. In the long catalogue of things to “think on,” they rank at any rate among the “whatsoever things are lovely.” You say they are trifles; then all the more they ought not to be neglected. But, trifles though they be, to neglect them is not a trifle; it is a breach of plain duty.—Hearth and Home.