Emotion and Principle by Jacob Abbott

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Aug 17, 1876

Emotion and Principle.

By Jacob Abbott

One of the most common religious errors of the present day, is the habit of confounding religious interest with religious emotion. Interest in religion is our constant duty. Emotion is one of the forms which this interest occasionally assumes. Now many persons confound the two, and think that they are in a cold, stupid state, unless their hearts are full of a deep, overwhelming emotion. They struggle continually to awaken and to sustain this emotion, and are distressed and disappointed that they cannot succeed. They fail for the obvious reason that the human heart is incapable of long continued emotion of any kind when in a healthy state. Susceptibility of emotion is given by the Creator for wise and good purposes, but it is intended to be an occasional not a habitual state of mind.

For example, a man loves his wife and little children, and thinks that he may promote their permanent good in the world by removing to a new home in the West, where he can make his labors far more effectual in laying a foundation for their wealth and prosperity than he can in the home of his own childhood. He sets off, therefore, on the long and toilsome journey, to explore the ground and prepare the way for them to follow. As soon as he gets fairly upon the confines of the settled country, his mind is daily engrossed by his labors and cares. Now, he is toiling over the rough and miry road—now hesitating upon the bank of a rapid stream, now making his slow and tedious way through the unbroken forest, his mind intent in studying the marks of the trees, or the faint traces of the Indian's path. During all this time he feels no emotion of love for his wife and children, but his mind is under the continued influence of the strongest possible interest in them. It is love for them which carries him on every step of the way. It is this that animates him, this that cheers and sustains him; while he perhaps seldom pauses in his labors and cares in order to bring them distinctly to his mind, and fill his heart with the flowings of a sentimental affection.

At length, however, at some solitary Post-office in the cabin of a settler, he finds a letter from home, and he lays the reins upon his saddle bow, and reads the welcome pages, while his horse, willing to rest, walks slowly through the forest.

As he reads sentence after sentence of the message which has thus found its way to him from his distant home, his ardent affection for the loved ones there which has through the day remained calm within, a quiet and steady principle of action, awakes and begins to agitate his bosom with more active emotions; and when, at the close of the letter, he comes upon a little postscript, rudely printed, asking “father to come home soon,” it calls to his mind so forcibly that round and happy face which smiled upon him from the steps of the door when he came away, that his heart is full. He does not love these absent ones any more than he did before; but his love for them takes a different form. Nor is it that his affection is merely in a greater state of intensity than usual at such a time. It is in a totally different state; different in its nature, and different, nay, the reverse, in its tendency. For while love, as a principle of action, would carry forward to labor with cheerfulness and zeal for the future good of his family—love as a mere emotion, tends to destroy all his interest in going forward, and to lead him to turn around in his path and seek his shortest way back to his home. He readily perceives this, and though the indulgence of such feelings may be delightful, he struggles to put them down. He suppresses the tear which fills his eye—folds up his letter—spurs on his horse, and instead of considering the state of emotion the one to be cultivated, as the only genuine evidence of true love, he regards it rather as one to be controlled and suppressed, as interfering with the duties and objects of genuine affection.

Now the discrimination, which is the design of the foregoing case to set in a strong light, is very often not made in religion, but it should be made. Piety, if it exists at all, must exist generally as a calm and steady principle of action, changing its form, and manifesting itself as a religious emotion only occasionally.

But we must not suppose that religion is quiescent and inactive at other times. Religion is, to say the least, quite as active a principle, when it leads a man to his work in the cause of God, as when, in his retirement, it swells his heart with spiritual joys. They are, in fact, two distinct forms, which the same principle assumes, and we cannot compare one with the other, so as to assign to either the pre-eminence. Neither can exist in a genuine state without some measure of the other. It is, undoubtedly, the former which is the great test of Christian character. It is the former which we are to strive to establish in our hearts, and in the which we may depend upon making steady and certain progress just in proportion to the faithfulness of our vigilance and the sincerity of our prayers.

But in point of fact, the attention of Christians in their efforts to make progress in piety, very often looks almost exclusively to the latter. They think that continued religious emotion is the only right frame of mind. The result is, therefore, either a feeling of dejection and confirmed despondency—or else the gradual cultivation of a morbid sentimentalism, which has nothing but the semblance of piety.—Rev. Jacob Abbott.