Novel-Killed | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 8, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 38.

Novel-Killed.

SOME years ago, a young lady began to visit her pastor's study as a religious inquirer. It was during a revival, and on every hand her young friends were coming to Christ, but she made no advance. Her pastor and her friends were equally puzzled. Prayer was offered for her, and the plainest instruction given; but she remained unmoved, excepting to regret that she could not become a Christian. At last, after three months' labor and anxiety, her pastor said: "I can do nothing with Sophia L—; she is perfectly unmanageable. I doubt if she ever will yield to the claims of the gospel."

"What is the trouble? Can you not discover the obstacle in her way?" was asked.

"I find she is an inveterate novel-reader, and I have come to the conclusion that this will keep her out of the kingdom."

"Can she not be persuaded to give up her novels?"

"That is not the point entirely. She has wasted her sensibilities over unreal objects so long—so continually reversed right and wrong, looking at vice in the garb of virtue, and at virtue in that of unworthiness and injustice—that she has destroyed her moral sense. She assents to truth, but seems to have no power to grasp it; she knows what is right, but has no energy of will to do it. Her mind is diseased and enervated, and I fear hopelessly so."

When we look at the young people daily flocking to the public libraries for the latest novels, or see them lounging away their best hours over the story papers and the magazines, when we hear of this one or that one who "does nothing but read novels the whole day through," we think of Sophia L—, who is "perfectly unmanageable," on points of truth and duty, and wonder if they too must be given over to mental and moral disease and death.—Sel.