Diligence-Earnestness

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Mar 25, 1913

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 40, No. 12.

Diligence—Earnestness

TO THE reader, and especially if he be a young man, we want to suggest a few thoughts, and one especially.

Do not waste your time.

Do you appreciate the importance of an hour and of a day?

Do you call yourself strictly to account, once a week or once a month, and ask what you have done to make yourself abler, better equipped as a thinking creature, than you were before?

Do you realize that the strength of your body should be economized and saved up for mental effort? Or do you devote energies that could give success to foolish amusements and self-indulgence?

All around you other human beings of your own age are living and working.

Some of these in a few years will be enjoying great success and great rewards.

The difference between the future great man and yourself is not so much the difference in opportunity as the difference in earnestness, application, self-denial, concentration of purpose.

Who will be president of the United States twenty-five years from now, or, more important still, who will be the most useful thinker of the United States twenty-five years from now?

Nobody knows.

But if that most useful and ablest man could be pointed out to you, you would probably laugh. You would see in him, undoubtedly, one with whom you would not fear to compete. That man is living somewhere about. He is perhaps on a farm, competing with a poor start in life, the hardest conditions. He is perhaps some poor clerk, some young mechanic.

Of this you may be sure: Whatever he is and wherever he is, he is an earnest young man; he is a dissatisfied, self-criticizing young man. He is trying to develop his mind; he is not content to spend the hours in amusement.—San Francisco “Examiner.”