p. 123 | Steadfastness

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 15, 1883

Steadfastness.

RAILROAD managers in America are giving fresh attention to the cost of stops and starts in the running of trains. It would seem from some of the more careful estimates, that there is more of waste in this line than in any other in railway service. More power is called for, and more is wasted, in the slowing and stopping and starting of the machinery than in the free play of that machinery at its greatest speed. This is a truth that has long been noted in the use of mental and moral machinery. Every student, every thinker and writer, knows that there is no such strain in continuous mental effort as in frequent interruptions. Every intelligent observer of Sunday-school methods knows that intermissions in the school sessions, or in the teachers' meetings, the interruption of the series by recesses and vacations, taxes the machinery and wastes power as no other strain can. And the same truth is marked in the progress of personal character. The man who is "always sinning and always repenting" in his moral course, racks his moral nature to very little purpose. He who starts off with a full head of steam every new year and birthday, and then breaks up at the first way-station which comes in sight, only to start and stop again all the way along through the year, is worth very little either for a through train, or for an accommodation. It was said of Isaac, as the child of promise, that, as he grew, he "went going;" and that is the best way for any child of promise who is on the right track—to go going, instead of to go stopping and starting, starting and stopping again.—S. S. Times.