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NOVEL KILLED

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 13, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 7.

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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 younger friends were coming to Christ. But there she stood at the very threshold of the kingdom, wistfully looking over, as if her feet were chained. She made no advance.
Her pastor and friends were equally puzzled. Prayer was offered for her, and the plainest instructions 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 will ever 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 of 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.”—Cynosure.