Purity of Character by Hammond

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 17, 1871

Purity of Character

By Hammond

Over the beauty of the plum and apricot there grows bloom and beauty more exquisite than the fruit itself—a soft, delicate blush that overspreads its blushing cheek. Now if you strike your hand over that, and it is once gone, it is gone forever, for it never grows but once. The flower that hangs in the morning impearled with dew—arrayed as no queenly woman was ever arrayed with jewels—once shake it, so that the beads fall off, and you may sprinkle water over it as you please, yet it can never be made what it was when the dew fell silently upon it from heaven. On a frosty morning you may see the panes of glass covered with landscapes—mountains, lakes, trees—blended in a beautiful fantastic picture. Now lay your hand upon the glass, and by the scratch of your finger, or by the warmth of your palm, all the delicate tracery will be obliterated. So there is in youth a purity and beauty of character, which, when touched and defiled, can never be restored—a fringe more delicate than frost-work, and which, when torn and broken, will never be re-embroidered. A man who has spotted and soiled his garments in youth, though he may seek to make them white again, can never wholly do it, even were he to wash them in his tears. When a young man leaves his father's house, with the blessing of his mother's tears still wet upon his forehead, if he once lose that early purity of character, it is a loss that he can never make whole again. Such is the consequence of crime.—Hammond.