The Touch of Sin | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 9, 1872

The Touch of Sin.

WHEN an earthly touch once mars a heavenly gift, it can never be restored to its primitive beauty. Ruffle the snow just fallen and who shall lay it again? Displace the dew as it has fallen on the blushing fruit, and no skill can replace it; press the rose leaf and wound it, and none can give back the perfection of its tints. So it is with human character. When youth has lost its innocence, when sin has once blasted the soul, when the first freshness of a God-given life is gone, no after repentance, reformation, or devotion to God, will ever make it the same. Memory is polluted, the imagination assailed by impurities, the habits of virtue are weakened, and the force of vice strengthened. The vileness may be healed, but the scar remains. God may forgive the sin and man may forget it, but it is never beyond the vision of him who committed it, and however distant it may be, it hovers over him like a gloomy cloud. Let us keep our feet from evil; blessed is he who escapes its first foul touch. “The knowledge of good and evil,” now, as in the beginning, hath death in it.