Literary Overwork

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 7, 1873

Literary Overwork.

T. DeWITT TALMAGE, in a sermon published in a late Methodist, gives the following good advice to those who are overtaxing their strength by that, most wearing of all work, mental labor:—

“Now, brethren of literary toil, you had better hold up. If you are going at the rate of sixty miles an hour, you had better stop and go no more than thirty. The temptations to overwork for literary men are multiplying all the time in increased newspapers and magazines and lecturing platforms. The temptation to night-work is especially great—that kind of work which is most exhausting and ruinous.

‘When the sun goes down, God puts his candle out, and says to the world, ‘My child, you had better go to sleep; I have put the candle out.’

‘The brass-headed nails of coffins are made out of gaslight! The money that a man makes by midnight toil he pays toward the expenses of his own funeral. When the devil cannot stop a good man’s work by making him lazy, then he comes into the editor’s room, or into the minister’s study, or into the artist’s studio, and he says, ‘Go it! you ought to be doing five times the work you are doing. You ought to write two books this year. You ought to send out twenty or thirty additional articles. You ought to deliver fifty lectures at two hundred dollars a night.’ Then when his health fails, there is satanic congratulation. The devil first tries to stop a useful man by making him lazy. Failing in that, he then puts on the lash, and digs in the spurs, and drives him to death. I say, therefore, to the men who are toiling with their brain, you had better ‘slow up,’ as they say on the railroad lines. I hear somebody say, ‘You had better take your own advice.’ I will. I am being converted under my own sermon. God gives to every man a certain amount of work, and he does not want him to do any more than that. ‘Do thyself no harm,’ is advice no more appropriate to the jailer when the prison is tumbling around his ears than it is appropriate to those the wards of whose health and the fastnesses of whose strength begin to tremble with the earthquake. Paul was very careful of his body; long before the days of expressage, he sends hundreds of miles for his great-coat to Troas.

“O ye men of literary toil! you have been careful about keeping the candle snuffed and burning brightly, is it not most time you began to look after the candlestick? The sharp sword will not make any execution unless you have a handle to it. Through all the editorial-rooms and through all the studies of this country, let the warning reverberate; let it come up to-night from the graves of Kirke White, of Henry J. Raymond, and of Horace Greeley.”