p. 138 | Value of Sleep

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 14, 1873

Value of Sleep.

Dr. Alexander was often heard to say in substance as follows: “Clergymen, authors, teachers, and other men of reflective habits, lose much health by losing sleep, and this because they carry their trains of thought to bed with them. In my earlier years I greatly injured my health by studying my sermons in bed. The best thing one can do is to take care of the last half hour before retiring. Devotion being ended, something may be done to quiet the strings of the harp, which otherwise would go on to vibrate. Let me commend to you this maxim, which I somewhere learned from Dr. Watts, who says that in his boyhood he received it from the lips of Dr. John Owen—a very good pedigree for a maxim: Break the chain of thought at bedtime by something at once serious and agreeable. By all means break the continuity, or sleep will be vexed, if not driven away. If you wish to know my method, it is to turn over the pages of my English Bible, alighting on a passage here, a passage there, backward and forward without plan, and without allowing my mind to fasten on any, leaving the place the moment it ceases to interest me. Some tranquilizing word often becomes a divine blessing of peace. ‘He giveth his beloved sleep.’”