p. 39 | Forming Habits by A. S. Hutchins

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 28, 1875

Forming Habits.

By A. S. Hutchins

HABITS should be formed with care and consideration. The consequences which necessarily will and must follow their formation should be well weighed. Our habits form our characters, and character shapes our destiny. On this subject my mind was considerably impressed a few days since, while conversing with a young man smoking a fifteen-cent cigar, when he said, “I cannot leave off smoking.”

In gratification of an unnatural appetite he could afford to indulge in this expensive and ruinous practice, and thought he was unable to free himself from it. Young men should take warning here, and beware how they consent to become slaves for life at such a terrible expense of means, waste of health, and even the shortening of life itself.

It is painful to hear men, bound with iron chains of evil habits, say, “I would gratify my appetite in this or that direction if I knew it would shorten my life several years.” What record can be rendered to the Judge of all the earth for thus knowingly shortening life, the gift of God, and to whom we are amenable for its proper use and its preservation as far as we have power?

The command, “Thou shall not kill,” must necessarily apply to those acts in which we voluntarily and needlessly shorten and gradually cut off life, as well as to those which deprive us of it at once.

A. S. Hutchins.