Novel Reading by Seb.

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 16, 1875

Novel Reading.

By Seb.

EARNEST study strengthens the mind, as vigorous exercise strengthens the body, or solid food the stomach. He who avoids hard labor grows feeble; he who avoids healthy food grows sickly; and he who avoids hard study grows simple, flat, and foolish.

Many young persons read fiction till they lose all taste for fact, and pore over novels until they are unfit for anything else.

Says the College Courant: “Exclusive and excessive novel-reading is to the mind a kind of intellectual opium-eating in its stimulant effects upon the fancy and its stupefying and bewildering influence on the judgment. An inveterate novel-reader speedily becomes a literary roue, and this is possible at a very early period of life. It now and then happens that a youth of seventeen becomes almost an intellectual idiot or an effeminate weakling by living exclusively upon the enfeebling swash or the poisoned stimulants that are sold so readily under the titles of tales and novels. An apprenticeship at a reform school in literature, with a spare diet of statistics, and a hard bed of mathematical problems, and the simple beverage of plain narrative, is much needed for the recovery of such insane and half-demented mortals.”

Do not live on such “swash” as that. What is the use? When you have read novels a thousand years, what do you know more than you did at first? What does it all amount to? Men need facts, not fictions, and when the world is full of good books containing information, fact, history, science, and a thousand matters of interest, what a shame it is to waste time reading the lying yarns of novel writers. He that “loveth and maketh a lie” has little blessing in this world, and little hope for the next.—Seb.