EXCESSES by Mrs. A. R. Aldrich

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 2, 1893

EXCESSES.

By Mrs. A. R. Aldrich

Intemperate eating and drinking are not the only intemperate habits that seem to be part of our social fabric. There is an incalculable waste of feeling, of emotion, and will; and the power lost in these various channels of life tells the whole story, if we would trace it back, of the undirected or misdirected energy at the outset. A child whose habits of eating, of sleeping, of dressing, and of talking are controlled by the real needs of life, and regulated with taste and discretion, will never need the good offices of a temperance society nor legislation to save him from ruin. His salvation was a foregone conclusion, because all the possibilities of his life were led in orderly activity to the threshold of his conscious personality.

What we most need is to be saved from ourselves, or, better to express the same thing, to be lifted into our best selves by adjusting the emotions, appetites, and tendencies when they are plastic and can be moulded.—Mrs. A. R. Aldrich, in Harper's Bazar.