p. 66 | TO YOUNG MEN

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Feb 12, 1880

TO YOUNG MEN.

WHEN a young man begins his career with an ostentatious contempt for all that is best in life, preferring expensive enjoyment and smart waistcoats to simple tastes and social virtues, the end is hardly a matter of doubt. The self-indulgent young man grows by easy stages into the pampered middle-aged citizen who cannot deny himself anything. The sarcastic juvenile snob, who is constantly reminding you that your quiet, unobtrusive, scrupulously honest friend is “no gentleman,” is apt to escape the characteristics of one himself.

When all sympathies, regards and duties become subservient to self-indulgence and superficial enjoyments, one is in a poor way to real happiness in life. Talfourd, in summing up the wretched career of Wainwright, the English forger and voluptuous felon, says: “Vanity, nurtured by selfishness and unchecked by religion, becomes a disease, perhaps amounting to monomania, yielding this lesson to repay the world for such a person’s existence: that there is no state of the soul so dangerous as that in which the vices of the sensualist are envenomed by the groveling intellect of the scorner.”