RELIGIOUS FICTION by H. L. Hastings

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Dec 27, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 52.

RELIGIOUS FICTION.

By H. L. Hastings

THE religious publishing houses of the day are sending forth cords of fictitious books, containing accounts of persons who never lived, and of occurrences which never happened; these yarns being spun out of the minds of their authors, and embellished with all the felicities of diction and grace of composition, until the young, fed upon such mental diet, lose all taste for solid reading, facts, truths, and history, and so are given over to the reign of fiction and folly, idealism and unreality.

Doubtless one reason for this is, these fictitious writers find it much easier to sit down and spin a yarn out of their own dreams and fancies, than to dig, delve, explore, and give facts to the people, grouped and related in an interesting manner.

Life is short. Time once wasted can never be recalled, and it is a sad sight to see thousands of young persons spending their years reading things which are not true, and which, after having been read for years and years, leave the mind empty of facts and perverted in its estimate of life and its duties and privileges, and in a condition to be misled and beguiled into paths of sin and folly and vanity.—H. L. Hastings.