Living in Quiet | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jul 3, 1879

Living in Quiet.

A RULE for living happily with others is to avoid having stock subjects of disputation. It mostly happens, when people live much together, that they come to have certain set topics, around which, from frequent dispute, there is such a growth of angry words, mortified vanity, and the like that the original subject of difference becomes a standing subject for quarrel, and there is a tendency in all minor disputes to drift down to it. Again if people wish to live well together, they must not hold too much to logic, and suppose that everything is to be settled by sufficient reason. Doctor Johnson saw this clearly with regard to married people, when he said, "Wretched would be the pair, above all names of wretchedness, who should be doomed to adjust by reason, every morning, all the minute detail of a domestic day." But the application should be much more general than he made it. There is no time for such reasonings, and nothing that is worth them. And, when we recollect how two lawyers or two politicians can go on contending, and that there is no end of one-sided reasoning on any subject, we shall not be sure that such contention is the best mode of arriving at truth. But certainly it is not the way to arrive at good temper.