Habits

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 10, 1880

HABITS.—"There are habits," says Paley, "not only of drinking, swearing, and lying and of some other things which are commonly acknowledged to be habits, but of every modification of action, speech, and thought. Man is a bundle of habits. There are habits of industry, attention, vigilance, advertency; of a prompt obedience to the judgment occurring, or of yielding to the first impulse of passion; of extending our views to the future, or of resting upon the present; of apprehending, methodizing, reasoning; of indolence, dilatoriness; of vanity, self-conceit, melancholy, partiality; of fretfulness, suspicion; captiousness, censoriousness; of pride, ambition, covetousness; of overreaching, intriguing, projecting; in a word, there is not a quality or function, either of body or mind, which does not feel the influence of this great law of animated nature."