Reputable Dissipation

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Mar 27, 1879

Reputable Dissipation.

A CLERGYMAN resident in the suburbs of New York had several times been cautioned by his friends against over study. He gave little heed to their warnings and a few days since became a raving maniac. Usually the saloon is credited with all the dissipation. Yet life's candle is often burned equally as fast at either end in the study. Intense mental application becomes a passion. The victim's whole life and energy are concentrated in books in the presumed facts and opinions gained from them and in giving them expression by tongue or pen. He lives in the study. He is with difficulty borne away from it. He begrudges the time spent elsewhere. He is absent from his family even when in their sight. His body may be present but his mind is absorbed elsewhere. He eats abstractedly or with a book before him.

This is dissipation. It does not give a man a bad name as will late hours at wicked places and midnight orgies, but the result sooner or later is similar. It is as much a craving after a certain form of excitement as is granted by the gaming table. It matters not whether a mind is over-driven in the study of theology or in rouge et noir. Both tend to midnight oil and exhaustion. The penalty of disreputable dissipation. Both alike often end in insanity. The man daily neglecting exercise and setting down immediately after a hastily bolted meal to his books, thus diverting all the spare blood, life and energy of his system to his brain when it should be at work in his stomach, is equally culpable with the one daily poisoning himself with bad liquor. Nature makes no exception in favor of moral pursuits. Good character goes for naught at Court. She punishes the young divine and the drunkard in exact proportion to the weight of their offenses. If referred to she can cite many dreadful warnings among students, divines, inventors, and writers as among the reckless and dissipated who travel to death by less respectable roads.—N. Y. Graphic.