Purity of Character

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 6, 1864

Purity of Character.

OVER the beauty of the plum and the apricot there grows a bloom and beauty more exquisite than the fruit itself—a soft, delicate flush overspreads its blushing cheek. Now, if you strike your hand over that, it is gone. The flower that hangs in the morning, impearled with dew, arrayed as no queenly woman ever was arrayed with jewels, once shake it so that the beads roll off, and you may sprinkle water over it as you please, yet it can never be again what it was when the dew fell silently on it from Heaven. On a frosty morning you may see panes of glass covered with landscape—mountains, lakes, trees, blended in a beautiful fantastic picture. Now lay your hand upon the glass, and by a scratch of your finger, or by the warmth of your palm, all the delicate tracery will be obliterated. So there is in youth a beauty and purity of character, which, when once touched and defiled, can never be restored; a fringe more delicate than frost-work, and which when torn and broken, will never be re-embroidered. He who has spotted and soiled his garments in youth, though he may seek to make them white again, can never wholly do it, even were he to wash them with his tears. When a young man leaves his father's house with the blessings of a mother's tears still wet upon his brow, if he once lose his early purity of character, it is a loss that he can never make whole again. Such is the consequence of crime. Its effect cannot be eradicated; it can only be forgiven.