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Perseverance and Health

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · April 29, 1880

FromAdvent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 18

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Perseverance and Health.

We believe that there is a great deal of truth and wisdom in what our excellent contemporary, the Sanitarian, says on the above subject: A man who inherits wealth may begin and worry through threescore and ten years without any definite object. In driving, in foreign travel, in hunting and fishing, in club-houses and society, he may manage to pass away his time; but he will hardly be happy. It seems to be necessary to health that the powers of a man be trained upon some subject and held there day after day, year after year, while vitality lasts. There may come a time in old age when the fund of vitality will have sunk so low that he can follow no consecutive labor without such a draft upon his forces that sleep cannot restore them. Then, and not before, he should stop work. But so long as a man has vitality to spare upon work, it must be used, or it will become a source of grievous, harassing discontent. The man will not know what to do with himself; and when he has reached such a point as that, he is unconsciously digging a grave for himself, and fashioning his own coffin.
Life needs a steady channel to run in,—regular habits of work and sleep. It needs a steady, stimulating aim, a trend toward something. An aimless life can never be happy, or, for a long period, healthy. Said a rich lady to a gentleman still laboring beyond his needs, “Don’t stop; keep at it.” The words that were in her heart were, “If my husband had not stopped, he would be alive to-day.” And what she thought, was doubtless true. A greater shock can hardly befall a man who has been active, than that which he experiences when, having relinquished his pursuits, he finds unused time and vitality hanging upon his idle hands and mind. The current of his life is thus thrown into eddies, or settled into a sluggish pool; and he begins to die.—Scientific American.