Improve the Evenings

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Oct 30, 1879

Improve the Evenings.

WITH the return of lengthened, and pleasant, and cool evenings, comes the query to all, how shall we best improve them? There are a thousand pleasant ways of spending a fall or winter evening within the reach of those who have command of their own time; and prominent among these is indulgence in literary pursuits. How few comparatively, of the young people of the present day appreciate, as they should, the inestimable privilege they enjoy! Surrounded, as are the young of large cities, with all the opportunities necessary for the cultivation of a literary taste, not one in a thousand appear to improve these golden chances. Occasionally, it is true, we meet with a young man or a young woman who firmly grasps the idea that "knowledge is power," but these, unfortunately, are the exceptions, not the rule.

Thousands of young men, who have comfortable homes—whose parents are willing to supply them with books and papers—instead of availing themselves of these advantages, spend their long fall and winter evenings either in idle lounging around corners, or in company with frivolous associates, male or female. Thus, winter after winter passes away, each one bringing them nearer to the age of manhood, but not fitting them for the proper discharge of the duties that a full manhood requires. They enter upon the busy stage of life with none of those safeguards which a cultivated intellect throws around its possessor. They start out laboring under a thousand disadvantages and confronted by innumerable obstacles, which disappear like shadows before a well-informed mind. The fact that they do not contemplate adopting a professional career does not in any degree relieve them from the charge of being untrue to themselves, their friends, and their country while thus frittering away the precious hours of their lives in idle indifference, and too frequently in the company of those whose association is contamination. How many of them will resolve to "turn over a new leaf" and improve the long evenings of the fall and winter?