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The Battle for Purity, July 7
Keep thyself pure.
1 Timothy 5:22
.
To know what constitutes purity of mind, soul, and body is an impor-
tant part of education.
When the character is lacking in purity, when sin has become a part
of the character, it has a bewitching power that is equal to the intoxicating
glass of liquor. The power of self-control and reason is overborne by
practices that defile the whole being; and if these sinful practices are
continued, the brain is enfeebled and diseased, and loses its balance. Such
ones are a curse to themselves and to all who have any connection with
them....
Bad habits are more easily formed than good habits, and the bad
habits are given up with more difficulty. The natural depravity of the heart
accounts for this well-known fact—that it takes far less labor to demoralize
the youth, to corrupt their ideas of moral and religious character, than to
engraft upon their character the enduring, pure, and uncorrupted habits of
righteousness and truth. Self-indulgence, love of pleasure, enmity, pride,
self-esteem, envy, jealousy, will grow spontaneously, without example
and teaching. In our present fallen state all that is needed is to give up the
mind and character to its natural tendencies. In the natural world, give up
a field to itself and you will see it covered with briers and thorns; but if
it yields precious grain or beautiful flowers, care and unremitting labor
must be applied.
Now we present before you the necessity of constant resistance to
evil. All heaven is interested in men and women whom God has valued so
much as to give His beloved Son to die to redeem them. No other creature
that God has made is capable of such improvement, such refinement, such
nobility as man. Then when men become blunted by their own debasing
passions, sunken in vice, what a specimen for God to look upon! Man
cannot conceive what he may be and what he may become. Through the
grace of Christ he is capable of constant mental progress. Let the light of
truth shine into his mind and the love of God be shed abroad in his heart
and he may, through the grace Christ has died to impart to him, be a man
of power—a child of earth but an heir of immortality.
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