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influence of such reading is injurious to both the mind and the body;
it weakens the intellect and brings a fearful tax upon the physical
strength. At times your mind is scarcely sane because the imagination
has been overexcited and diseased by reading fictitious stories. The
mind should be so disciplined that all its powers will be symmetrically
developed....
If the imagination is constantly overfed and stimulated by fictitious
literature, it soon becomes a tyrant, controlling all the other faculties
of the mind and causing the taste to become fitful and the tendencies
perverse.—
Testimonies for the Church 4:497
(1881).
Reading Affects Brain—I am personally acquainted with some
who have lost the healthy tone of the mind through wrong habits of
reading. They go through life with a diseased imagination, magnifying
every little grievance. Things which a sound, sensible mind would
not notice become to them unendurable trials and insurmountable
obstacles. To them life is in constant shadow.—
Christian Temperance
and Bible Hygiene, 124, 1890
. (
Fundamentals of Christian Education,
162, 163
.)
Seeing Corrupts the Imagination—This is an age when corrup-
tion is teeming everywhere. The lust of the eye and corrupt passions
are aroused by beholding and by reading. The heart is corrupted
through the imagination. The mind takes pleasure in contemplating
scenes which awaken the lower and baser passions. These vile images,
seen through defiled imagination, corrupt the morals and prepare the
deluded, infatuated beings to give loose rein to lustful passions. Then
follow sins and crimes which drag beings formed in the image of God
down to a level with the beasts, sinking them at last in perdition.
Avoid reading and seeing things which will suggest impure
thoughts. Cultivate the moral and intellectual powers. Let not these
noble powers become enfeebled and perverted by much reading of
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even storybooks. I know of strong minds that have been unbalanced
and partially benumbed, or paralyzed, by intemperance in reading.—
Testimonies for the Church 2:410
(1870).
Masturbation and the Imagination—When persons are addicted
to the habit of self-abuse, it is impossible to arouse their moral sen-
sibilities to appreciate eternal things or to delight in spiritual exer-
cises. Impure thoughts seize and control the imagination and fascinate
the mind, and next follows an almost uncontrollable desire for the