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Chapter 55—True Love at Home
Brother M,
At Adams Center I was shown that you greatly lacked an un-
selfish spirit while at the Institute; you did not exert the influence
that you should. You might have let your light shine there, but you
did not. You often neglected your duty for amusements. You failed
to take care and to bear responsibility. You do not enjoy active exer-
cise. You love your ease; you and hard work are at variance. This is
selfish. You allowed the property of the Institute to run down and
be destroyed, when it was your business to see that it was kept up,
and that everything was in order, and preserved with greater interest
and care than if it were your own. You were an unfaithful steward.
Every time you permitted yourself to engage in amusements, playing
croquet or anything of the kind, you were using time for which you
were paid and which did not belong to you. You would be just as
excusable should you take money which you had not earned and
appropriate it to yourself.
Brethren Loughborough, Andrews, Aldrich, and others did not
know you. They estimated you too highly. You could not fill the
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place they employed you to fill. They erred in judgment when they
paid you so high a price for your labor. You did not earn the money
that you received. You were very slow and lacked greatly in energy.
You were not enough interested and awake to see and do, and things
were terribly neglected by you.
My brother, you are far from God; you are in a state of backslid-
ing. You do not possess noble moral courage. You yield to your own
desires instead of denying self. In seeking after happiness, you have
attended places of amusement which God does not approve, and in
so doing have weakened your own soul. My brother, you have much
to learn. You indulge your appetite by eating more food than your
system can convert into good blood. It is sin to be intemperate in
the quantity of food eaten, even if the quality is unobjectionable.
Many feel that, if they do not eat meat and the grosser articles of
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