Advice to the Young
469
not without drawbacks. Unless carefully regulated, they are productive
of more harm than good. Some have suffered lifelong physical injury
through these gymnasium sports. The manual training connected with
our schools, if rightly conducted, will largely take the place of the
gymnasium.
Teachers should give far more attention to the physical, mental,
and moral influences in our schools. Although the study of the sciences
may carry the students to high literary attainments, it does not give a
full, perfect education. When special attention is given to the thorough
development of every physical and moral power which God has given,
then students will not leave our colleges calling themselves educated
while they are ignorant of that knowledge which they must have for
practical life and for the fullest development of character.
My heart aches as I see these deficiencies; for the result must be
loss of health, a lack of care-taking ability, and a want of adaptation
to that kind of labor which is most essential to success in life. The
newspapers abound in sensational records of frauds and embezzle-
ments, of misery in families, husbands eloping with other men’s wives,
and wives eloping with other women’s husbands—all because these
parties were not trained to habits of industry and never learned how to
economize time or to employ their faculties in the best way to make a
happy home.
Would that I could arouse every teacher in our land on this subject.
There is a work for them to do to broaden and elevate their educational
work. There is a period of time just before us when the condition of
the world will become desperate, when that true religion which yields
obedience to a “Thus saith the Lord” will become almost extinct.
Our youth should be taught that wicked deeds are not forgotten or
overlooked because God does not immediately punish the perpetrators
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with extreme indignation. God keeps a reckoning with the nations.
Through every century of this world’s history evil workers have been
treasuring up wrath against the day of wrath; and when the time fully
comes that iniquity shall have reached the stated boundary of God’s
mercy, His forbearance will cease. When the accumulated figures in
heaven’s record books shall mark the sum of transgression complete,
wrath will come, unmixed with mercy, and then it will be seen what a
tremendous thing it is to have worn out the divine patience. This crisis
will be reached when the nations shall unite in making void God’s law.