Mind, Character, and Personality Vol. 2 - Second Advent Revival

eading until you live in an imaginary world. The 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. . . . {2MCP 591.1}
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.-- 4T 497 (1881). {2MCP 591.2}
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.--CTBH 124, 1890. (FE 162, 163.) {2MCP
591.3}
Seeing Corrupts the Imagination.--This is an age when corruption 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. {2MCP 591.4}
Avoid reading and seeing things which will suggest impure thoughts. Cultivate the
moral and intellectual powers. Let not these noble powers become enfeebled
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and perverted by much reading of even storybooks. I know of strong minds that have
been unbalanced and partially benumbed, or paralyzed, by intemperance in
reading.--2T 410 (1870). {2MCP 591.5}
Masturbation and the Imagination.--When persons are addicted to the habit of
self-abuse, it is impossible to arouse their moral sensibilities to appreciate eternal things
or to delight in spiritual exercises. Impure thoughts seize and control the imagination
and fascinate the mind, and next follows an almost uncontrollable desire for the
performance of impure actions. If the mind were educated to contemplate elevating
subjects, the imagination trained to reflect upon pure and holy things, it would be
fortified against this terrible, debasing, soul-and-body-destroying indulgence. It would,
by training, become accustomed to linger upon the high, the heavenly, the pure, and
the sacred, and could not be attracted to this base, corrupt, and vile indulgence.--2T
470 (1870). {2MCP 592.1}
Dreamings of the Mind Lead to Self-exaltation.-- If the thoughts, the dreamings of
the mind, are of great purposes in which self figures, there will be revealed in words and
actions self-exaltation, a lifting up of self. These thoughts are not such as lead to a