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Testimony Treasures, Volume 1 - Ellen G. White

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Chapter 104<br />

Mental Dyspeptics<br />

Love for your soul causes me to write at the present time. I am<br />

oppressed with the burden of responsibility which I now take upon myself in<br />

writing out these things for you. By your own course you are closing the<br />

gates of heaven against yourself and your children, for neither you nor they<br />

will ever enter there with your present defective characters. You, my sister,<br />

are playing a sad, losing game in life. Holy angels are watching you with<br />

sadness; and evil spirits are looking on with triumph as they see you losing,<br />

fast losing, the graces that adorn the Christian character, while in their place<br />

Satan is implanting his own evil traits.<br />

You have indulged in novel and story reading until you live in an<br />

imaginary world. The influence of such reading is injurious to both the mind<br />

and the body; it weakens the intellect and brings a fearful tax upon the<br />

physical strength. At times your mind is scarcely sane because the<br />

imagination has been overexcited and diseased by reading fictitious stories.<br />

The mind should be so disciplined that all its powers will be symmetrically<br />

developed. A certain course of training may invigorate special faculties and<br />

at the same time leave other faculties without improvement so that their<br />

usefulness will be crippled. The memory is greatly injured by ill-chosen<br />

reading, which has a tendency to unbalance the reasoning powers and to<br />

create nervousness, weariness of the brain, and prostration of the entire<br />

system. If the imagination is constantly overfed and stimulated by fictitious<br />

literature, it soon becomes a tyrant, controlling all the other faculties of the<br />

mind and causing the taste to become fitful and the tendencies perverse.<br />

You are a mental dyspeptic. Your mind has been crammed with<br />

knowledge of all sorts,--politics, history, theology, and anecdote,--only a part<br />

542

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