"Now,
all works of fiction are full of scenes of imaginary distress, which
are constructed to impress the sensibilities. The fatal objection to
the habitual contemplation of these scenes is this, that while they
deaden the sensibilities, they afford no occasion or call for the
exercise of active sympathies. Thus the feelings of the heart
are cultivated into a monstrous, an unnatural, and unamiable
disproportion.[2] He who goes forth in the works of active
benevolence among the real sufferings of his fellow creatures will
have his sensibilities impressed, and at the same time will have
opportunity to cultivate the principle of benevolence by its
exercise. Thus the qualities of his heart will be nurtured in
beautiful harmony, until they become an ornament to his character and
a blessing to his race. This is God's "school of morals."
This is God's plan for developing and training the emotions and moral
impulses. "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father
is this, to visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction,
and to keep himself unspotted from the world." [James 1.27.] And
the adaptation of this plan of cultivation to the laws of man's
nature shows that the inventor is the same wise Being who created
man. It is by practicing this precept of the gospel that man is truly
humanized. But the beholder of these fictitious sorrows has his
sympathies impressed, and therefore deadened, while those sympathies
must necessarily remain inert and passive, because the whole scene is
imaginary. And thus, by equal steps, he becomes at once sentimental
and inhuman. While the Christian, whose heart has been trained in
the school of duty, goes forth with cheerful and active sympathies in
exercises of beneficence towards the real woes of his neighbor, the
novel reader sits weeping over the sorrows of imaginary heroes and
heroines, too selfish and lazy to lay down the fascinating volume and
reach forth his hand to relieve an actual sufferer at his door." Read the rest HERE
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