In Guarding Against Bad Habits.
Stop before cultivating an inordinate self-conceit, and remember that real worth is mostly modest, while those persons are the vainest who have the least to be vain of.
Stop before contracting a habit of exaggeration. This is the stock-in-trade of the cheap penny-a-liner, while the strength of the true historian lies in conscientious statement.
Stop short of fancying that such exaggeration can impress others with your imaginative powers. Were this true, the grimaces of a baboon might be ascribed to emotional fine frenzy.
Stop before contracting the habit of lying, even in a harmless way. But this fault is as naturally the outgrowth of extravagance or looseness of statement, as is the noxious weed of the miscellaneous muck that stimulates it into useless being.
Stop short of listlessness in word, look and deed. A perfunctory person is never in demand, and Rip Van Winkle only indemnified society in sleeping out his twenty years.
Stop, and do nothing, rather than procrastinate indefinitely. Untrustworthiness is the final result of procrastination, and a reputation for that is tantamount to elimination from the world’s employment.
Stop far short of any indulgence that can affect your general reputation. “The two most precious things this side the grave,” says Lacon, “are our reputation and our life; the most contemptible whisper may deprive us of the one, the weakest weapon of the other.”
Stop the use of tobacco, if addicted to it, but especially in the form of chewing, the vileness of this practice is in no wise mitigated by its prevalence.
Stop smoking, also, at its first threatened inroad upon the general health. To persist in it thereafter is a confession of both moral and mental weakness.
Stop on the threshold of gambling of every description, and, if already in the toils, shut down on the practice with all the ponderosity at your command.
Stop, moreover, and understand that gambling—the worship of chance—is death to the soul, to faith in human nature, to man’s nobler attributes. In this regard, it is more literally demoralizing than alcoholic drunkenness; and there is yet to be found the veteran professional gambler who is not a materialistic atheist.
Stop, once more, and remember that every man who will play cards for money, will in time, cheat. He may set out honestly enough, but it is only a question of time before he will take an unfair advantage in self-defense. What, then, can be thought of a practice that almost necessitates dishonesty?
Stop—hold! That “D—n!” upon thy lips! Would not “Confound it!” “The deuce take it!” or simply “Bless me!” emphasize resentment or annoyance equally well? Or, still better, is there any need for emphasis at all?
Stop, above all, before falling into the profane habit, upon no provocation. A passionless, half-conscious interlarding of speech with oaths and epithets is as idiotic as it is disgusting.
Stop on the verge of becoming anecdotal to excess. Second only to the confirmed scandal-bearer is the friend whose encounter one must dodge for fear of being made the repository of some long-winded anecdote, or pointless pun.
Stop short of narrating indecent stories. Unfortunately, nearly all stories of much point that are interchanged among men are of this description; ergo, eschew the retailing of them, on your own part, altogether.
Stop before becoming the slave of any depraved appetite. To take the appetite for strong drink as an illustration, it is a terrible enchantress—siren, bacchante, or task-mistress, at will. One can seldom coquette with but he marries her at last; when, like the Lamia of the legend, she turns to a serpent in the embrace, and her dalliance is despair and death.
Stop before contracting a habit of belittling or sneering at what you do not understand. This is but the pasteboard buckler with which the fool would shield his self-love.
Stop before habitually ascribing mean or sordid motives to others upon mere conjecture.
Stop short of any habit that can fruitlessly waste one’s time or substance, since the one is more than money, because, once dissipated, it can never be replaced, and the other is the very means of life.
