THE OPPORTUNITIES OF JOURNALISM.
And then look at the opportunities of journalism. I praise the pulpit and magnify my office, but I state a fact which you all know when I say that where the pulpit touches one person the press touches five hundred. The vast majority of people do not go to church, but all intelligent people read the newspapers. While, therefore, the responsibility of the minister is great, the responsibilities of editors and reporters is greater. Come, brother journalist, and get your ordination, not by the laying on of human hands, but by the laying on of the hands of the Almighty. To you is committed the precious reputation of men and the more precious reputation of women. Spread before our children an elevated literature. Make sin appear disgusting and virtue admirable. Believe good rather than evil. While you show up the hypocrisies of the church, show up the stupendous hypocrisies outside of the church. Be not, as some of you are, the mere echoes of public opinion; make public opinion. Let the great roll on which you write with a man’s pen be a message of light and liberty, and kindness and an awakening of moral power. But who is sufficient for these things! Not one of you without Divine help. But get that influence and the editors and reporters can go up and take this world for God and the truth. The mightiest opportunity in all the world for usefulness to-day is open before editors and reporters and publishers, whether of knowledge on foot, as in the book, or knowledge on the wing, as in the newspaper; I pray God, men of the newspaper press, whether you hear or read this sermon, that you may rise up to your full opportunity and that you may be divinely helped and rescued and blessed.
Some one might say to me: “How can you talk thus of the newspaper press when you yourself have sometimes been unfairly treated and misrepresented?” I answer that in the opportunity the newspaper press of this country and other countries have given me week by week to preach the gospel to the nations, I am put under so much obligation that I defy all editors and reporters, the world over, to write anything that shall call forth from me one word of bitter retort from now till the day of my death. My opinion is that all reformers and religious teachers, instead of spending so much time and energy in denouncing the press, had better spend more time in thanking them for what they have done for the world’s intelligence, and declaring their magnificent opportunity and urging their employment of it all for beneficent and righteous purposes.