And in the most comfortable way this true gentleman went on until the boy mentioned that he must be keeping him from his work.
"Not at all; not at all," was the quick and hearty response. "Not a thing to do. I cleaned up all my mail before I had my breakfast this morning.
"These letters, you mean?" he said, as the boy pointed to some letters on his desk unopened. "Oh, yes! Well, they must have come in a later mail. Well, if it will make you feel any better I'll go through them, and you can go through my books if you like. I'll trust you," he added laughingly, as Wendell Phillips's advice occurred to him.
"You like books, you say?" he went on, as he opened his letters. "Well, then, you must come into my library here at any time you are in Boston, and spend a morning reading anything I have that you like. Young men do that, you know, and I like to have them. What's the use of good friends if you don't share them? There's where the pleasure comes in."
He asked the boy then about his newspaper work: how much it paid him, and whether he felt it helped him in an educational way. The boy told him he thought it did; that it furnished good lessons in the study of human nature.
"Yes," he said, "I can believe that, so long as it is good journalism."
Edward told him that he sometimes wrote for the Sunday paper, and asked the preacher what he thought of that.
"Well," he said, "that is not a crime."
The boy asked him if he, then, favored the Sunday paper more than did some other clergymen.
"There is always good in everything, I think," replied Phillips Brooks. "A thing must be pretty bad that hasn't some good in it." Then he stopped, and after a moment went on: "My idea is that the fate of Sunday newspapers rests very much with Sunday editors. There is a Sunday newspaper conceivable in which we should all rejoice—all, that is, who do not hold that a Sunday newspaper is always and per se wrong. But some cause has, in many instances, brought it about that the Sunday paper is below, and not above, the standard of its weekday brethren. I mean it is apt to be more gossipy, more personal, more sensational, more frivolous; less serious and thoughtful and suggestive. Taking for granted the fact of special leisure on the part of its readers, it is apt to appeal to the lower and not to the higher part of them, which the Sunday leisure has set free. Let the Sunday newspaper be worthy of the day, and the day will not reject it. So I say its fate is in the hands of its editor. He can give it such a character as will make all good men its champions and friends, or he can preserve for it the suspicion and dislike in which it stands at present."