XIX.
PESTIFEROUS LITERATURE.
THE PRINTING-PRESS THE MIGHTIEST AGENCY ON EARTH FOR GOOD AND FOR EVIL--THE FLOOD OF IMPURE AND LOATHSOME LITERATURE--WHAT CAN WE DO TO ABATE THIS PESTILENCE?--WHAT BOOKS AND NEWSPAPERS SHALL WE READ?--HOW PROTECT OUR CHILDREN.
He is a brave man, who, at the right time and in the right place and manner, lifts his voice against a great evil of the day. Dr. Talmage has recently done this, with an earnestness like that of the old Hebrew prophets. His timely words of warning >an not be unfruitful:
"Of making books there is no end." True in the times so long B.C., how much more true in the times so long A.D.! We see so many books we do not understand what a book is. Stand it on end. Measure it, the height of it, the depth of it, the length of it, the breadth of it. You can not do it. Examine the paper, and estimate the progress made from the time of the impressions on clay, and then on the bark of trees, and from the bark of trees to papyrus, and from papyrus to the hide of wild beasts, and from the hide of wild beasts on down until the miracles of our modern paper manufactories, and then see the paper, white and pure as an infant's soul, waiting for God's inscription. A book! Examine the type of it; examine the printing, and see the progress from the time when Solon's laws were written on oak planks, and Hesiod's poems were written on tables of lead, and the Sinaitic commands were written on tables of stone, on down to Hoe's perfecting printing-press. A book! It took all the universities of the past, all the martyr-fires, all the civilizations, all the battles, all the victories, all the defeats, all the glooms, all the brightnesses, all the centuries, to make it possible. A book! It is the chorus of the ages--it is the drawing-room in which kings and queens, and orators, and poets, and historians, and philosophers come out to greet you. If I worshiped any thing on earth, I would worship that. If I burned incense to any idol, I would build an altar to that. Thank God for good books, helpful books, inspiring books, Christian books, books of men, books of women, books of God. The printing-press is the mightiest agency on earth for good and for evil. The minister of the Gospel standing in a pulpit has a responsible position, but I do not think it is as responsible as the position of an editor or a publisher. Take the simple statistics that our New York dailies now have a circulation of 450,000 per day, and add to it the fact that three of our weekly periodicals have an aggregate circulation of about one million, and then cipher, if you can, how far up and how far down and how far out reach the influences of the American printing-press. I believe the Lord intends the printing-press to be the chief means for the world's rescue and evangelization, and I think that the great last battle of the world will not be fought with swords or guns, but with types and press--a purified Gospel literature triumphing over, trampling down, and crushing out forever that which is depraved. The only way to right a bad book is by printing a good one. The only way to overcome unclean newspaper literature is by scattering abroad that which is healthful. May God speed the cylinders of an honest, intelligent, aggressive, Christian printing-press.
I have to tell you this morning that I believe that the greatest scourge that has ever come upon this nation has been that of unclean journalism. It has its victims in all occupations and departments. It has helped to fill insane asylums and penitentiaries, and alms-houses and dens of shame. The bodies of this infection lie in the hospitals and in the graves, while their souls are being tossed over into a lost eternity, an avalanche of horror and despair. The London plague was nothing to it. That counted its victims by thousands; but this modern pest has already shoveled its millions into the charnel-house of the morally dead. The longest rail train that ever ran over the Erie or the Hudson tracks was not long enough or large enough to carry the beastliness and the putrefaction which have gathered up in the bad books and newspapers of this land in the last twenty years. Now, it is amid such circumstances that I put the questions of overmastering importance to you and your families: What can we do to abate this pestilence? What books and newspapers shall we read? You see I group them together. A newspaper is only a book in a swifter and more portable shape, and the same rules which apply to book-reading will apply to newspaper-reading. What shall we read? Shall our minds be the receptacle of every thing that an author has a mind to write? Shall there be no distinction between the tree of life and the tree of death? Shall we stoop down and drink out of the trough which the wickedness of men has filled with pollution and shame? Shall we mire in impurity, and chase fantastic will-o'-the-wisps across the swamps, when we might walk in the blooming gardens of God? O, no. For the sake of our present and everlasting welfare, we must make an intelligent and Christian choice.
Standing, as we do, chin-deep in fictitious literature, the first question that many of the young people are asking me is, "Shall we read novels?" I reply, there are novels that are pure, good, Christian, elevating to the heart, and ennobling to the life. But I have still further to say, that I believe three-fourths of the novels in this day are baneful and destructive to the last degree. A pure work of fiction is history and poetry combined. It is a history of things around us, with the licenses and the assumed names of poetry. The world can never repay the debt which it owes to such fictitious writers as Hawthorne, Mackenzie, and Landor and Hunt, and others whose names are familiar to all. The follies of high life were never better exposed than by Miss Edgeworth. The memories of the past were never more faithfully embalmed than in the writings of Walter Scott. Cooper's novels are healthfully redolent with the breath of the seaweed and the air of the American forest. Charles Kingsley has smitten the morbidness of the world, and led a great many to appreciate the poetry of sound health, strong muscles, and fresh air. Thackeray did a grand work in caricaturing the pretenders to gentility and high blood. Dickens has built his own monument in his books, which are an everlasting plea for the poor and the anathema of injustice. Now, I say books like these, read at right times and read in right proportion with other books, can not help but be ennobling and purifying. But, alas! for the loathsome and impure literature that has come upon this country in the shape of novels like a freshet overflowing all the banks of decency and common sense. They are coming from some of the most celebrated publishing houses in the country. They are coming with the recommendation of some of our religious newspapers. They lie on your center-table, to curse your children and blast with their infernal fires generations unborn. You find these books in the desk of the school-miss, in the trunk of the young man, in the steamboat cabin, and on the table of the hotel reception-room. You see a light in your child's room late at night. You suddenly go in and say: "What are you doing?". "I am reading." "What are you reading?" "A book." You look at the book. It is a bad book. "Where did you get it?" "I borrowed it." Alas! there are always those abroad who would like to loan your son or daughter a bad book. Everywhere, everywhere an unclean literature. I charge upon it the destruction of ten thousand immortal souls; and I bid you this morning to wake up to the magnitude of the theme. I shall take all the world's literature--good novels and bad; travels, true or false; histories, faithful and incorrect; legends, beautiful and monstrous; all tracts, all chronicles, all epilogues, all family, city, state, national libraries--and pile them up in a pyramid of literature; and then I shall bring to bear upon it some grand, glorious, infallible, unmistakable Christian principles. God help me to speak with reference to the account I must at last render! God help you to listen.
I charge you, in the first place, to stand aloof from all books that give false pictures of human life. Life is neither a tragedy nor a farce. Men are not all either knaves or heroes. Women are neither angels nor furies. And yet if you depended upon much of the literature of the day, you would get the idea that life, instead of being something earnest, something practical, is a fitful and fantastic and extravagant thing. How poorly prepared are that young man and woman for the duties of to-day who spent last night wading through brilliant passages descriptive of magnificent knavery and wickedness! The man will be looking all day long for his heroine in the tin-shop, by the forge or in the factory, in the counting-room, and he will not find her, and he will be dissatisfied. A man who gives himself up to the indiscriminate reading of novels will be nerveless, inane, and a nuisance. He will be fit neither for the store, nor the shop, nor the field. A woman who gives herself up to the indiscriminate reading of novels will be unfitted for the duties of wife, mother, sister, daughter. There she is, hair disheveled, countenance vacant, cheeks pale, hands trembling, bursting into tears at midnight over the woes of some unfortunate. In the day-time, when she ought to be busy, staring by the half-hour at nothing; biting her finger-nails to the quick. The carpet that was plain before will be plainer after having through a romance all night long wandered in tessellated halls of castles, and your industrious companion will be more unattractive than ever now that you have walked in the romance through parks with plumed princesses or lounged in the arbor with the polished desperado. O, these confirmed novel-readers! They are unfit for this life, which is a tremendous discipline. They know not how to go through the furnaces of trial where they must pass, and they are unfitted for a world where every thing we gain we achieve by hard, long continuing, and exhaustive work.
Again, abstain from all those books which, while they have some good things about them, have also an admixture of evil. You have read books that had the two elements in them--the good and the bad. Which stuck to you? The bad! The heart of most people is like a sieve, which lets the small particles of gold fall through, but keeps the great cinders.
Again, abstain from those books which are apologetic of crime. It is a sad thing that some of the best and most beautiful bookbindery, and some of the finest rhetoric, have been brought to make sin attractive. Vice is a horrible thing, anyhow. It is born in shame, and it dies howling in the darkness. In this world it is scourged with a whip of scorpions, but afterward the thunders of God's wrath pursue it across a boundless desert, beating it with ruin and woe. When you come to paint carnality, do not paint it as looking from behind embroidered curtains, or through lattice of royal seraglio, but as writhing in the agonies of a city hospital. Cursed be the books that try to make impurity decent, and crime attractive, and hypocrisy noble! Cursed be the books that swarm with libertines and desperadoes, who make the brain of the young people whirl with villainy. Ye authors who write them, ye publishers who print them, ye book-sellers who distribute them, shall be cut to pieces; if not by an aroused community, then at last by a divine vengeance, which shall sweep to the lowest pit of perdition all ye murderers of souls. I tell you, though you may escape in this world, you will be ground at last under the hoof of eternal calamities, and you will be chained to the rock, and you will have the vultures of despair clawing at your soul, and those whom you have destroyed will come around to torment you and to pour hotter coals of fury upon your head and rejoice eternally in the outcry of your pain and the howl of your damnation! "God shall wound the hairy scalp of him that goeth on in his trespasses." The clock strikes midnight, a fair form bends over a romance. The eyes flash fire. The breath is quick and irregular. Occasionally the color dashes to the cheek, and then dies out. The hands tremble as though a guardian spirit were trying to shake the deadly book out of the grasp. Hot tears fall. She laughs with a shrill voice that drops dead at its own sound. The sweat on her brow is the spray dashed up from the river of Death. The clock strikes four, and the rosy dawn soon after begins to look through the lattice upon the pale form, that looks like a detained specter of the night. Soon in a mad-house, she will mistake her ringlets for curling serpents, and thrust her white hand through the bars of the prison and smite her head, rubbing it back as though to push the scalp from the skull, shrieking, "My brain! my brain!" O, stand off from that. Why will you go sounding your way amidst the reefs and warning buoys, when there is such a vast ocean in which you may voyage, all sail set?