The Abominations of Modern Society

by T. De Witt Talmage

In the United States, the people would not average one such book a year for each individual!

Whence, then, this intelligence—this capacity to talk about all themes, secular and religious—this acquaintance with science and art—this power to appreciate the beautiful and grand? Next to the Bible, the newspaper,—swift-winged, and everywhere present, flying over the fences, shoved under the door, tossed into the counting-house, laid on the work-bench, hawked through the cars! All read it: white and black, German, Irishman, Swiss, Spaniard, American, old and young, good and bad, sick and well, before breakfast and after tea, Monday morning, Saturday night, Sunday and week day!

I now declare that I consider the newspaper to be the grand agency by which the Gospel is to be preached, ignorance cast out, oppression dethroned, crime extirpated, the world raised, heaven rejoiced, and God glorified.

In the clanking of the printing-press, as the sheets fly out, I hear the voice of the Lord Almighty proclaiming to all the dead nations of the earth,—"Lazarus, come forth!" And to the retreating surges of darkness,—"Let there be light!" In many of our city newspapers, professing no more than secular information, there have appeared during the past ten years some of the grandest appeals in behalf of religion, and some of the most effective interpretations of God's government among the nations.

That man has a shrivelled heart who begrudges the five pennies he pays to the newsboy who brings the world to his feet. There are to-day connected with the editorial and reportorial corps of newspaper establishments men of the highest culture and most unimpeachable morality, who are living on the most limited stipends, martyrs to the work to which they feel themselves called. While you sleep in the midnight hours, their pens fly, and their brains ache in preparing the morning intelligence. Many of them go, unrested and unappreciated, their cheeks blanched and their eyes half quenched with midnight work, toward premature graves, to have the "proof-sheet" of their life corrected by Divine mercy, glad at last to escape the perpetual annoyances of a fault-finding public, and the restless, impatient cry for "more copy."

"Nations are to be born in a day." Will this great inrush come from personal presence of missionary or philanthropist? No. When the time comes for that grand demonstration I think the press in all the earth will make the announcement, and give the call to the nations. As at some telegraphic centre, an operator will send the messages, north and south, and east and west, San Francisco and Heart's Content catching the flash at the same instant; so, standing at some centre to which shall reach all the electric wires that cross the continent and undergird the sea, some one shall, with the forefinger of the right hand, click the instrument that shall thrill through all lands, across all islands, under all seas, through all palaces, into all dungeons, and startle both hemispheres with the news, that in a few moments shall rush out from the ten thousand times ten thousand printing-presses of the earth: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good-will toward men!"

You see, therefore, that, in the plain words to be written, I have no grudges to gratify against the newspaper press. Professional men are accustomed to complain of injustice done them, but I take the censure I have sometimes received and place it on one side the scales, and the excessive praise, and place it on the other side, and they balance, and so I consider I have had simple justice. But we are all aware that there is a class of men in towns and cities who send forth a baleful influence from their editorial pens. There are enough bad newspapers weekly poured out into the homes of our country to poison a vast population. In addition to the home manufacture of iniquitous sheets, the mail-bags of other cities come in gorged with abominations. New York scoops up from the sewers of other cities, and adds to its own newspaper filth. And to-night, lying on the tables of this city, or laid away on the shelf, or in the trunk, for more private perusal, are papers the mere mention of the names of which would send a blush to the cheek, and make the decent and Christian world cry out: "God save the city!"

There is a paper published in Boston of outrageous character, and yet there are seven thousand copies of that paper coming weekly to New York for circulation. I will not mention the name, lest some of you should go right away and get it. It is wonderful how quick the fingers of the printer-boy fly, but the fingers of sin and pollution can set up fifty thousand types in an instant. The supply of bad newspapers in New York does not meet the insatiable appetite of our people for refuse, and garbage, and moral swill. We must, therefore, import corrupt weeklies published elsewhere, that make our newspaper stands groan under the burden.

But we need not go abroad. There are papers in New York that long ago came to perfection of shamelessness, and there is no more power in venom and mud and slime to pollute them. They have dashed their iniquities into the face of everything decent and holy. And their work will be seen in the crime and debauchery and the hell of innumerable victims. Their columns are not long and broad enough to record the tragedies of their horrible undoing of immortal men and women.

God, after a while, will hold up these reeking, stenchful, accursed sheets, upon which they spread out their guilt, and the whole universe will cry out for their damnation. See the work of bad newspapers in the false tidings they bring! There are hundreds of men to-day penniless, who were, during the war, hurled from their affluent positions by incorrect accounts of battles that shook the money-market, and the gold gamblers, with their hoofs, trampled these honest men into the mire. And many a window was hoisted at the hour of midnight as the boy shouted: "Extra! Extra!" And the father and mother who had an only son at the front, with trembling hand, and blanched cheek, and sinking heart, read of battles that had never occurred. God pity the father and mother who have a boy at the front when evil tidings come! If an individual makes a false statement, one or twenty persons may be damaged; but a newspaper of large circulation that wilfully makes a misstatement in one day tells fifty thousand falsehoods.