It has always required—but never more than now—no small amount of moral courage on the part of newly married couples, whose incomes are moderate, to resist the temptations of extravagant living. As the heads of young men are often turned by the reports of great fortunes suddenly acquired, so the ambition seizes upon many a young wife to cut a figure in "society." Instead of "the household—motions light and free" that Wordsworth describes, the handmaid of fashion leads the hollow life of "keeping up appearances." If nothing worse than the slavery of debt is incurred, home life becomes a counterfeit of happiness; but any one who watches the daily papers will sometimes see obituaries there more saddening than those which appear under the head of "Deaths," it is the list of detected defaulters or peculators or swindlers of some description—often belonging to the most respectable families. While the ruin of those evil-doers is sometimes caused by club life or dissipated habits, yet, in a large number of cases, the temptation to fraud has been the snare of extravagant living.
In my long experience as a city pastor I have watched the careers of thousands of married pairs. One class have begun modestly in an unfashionable locality with plain dress and frugal expenditure They have eaten the wholesome bread of independence. I wish that every young woman would display the good sense of a friend of mine, who received an offer of marriage from a very intelligent and very industrious, but poor young man who said to her: "I hear that you have offers of marriage from young men of wealth; all that I can offer you is a good name, sincere love and plain lodgings at first in a boarding house." She was wise enough to discover the "jewel in the leaden casket" and accept his hand. He became a prosperous business man and an officer of my church. As for the other class, who begin their domestic career by a pitiable craze to "get into society" and to keep up with their "set" in the vain show, is their fate not written in the chronicles of haggard and jaded wives, and of husbands drowned in debt or driven perhaps to stock-gambling or some other refuge of desperation?
In another portion of this autobiography I have uttered a prayer for the revival of soul-kindling eloquence in the pulpit. In this age of dizzy ballooning in finance and social extravagance, my prayer is: "Oh, for the revival of old fashioned, sturdy, courageous frugality that 'hath clean hands and a clean heart, and hath not lifted up its soul to vanity!'"
"Do you not discover a great advance in educational facilities and in the enlargement of means to popular knowledge?" To this question I am happy to give an affirmative reply. Schools and universities are more richly endowed and our public schools have been greatly improved in many directions. Among the educated classes, reading clubs and societies for discussing sociological questions are more numerous, and so are free lectures among the humbler classes. Books have been multiplied—and at cheaper prices—to an enormous extent. In my childhood, books adapted to the reach of children numbered not more than a score or two; now they are multiplied to a degree that is almost bewildering to the youthful mind. Newspapers printed for them, such as the Youth's Companion and the National Society's Temperance Banner, were then utterly unknown. The sacred writer of the ecclesiastics needs not to tell the people of this generation: "That of making many books there is no end."
It is not, however, a matter for congratulation that so large a portion of the volumes that are most read are works of fiction. In most of our public libraries the novels called for are far in excess of all the other books. Let any one scrutinize the advertising columns of literary journals, and he will see that the only startling figures are those which announce the enormous sale of popular works of fiction. I am not uttering a tirade against any book simply because it is fictitious. Our Divine Master spoke often in parables; Bunyan's matchless allegories have guided multitudes of pilgrims towards the Celestial City. Fiction in the clean hands of that king of romancers, Sir Walter Scott, threw new light on the history and scenes of the past. Such characters as "Jennie Deans" and her godly father might have been taken from John Banyan's portrait gallery; Lady Di Vernon is the ideal of young womanhood. Fiction has often been a wholesome relief to a good man's overworked and weary brain. Many of the recent popular novels are wholesome in their tone and the historical type often instructive. The chief objection to the best of them is that they excite a distaste in the minds of thousands for any other reading. Exclusive reading of fiction is to any one's mind just what highly spiced food and alcoholic stimulants are to the body. The increasing rage for novel reading betokens both a famine in the intellect, and a serious peril to the mental and spiritual life. The honest truth is that quite too large a number of fictitious works are subtle poison. The plots of some of the most popular novels turn on the sexual relation and the violation in some form of the seventh commandment. They kindle evil passions; they varnish and veneer vice; they deride connubial purity; they uncover what ought to be hid, and paint in attractive hues what never ought to be seen by any pure eye or named by any modest tongue. Another objection to many of the most advertised works of fiction is that they deal with the sacred themes of religion in a very mischievous and misleading manner. A few popular writers of fiction present evangelical religion in its winning features; they preach with the pen the same truths that they preach from the pulpit. Two of the perils that threaten American youths are a licentious stage and a poisonous literature. A highly intelligent lady, who has examined many of the novels printed during the last decade, said to me: "The main purpose of many of these books is to knock away the underpinning of the marriage relation or of the Bible." If parents give house room to trashy or corrupt books, they cannot be surprised if their children give heart-room to "the world, the flesh, and the evil one." When interesting and profitable books are so abundant and so cheap, this increasing rage for novels is to me one of the sinister signs of the times.
Within the last two or three decades there has been a most marked change as to the directions in which the human intellect has exerted its highest activities. This change is especially marked in the literature of the two great English-speaking nations. For example, there are now in Great Britain no poets who are the peers of Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning;—no brilliant essayists who are the peers of Carlyle and Macaulay, and no novelists who are the peers of Scott, Dickens and Thackeray. In the United States we have no poets who are a match for Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier and Holmes; and no essayists who are a match for Emerson and James Russell Lowell—no jurists who are the rivals of Marshall, Kent and Story; and no living historians equal Bancroft, Prescott and Motley. These facts do not necessarily indicate (as some assert) a widespread intellectual famine. The most probable explanation of the fact is that the mental forces in our day exert themselves in other directions. This is an age of scientific research and scientific achievement. It is an age of material advancement, and in those lines in which the human mind can "seek out many inventions." The whole trend of human thought is under transformation. In ancient days "a man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon thick trees." The man is famous now who makes some useful mechanical invention, or explores some unknown territory, or bridges the oceans with swift steamers, or belts the earth with new railways, or organizes powerful financial combinations. If the law of demand and supply is as applicable to mental products as it is to the imports of commerce, then we may readily understand that the realm of the ideal, which was ruled by the Wordsworths, Carlyles and Longfellows, should be supplanted by a realm in which the master minds should be political economists, or explorers, or railway kings, or financial magnates, or empire-builders of some description. The philosophical and poetical yield to the practical, when "cui bono?" is the lest question which challenges all comers. This change, if it be an actual one, may bring its losses as well as its gains. We are thankful for all the precious boons which inventive genius has brought to us—for telegraphs, and telephones, and photographic arts, for steam engines and electric motors, for power presses and sewing machines, for pain-killing chloroform, and the splendid achievements of skillful surgery. But the mind has its necessities as well as the body; and we hope and pray that the human intellect may never be so busy in materialistic inventions that it cannot give us an "Ode to Duty," and a "Happy Warrior," a "Snow Bound," and a "Thanatopsis," an "Evangeline" and a "Chambered Nautilus," a "Pippa Passes" or a "Biglow Papers," an "In Memoriam" or a "Locksley Hall."
One characteristic of the present time is the radical and revolutionary spirit which condemns everything that is "old," especially in the realm of religion. It arrogantly claims that the "advanced thought" of this highly cultured age has broken with the traditional beliefs of our benighted ancestors, and that modern congregations are too highly enlighted to accept those antiquated theologies. No pretentions could be more preposterous. Methinks that those stalwart farmers of New England, who on a wintry Sabbath, sat and eagerly devoured for an hour the strong meat of such theological giants as Jonathan Edwards, and Emmons and Bellamy and Dwight, would laugh to scorn the ridiculous assumption of the present day congregations, many of whom have fed on little else during the week but novels and newspapers. This revolutionary spirit is expert in pulling down; it is a sorry bungler at rebuilding. Nothing is too sacred for its assaults. The iconoclasts who belong to the most extreme and destructive school of "higher criticism" have reduced a large portion of God's revealed word utterly to tatters. King David has been exiled from the Psalter; but no "sweet singers" have yet turned up who could have composed those matchless minstrelsies. Paul is denied the authorship of the Epistle to the Romans; but the mighty mind has not been discovered which produced what Coleridge called the "profoundest book in existence." The Scripture miracles are discarded, but Christianity, which is the greatest miracle of all, is not accounted for. The "new theology" which has well nigh banished the supernatural from the Bible pays an homage to the principle of "evolution," which is due only to the Almighty Creator of the universe. Spurgeon has wittily said that if we are not the product of God's creating hand, but are only the advanced descendants of the ape, then we ought to conduct our devotions accordingly, and address our daily petitions "not to our Father which is in Heaven, but to our father which is up a tree."
I do not belong to that class which is irreverently styled "old fogies," for I hold that genuine conservatism consists in healthful and regular progress; and it has been my privilege to take an active part in a great many reformatory movements; yet I am more warmly hospitable to a truth which has stood the test of time and of trial. There are many things in this world that are improved by age. Friendship is one of them, and I have found that it takes a great many new friends to make an old one. My Bible is all the dearer to me, not only because it has pillowed the dying heads of my father and my mother, but because it has been the sure guide of a hundred generations of Christians before them. When the boastful innovators offer me a new system of belief (which is really a congeries of unbeliefs) I say to them: "the old is better." Twenty centuries of experience shared by such intellects as Augustine, Luther, Pascal, Calvin, Newton, Chalmers, Edwards, Wesley and Spurgeon are not to be shaken by the assaults of men, who often contradict each other while contradicting God's truth. We have tested a supernaturally inspired Bible for ourselves. As my eloquent and much loved friend, Dr. McLaren, of Manchester has finely said: "We decline to dig up the piles of the bridge that carries us over the abyss because some voices tell us that it is rotten. It is perfectly reasonable to answer, 'We have tried the bridge and it bears.' Which, being translated into less simple language, is just the assertion of certitude, built on facts and experience, which leaves no place for doubt. All the opposition will be broken into spray against this rock-bulwark: 'Thy words were found, and I did eat them, and they are the joy and rejoicing of my heart.'"