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1. One of the wants of the cities of this country is a great bonfire of bad books and newspapers. The printing press is the mightiest agency on earth for good and for evil. I believe that the greatest scourge that has ever come upon this nation has been that of unclean journalism. The London plague was nothing to it. That counted its victims by thousands, but this modern pest has already shovelled its millions into the charnel house of the morally dead.

2. What books and newspapers shall we read? Shall our minds be the receptacle of everything that an author has a mind to write? Shall there be no distinction between the tree of life and the tree of death? 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 believe that ninety-nine out of one hundred are destructive to the last degree. Stand aloof from all books —

I. THAT GIVE FALSE: PICTURES OF HUMAN LIFE. If you depended upon much of the literature of the day, you would get the idea that life, instead of being something earnest, practical, is a fitful and fantastic and extravagant thing. 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.

II. 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. Once in a while there is a mind like a loadstone, which, plunged amid steel and brass filings, gathers up the steel and repels the brass. But it is generally just the opposite. If you attempt to plunge through a hedge of burrs to get one blackberry, you will get more burrs than blackberries. You cannot afford to read a bad book, however good you are. Alas, if through curiosity, as many do, you pry into an evil book, your curiosity is as dangerous as that of the man who should take a torch into a gunpowdermill merely to see whether it would really blow up or not.

III. WHICH CORRUPT THE IMAGINATION AND INFLAME THE PASSIONS. Today, under the nostrils of your city, there is a fetid, reeking, unwashed literature, enough to poison all the fountains of public virtue.

IV. WHICH ARE APOLOGETIC OF CRIME. It is a sad thing that some of the best and most beautiful book bindery, and some of the finest rhetoric, has been brought to make sin attractive. Vice is a horrible thing. 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 booksellers who distribute them, though you may escape in this world, 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.

V. THE LASCIVIOUS PICTORIAL LITERATURE OF THE DAY IS MOST TREMENDOUS FOR RUIN. These death warrants of the soul are at every street corner. There may be enough poison in one bad picture to poison one soul, and that soul may poison ten, and ten fifty, and the fifty hundreds, and the hundreds thousands, until nothing but the measuring line of eternity can tell the height, and depth, and ghastliness, and horror of the great undoing. At a newsstand one can guess the character of a man by the kind of:pictorial he purchases. Whern the devil fails to get a man to read a bad book, he sometimes succeeds in getting him to look at a bad picture.

VI. CHERISH GOOD BOOKS AND NEWSPAPERS. Beware of the bad ones. One column may save your soul; one paragraph may ruin it. Benjamin Franklin said that the reading of "Cotton Mather's Essay on Doing Good" moulded his entire life. The assassin of Lord Russell declared that he was led into crime by reading one vicious romance.

(T. De Witt Talmage, D. D.)

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KJV: And many that believed came, and confessed, and shewed their deeds.

WEB: Many also of those who had believed came, confessing, and declaring their deeds.