Rensselaer Republican, Volume 23, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 March 1891 — EVIL LITERATURE. [ARTICLE]

EVIL LITERATURE.

THE THIRD GREAT CURSECFOUR GREAT CITIES. A Plague of th- Land of Egypt With Us To 1). y—How it Cam be Driven BackDr. Talmage’a Sermon, v Dr. Talmage preached at Brooklyn and New York, Sunday and Sunday night, the third of the series on the “Plagues of the Great Cities.” Text, Exodus viii., 6-7. He referred at some length to the plague of frogs in Egypt, and then said: Now that plague of frogs has come back upon the earth. It is abroad today. It is smiting this Nation. It comes in the shape of corrupt literature. These frogs hop into the store, the shop, the office, the banking house, the factory, intp the home, into the cellar, into the garret, on the drawing room table, on the shelf of thelibrary. While the lad is reading the bad book the teacher’s face is turned the other way. One of these frogs hops upon the page. While the young woman is reading the forbidden novelette after retiring at night, reading by gaslight, one of these frogs leaps upon the page. Indeed, they have hopped upon the news stands of the country, and the mails at the postoffice shake out into letter trough hundreds of them. The plague has taken at different times possession of the country. It is one of the most loathesome, one of the most frightful, one of the most ghastly of the ten plagues .of our modern cities. There is a vast number of hooks and newspapers printed and published which ought never to see the light. They are filled with a pestilence that makes the land swelter with a moral epidemic. The greatest blessing that ever came to this Nation is that of an elevated literature, and the greatest scourge has been that of unclean literature . This last 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 moral 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 Hudson tracks was not long enough nor large enough to carry the beastliness and the putrefaction which have been gathered up in bad books and newspapers of this land in the last twenty years. The literature of a nation decides the fate qf a nation. Good books, good morals. Bad books, bad morals. I bogin with the lowest of all the literature, that which does not even pretend to be respectable—from cover to co' Ur-bloteh of leprosy. There ftre i. ». * v hose'entire businass it is to di =1 • of that kind of literature, r: They display it before' the school hoy on his way homo. They get the catalogues of schools and colleges, take the names and postoffice addresses, and tend their advertisements and their circulars and their pamphlets and their books to every one of them. In the possession of these dealers in bad literature were found 900,000 names and postoffice addresses to whom It was thought it might he profitable to lend these corrupt things. In the year ! 873 there were 165 establishments engaged in printing cheap, corrupt liter* ature. From one publishing house there went out twenty different styles of corrupt books. Although over 30 tons of vile literature have been destroyed by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, still there is enough of it lejt in this country to bring down upotT Us the thunderbolts of an incensed God.

- Ia the year 1868 the evil had becOBA so great in this country that the Congress of the United States passed a law forbidding the transmission of bad literature through the United States mails; but there were large loops in thac law through which criminals might crawl out and the law was a dead failure—that law of 1868. But in 1876 another law was passed by the Congress of the United States against the transmission of corrupt literature through the mails—a grand law, a potent law, a Christian law—and under that law multitudes of these scoundrels have been arrested, their property confiscated, and they themselves thrown into the penitentiaries, where they belonged. Now, my friends, how are we to war against this corrupt literature,and how are the frogs of this Egyptian plague to be slain 3 First of all by the prompt and inexorable execution of the law. Let all good postpiasters and United States District Attorneys and detectives and reformers concert in their action to stop this plague. When Sir Rowland Hill spent his life in trying to secure cheap postage, not only for England but for all the world, and to open the blessing of the post-office to all honest business,and to all messages of charity and kindness and affection, for all healthful intercommunication; he did not intend to make vice easy or to fill the ihail bags of the United States with the scabs of such a leprosy. It ought not to be in the power of every bad man who can raise '& one cent stamp for a circular or a two cent stamp for a letter to blast a man or destroy a home. Tb.e postal service of this country must be kept clean, and we must all understand that ttye swift retributions of the United States government hover over every violation of the letter box. '1 here are thousands of men and women in this country, some for personal gain, some through innate depravity, some through a spirit of revenge, who wish to use this great qvenue of convenience ned intelligence for purposes revengeful, salacious and diabolic.

Wake up the law. Wake up hll its t penalties. Let every court room on ; this subject be a Sinai thunderous and aflame. Let the convicted oTenders be sent for the full term to Sing Sing or Harrisburg. I am not talking about what cannot be done. lam talking about what is being done. A great many of the printing presses that gave themselves entirely to the publication of vile literature have been stopped or have gone into business less obnoxious. What has thf'own off, what has kept off the rail trains of this country for some time back nearly all the leprous periodicals? Those of us who have been on the railroads have noticed a great change in the last few months and the last year or two. Why have nearly all those vile periodicals been kept off the rail trains for sometime back? Who effected it? These societies for the purification of railroad literature gave warning to the publishers and warning to railroad companies, and warning to conductors and waraipg to newsboys, to keep the infernal stuff off the trains. How have so many of the newsstands of our great cities been purified? How has so much of this iniquity been balked? By moral suasion? Oh, no. You might as well go into a jungle of the East Indies and put a cobra on the neck, and with profound argument try to persuade it that it is morally wrong to bite and to sting and to poison any thing. The only answer to your argument would be an uplifted head and a his 9 and a sharp,reeking tooth struck into your arteries. The only argument for a cobra is a shotgun, and the only argument for these dealers in impure literature is the clutch of the police and bean soup in a penitentiary. The law! The law! I invoke to consummate the work so grandly begun! Another way in which we are to drive back this plague of Egyptian frogs is by filling the minds of our young people with a healthful literature. Ido not mean to say that all the books and newspapers in our families ought to be religious books and newspapers, or that every song ought to be aung to the tune of “Old Hundred. 1 ' I have no sympaty with the attempt to make the young old. I would rather join in a crusade toJceep the young young. Boyhood and girls hood must not be abbreviated. But there are good books, good histories, good biographies, good works of fiction, good books of all styles, with which we are to fill the minds of the young, so that there will bo no more room for the useless and the vicious than there is room for chaff in a bushel measure which is already filled with Michigan wheat.

Why are 60 per cent, of the criminals in the Jails and Penitentiaries of the United States to-day under 21 years of age? Many of them under 17, under 16, under 15, under 14, under 13. Walk along the corridors of the Tombs prison in New York and look for yourselves. Bad books, bad newspapers, bewitched them as soon as they got-out of the cradle. Beware of all those stories which end wrtmg. Beware of books which make the road that ends in perdition seem to end in paradise. Do not glorify the dirk and the pistol. Do not call the desperado brave or the libertine gallant. Teach our young people that if they go down into the swamps and marshes to watch the jack-o’-lanters dance on the decay and rottenness, they will catch malaria and death. •‘Oh!” sayß some one, ‘lama busi* ness man and I have no time to exam' ine what my children read. I have nO time to inspect the books that come in to ray household. ” If your children were threatened with typhoid fever, would you have time to go for the doctor? Would you have time :-to -watch the progress of the disease? Would you have time for the funeral? In the presence of my God I warn you of the fact that your children are threatened with moral and spiritual typhoid, and that unless the thing be stopped, it will be to them funeral of body, funeral of mind, funeral of soul. Three funerals in one day. My word is to this vast multitude of young people: Do not touch, do not borrow, do not buy a corrupt book or a corrupt picture. A book will decide a man's destiny for good or for evil. The book you read yesterday may have decided you for tinj.6 and for eternity, or it may be a book that may come into your possess sion to-morrow.

Another way in which we shall fight back this corrupt literature and kill the frogs of Egypt is by rolling over them the Christian printing press, which shall give plenty of healthful reading to all adults. All these men and women are reading to all adults. All these men and women are reading men and women. What are you reading? Abstain from all those books which, ~while they had some good things about them, have also an admixture of evil. You have read books that had two elements in them, the good and the bad, which struck to you The bad! The heart of most people is lik a sieve, which lets the small particles of gold fall through, but keeps the great cinders. Once in awhile there is a mind like a loadstone, which plunged amid steel and brass filings, gathors up the steel and repels the brass. But it is generally jus¥ the opposite. If you. attempt to plunge through a fence of burrs to get one blackberry, you will get more burrs than blackberries. You can not afford to read a bad book bowevor good you are. You say: "The influence is insignificant.” I tell you that the scratch of a pin has somotimes produced the lock-jaw. Alas, if through curiosity, as many do, you pry into an evil book, your cariosity is as dangerous ns that of tho man who would take a torch into a gunpowder mill, merely to seo. whether it would really blow up or not. In a

menagrle, a man put his arm through the bars of the black leopard’s cageThe animal’s hide looked so sleek, and bright and beautiful. He just stroked it once. The monster seized him, and he drew forth a hand torn, and mangled, and bleeding. O, touch not evil even with tbe| faitest stroke! Though it may be glossy and beautiful, touch it not, less you pull forth your soul torn and bleeding under thji clut’h of the black serpent. “But,” you say, •‘how can I find out whether a book i good or bad without reading it?” There Is always something suspicious about a had book. I never knew an exception—something suspicious in the index or style of illustration. Thi ; venomous reptile almost carries a warning rattle. This clock strikes midnight. A fair form bends over a romance. Eyes flash fire. The breath quick and irregular Occasionally the color dashes to the cheek, and then dies out. The hand* tremble as though a guardian spirit were trying to shake the deadly book out of the grasp. Hot tears fall. Sue laughs, with a shrill voice that drops dead at it 9 own sound. The sweat on her brow is the spray dashed up from the river of death. The clock striks four, and the rosy dawirsoorr gins to look through the latitude upon the pale form that lootes like a detained specter of the night. Soon in a mad house she will mistake her ring lets for curling serpents, and thrust her white hand through the bars of the prison and smite her head, rub bing it back as though to push the scalp from the skull, shrieking: “My brain! my brain!” Oh, stand off from that! Why will you go sounding your way amid the reefs and warning buoys,when there is such a vast ocean in. which youmay voyage all sail set? 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 impression on clay, and then onto barks of trees to papyrus, and from the 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’ Examine the printing of it, 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 Siniatic commands were written on tables of stones, 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 brightness, all the centuries to make it possible. A book! It is the chorous 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 anything I would worship that. If I burned incense to an idol, I would build an altar to that. Thank God for good books, healthful books, inspiring books, Christian book, books of men, books of women, books of God. It is with these good books that we are to overcome corrupt literature. Upon the frogs swoop with these eagles I depend much for the overthrow of iniquitous literature the mortality of books. Even good books have a hard struggle to live. Polybius wrote forty books: only five of them left. Thirty books of Tacitus have perished. Livy wrote 140 books: only thirty-five remain. iEschylus wrote -100 dramas: only ninteen remain. Varro wfotetbe biographies of over 700 great Romans: all that wealth of biography has perished. If good and valuable books have such a struggle to live, what must be the fate of that are deceased and cor rupt and blasted at the very start? They will die as the frogs when the Lprd turned back the plague. The work of Christianization will go on until there will be nothing left but good books, and they will take the supremacy of the world. May you and I see the illustrious day. - *» Lady Hester Stanhope was the daughter of the third Earl of Stanhope, and after her nearest friends had died she went to the far East, took possession of a deserted convent, threw up fortresses amid the mountains of Lebanon, opened the castle to the poor and the wretched and the 6ick who would come in. She made her castle

a home for the unfortunate. She was a devout Christian woman. She was waiting for the coming of the Lord. She expected that the Lord would descend in person, and she thought upon it until it was too much for her reason. In the magnificent stables of her palace she had two horses groomed and bridled and saddled and caparisoned, and all ready for the day in which her Lord should descend and He on one of them and she on the other should start for Jerusalem, the city of the Great King, It was a fanaticism and a delusion, but there was romance and there was splendor, and there was thrilling expectation in the dream! □ Ah. my friends, we need no earthly palfreys groomed and saddled and bridled and caparisoned for our Lord when He shall come. The horse is ready in the equerry of heaven, and the imperial rider is ready to mount. ••And I saw, and behold a white horse, and He that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto Him; and He went forth conquering and to conquer. And the armies which were in heaven followed Him on white horses and on His vesture and on Hiß thigh were written. ‘King of kings. j»nd Lord of lords.’ ” Horsemen of heaven, mount! Cavalrymen of God, rid on! Charge! Oharge! until they shall be hurled back on their haunches, the black horse of famine, and the red horse of carnage and the pale horse of deuth. Jesu? forever!