The clarion. [volume] (Jackson, Miss.) 1883-1888, 1884-05-28

~ Al P1I OA AiGCIaAuIG anu GuEl
shall bring to bear upon it some gran
glorious infallible, unmistakable Chr
tian principles. God help me to spes
with reference to the account must
last render. God help you to listen.
charge you in the first place to stan
aloof from all books that give false pi
lures of human life. Life is neither
tragedy nor a farce. Men are not a
either knaves or heroes Women al
neither angels nor faries. And vet
you depended upon much of the liter,
ture of the day you would get the ide
that life, instead of being somethin
earnest, something practical, IS a fitfu
and fantastic and extravagant thing
How poorly prepared are that youn
man and woman for the duties of tO-da,
who spent last night wading through
brilliant passages descriptive OF magnifi
, cent knavery and wickedness. The MAJ
! will be looking all day long for hi
. heroine in the tinshop, by the forge, il
the factory, or in the counting room
and he will not find her, and he will b,
dissatisfied. A man who gives himsel
up TO the indiscriminate reading ot
novels will be nerveless, inane and /
nuisance. He will be fit neither for the
store, nor the shop, nor the fields. a
woman who gives herself up to the
! INDIscRIMTNATE READING OF NOVELS
will be untitled for the duties of wife
mother, sister, daughter. There she is
hair disheyeled, countenance vacant
cheeks pale, hands trembling, bursting
into tears at midnight over the woes OF
some unfortunate. In the daytime,
when she ought to be busy, staring by
the half-hOur g nothing; biting her
finger-nails to e quick. The carpet
that was plain Before will be palmer
after having, through romance, all
night long wandered in tesselated halls
of castles, and your industrious compan-
ion will be more unattractiye than ever
now that you have walked in the
romance through parks with plumed
princess or lounged in the arbor with
the polished desperate. Oh, these con-
! lirmed nOvel-readtrs, they are unfit for
| this life which is tremendous discip-
line. They know not how to 60 through
! the furnaces of trial where they must
pass and they are untitled for world
where everything we gain we achieve by
hard, long-eontinning 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 have
the two elements in them, the good and
the bad; which stuck to you? The bad.
The heart of most people is like sieve,
Il, l. h. iola Of rrolH
fall through but keeps the great cinders.
Once in while there is mind like a
loadstone, which, plunged amidst 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 get more burrs than
blackberries. You cannot afford to read
bad book, however good you are. You
say "the influence is insignificant" /
tell you that the scratch of a pin has
sometimes produced lockjaw. 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 torch into a
gunpowder- mill, merely to see whether
it would blow up or not In Il menagerie
in New York, man put his hand
through the bars of a black leopard's
cage. The animals hide looked so sleek
and bright and beautiful. He just
stroked it once The monster seized
him, and he drew forth hand torn and
mangled and bleeding. Oh, touch not
evil, even with the faintest strike;
though it may be glossy and beautiful,
touch it not, lest you pull forth your
soul torn and bleeding under the clutch
of the black leopard. ''But," you say,
chow can | find out whether book is
good or bad without reading it?" There
Is always something suspicious about
bad book. | never knew an exception.
Something suspicious in the index or
the style of illustration. This venOmous
reptile almost always carries a warning
rattle.
Again charge you to stand off from
all those books which corrupt the imagi-
nation and inhame the passions. | do
not refer now to that kind of a book
which the villain has under his coat
waiting for the school to be let out, and
then looking both ways to see that there
is no policeman around the block, offers
the book to your son on his way home.
| do not speak of thst kind of literature,
but that which evades the law and comes
out in polished style, and with acute
plot sounds the tocsip that rouses up all
the baser passions of the soul. Years
ago a French lady came forth as an au-
thoress under the assumed name of
George Sand. She smoked cigars. She
wore gentleman's apparel. She stepped
off the bounds of deeeney. She wrote
with a style ardent, eloquent, mighty in
its gloom, horrible in its unehastity glow
ing in it's verbiage, vivid it its portrait
ure. damning in its effects, transfusing
into the libraries and houses of the
world an evil that has not even begun
to relent, and she has her copyists in all
lands. To-day under the nostrils of
your city there is
FETID, RERKING, UNwAsHED LITERA-
TURE,
enough to poisoa all the fountains of
public virtue and smite your sons and
daughters as with the wing of a destroy
ing angel, and it is time that the minis
tiers of the Gospel blew the trumpet and
rallied the forces of righteousness, all
armed to the teeth in this great battle
against depraved literature. Why are
50 Der cent. of the criminals in the jails
and penitentiaries of the United States
under twenty-one years of age? Many
of them under seventeen, under sixteen,
under fifteen, under fourteen, under
thirteen. Walk along one of the corri-
dors of the Tombs prison in New York
and look for yourselves. Bad books,
bad newspapers bewitehed them as soon
as they got out of the cradle. "Oh,"
saws one, 81 am business man, and |
have no time to examine what my chill
dren read. have no time to inspect
the books that come into my household.
| If your children were threatened with
typhoid fever, would you have time to
90 for the d0ctor2 Would you have
time to watch the progress of the disease?
Would you have time for the funeral?
| In the presence of my God warn you
of the fact that your children are
threatened with moral and spiritual
| typhus. 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.
Again, abstain from those books which
are apoIogetic Of crime. 1t is sad
thing that some of the best and most
beautiful book bindery and some of the
finest rhetoric have been brought to
make sin attractive. Vics is a horrible
thing. anyhow. 1t Is born in shame,
and Il dies bowling in the darkness. In
this world ii is scoarged with whip Of
scorpions, but afterward the thunders of
Gods wrath pursue It ACROSS a bonnd-
les desert, beating It Kith ruin and woe.
When you come to paint carnality, do
not paint it rs looking from behind
embroidered curtains or through lattice
Iof royal seraglio. but as wTithing in the
agonies Of 3 city hospital. Cursed be
tise hooks shat try 10 make impuritv