The Russellville Democrat., 1888-06-28

have it's little organ supported at great expense, when with one-half the outlay column or half column of room might be rented in some semi -omnipotent secu- lar publication, and so the religious in- formation would be sent round and round the world. The world moves so swiftly to-day that news week old is stale. Give us all the great church facts and all the revival tidings the next morning or the same evening. My advice, often given to friends who propose to start a new paper, is: Don't don'ti Employ the papers al- ready started"
 Again: If you would secure the secular press as a mightier reinforcement of religion and the pulpit, extend widest and highest Christian court esies to the repre- sentatives of journalism. Give them easy chairs and plenty of room when they come to report occasions. For the most part they arc gentlemen of education and refinement graduates of colleges, with families to support by their literary craft, many of them weary with the push of business that is precarious and fiuctuat- ing, each one of them the avenue of in formation to thousands of readers, their impression of the services to be the im- pression adopted by multitudes. They
 
 or song, or prayer, and this great popul ation that tramp up and down the streets day by day and year by year, with their sorrows uncontrolled and their sins unpardoneG.
 More than s00000 people in Brooklyn and less than T5,000 in churches, so that our cities are not so much preached to by ministers of religion as by reporters. Put all journalists into our prayers and ser mons. Of all the hundred thousand ser mons preached to-day there will not be three preached to journalists, and proba- bly not one. Of all the prayers offered for classes of men innumerable the pray CTS offered for this most potential class will be so few and rare that they will be thought preachers idiosyncrasy. This world will never be brought to God until some revival of religion sweeps over the land and takes intothe Kingdom of God ed- itors and reporters, ,compositors, pressmen and newsboys. And if you have not faith enough to pray for that and toll for that you had better get out of our ranks and join the other side, for you are the unbe- lievers who make the wheels of the Lords chariot drag heavily. The great final bat tie between truth and error, the Arma- geddon, think, will not be fought with swords and shells and guns, but with pens, quill pens, steel pens, gold pens, fountain pens, and, before that, the pens must be converted. The most divinely honored weapon of the past has been the pen and the most divinely- -honored weap- on of the future will be the pen; prophets pen, and evangelist's pen, and apostles pen, followed by editors pen, and re- porter's pen, and authors pen. God save the pen. The wing of the Apocalyptic an- gel will be the printed page. The print ing press will roll ahead of Christ's chari- ot to clear the way.
 But" some one might ask, "would you make the Sunday newspaper also re- en- forcement?" Yes, would. 1 have learned to take things as they are 1 would like to see the much scoffed-at old Puritan Sabbaths come back again. 1 do not think the modern Sunday will turn out any better men and women than were your grandfathers and grandmothers under the old-fashioned Sunday. To say nothing of other results, Sunday news papers are killing editors, reporters, com positors and pressmen. Every man, wom- an and child is entitled to twenty hours of nothing to do. If the newspapers put on another set of hands that does not relieve the editorial and reportorial room of its cares and responsibilities. Our literary men die fast enough without killing them with Sunday work. But the Sunday newspaper has come to stay. It will stay good deal longer than any of us stay. What then shall we dor. Im- plore all those. who have any thing to do with issuing it to fill it with moral and | religious information, live sermons and facts eleyating. Urge them that all l divorce cases be dropped, and instead l thereof have good advice as to how hus- bands and wives ought to live lovingly l together. Put in small type the behavior l of the swindling church member, and in ] large type the contribution of some 1 Christian man toward an asylum for | feeble minded children or seaside | sanitarium. Urge all managing editors l to put meanness and impurity in type l pearl or agate, and charity, and fidelity, and Christian consistency in brevier or bourgeois. If we can not drive out the Sunday newspaper let us have the Sun day Tt wspaper converted. ] The fact is that the modern Sunday newspaper is great improvement on the old Sunday newspaper. What a beastly thing was the Sunday newspaper thirty years ago! It was enough to destroy . mans responsibility to leave the tip end of it sticking out of his coat pockets What editorials What advertisements! What | pictures! The modern Sunday newspaper | is as much an improvement on the old | time Sunday newspaper as one hundred is more than twenty-five; in other words, | about seventy five per cent. improve ment. Who knows that by prayer and | kindly consultation with our literary friends we may have it lifted into posi- tod night, and only distributed, like the Aiaer- ! icdR Messenger, or the Missionary Journal, | or the Hunddy- School AdU0cdte, on Sabbath
 mornings. All things are possible with | God, and my faith is up until nothing in the way of religious victory would sur prise me. All the newspaper printing l presses of the earth are going to be the Lords, and telegraph and telephone and | type will yet announce nations born ill a day. The first book ever printed was the Bible by Faust and his son- in- law Schoef- fer in 1460 and that conservation of type to the Holy Scrip lures was a prophecy of the great mission of printing for the | evangelization of all the nations The father of the American printing press was a clergyman, Rev. Jesse Glover, and that was d prophecy of the religious use that the Gospel ministry in this country were to make of the types
 Again, we shall secure the secular press as mightIer reinforcement of religion and the pulpit by making our religious utterances more interesting and spirited, and then the press will reproduce them. ] On the way to church some fifteen years ago a journalist said thing that has kept me ever since thinking.
 Are you going to give us any points to- dayY"
 "What do you meanY" I asked. He said:
 ''I mean by that any thing that will be striking enough to be remembered"
 Then I said to myself: What right have we in our pulpits and Sunday schools to take the time of people five have nothing