Pittsburg dispatch. [volume] (Pittsburg [Pa.]) 1880-1923, 1889-03-17
Is the Earnest Advice and Counsel of
Rev. George Hodges, but
DISSEMINATION is NECESSARY.
The Description of Novel Which Should be
Most Popular.
HOW TO SELECT BOOKS. FOR CHILDREN
WRITTEN FOR THE DrsrArcH.l

" daily paper may seem
strange neighbors; nevertheless put them
side by side, affirming that the man who
neglects either one of these important read
ings neglects an emphatic help toward the
best manhood.
No intelligent citizen of this country
ought to let day go by without reading the
last edition of the history of the world.
This is even religious duty if we believe
that the Lord of hosts is still theGod of ma
tions. God who has put rs in this nineteenth
century, and who in these years, past and
present, is working perhaps more vislbly
and wonderfully than in any time since
those recorded in the Bible, wants US to
know what is going on about US. We can
know that best from the newspapers.
If there is ever great inter-planetary
fair, and ambassadors from Mars and Nep-
tune, and the others meet upon the planet
Saturn to display the achievements of their
several spheres, what more characteristic
contribution can the ambassador from the
planet Earth present than copy of one of
our great daily newspapers? What one
product of our time shows more strikingly
what sort of an age and world this is?
DISCRIMINATION NECESSARY.
Not all newspapers are helpful, and n OF
all people are helped by reading newspa-
pers. Not all men know how to read the
newspaper. If you read it all, you have no
discrimination. If you spend too much
time over it, you are idle. If you read it in
the Athenian fashion, looking after some
new thing, forgetting one sensation in the
excitement OF another, and at the end re-
membering nothing, you are foolish, super
fetal, thoughtless; and you are not strength
ening your mind, but weakening it. When
DR.. Benjamin Rush died he left large sum
of money to library in Philadelphia upon
condition that none of 1t should be spent for
newspapers, which he called teachers of
disjointed thinking" So they are, If you do
not know how to read them.
And they teach something worse than
that. The trouble with the ordinary news
! paper is that it takes up more space telling
what the devil has been doing than what
God has been doing. IT you spend the
most time over the DEVILS part of the paper,
which is record of one days villainy, and
uncleanness, and crime, you harm both
your mind and your SOUL. And you help,
too, to harm somebody else's mind and soul.
Because you help on that sort of thing, you
encourage that kind of newspaper. Every
man who buys copy of such a sheet is in
just that measure responsible for it. He
cries 'encore."
He is not so responsible as the proprietor
and the editor who pay reporters for GER
tain sort Of work and who value items, like
imported cheese, by the strength of their
odor; but he is responsible, nevertheless. I
suppose that the newspaper business did
not amount to much when Dante wrote the
Inferno" Dante would add another
canto, if he could revise that remarkable
vision to-day.
DAYS DoINGs.
Study your morning newspaper as pict-
ure of Gods world. Read in it what your
fellowmen are thinking about, and are do
ing; what they are suffering, too, and what
is being done to help them. Read it to
find what manner of time this is, to keep
yourself in the glorious swing and surge of
it. to make yourself more the kind of man
which God wants you to be this year; end
then you will know not only what it is to
read your paper for the increasing of your
knowledge, the broadening of your SYM
pathies, and the bettering of your mind, but
even for the glory of God.
I turn from the newspaper to the novel.
1t is notorious that Of all varieties of books
the kind whose covers wear out first is the
novel. Almost everybod who reads any
thing reads novels. We understand why,
when we listen to the general tone of con.
versation. Few people talk very thought
fully, and altogether about things and
themes-most people talk about other peo-
pie. The largest part Of common talk is
personal, biographical. We tell what we
have seen and heard and attempted and en-
dured; and we like to hear what others are
saying and doing, or failing to do. Matthew
Arnold said that conduct is three-fourths of
life; comment upon conduct is evidently
three-fourths of conversation. Now, this is
a revelation of our common taste.
AS we like to hear about other people, so