The Bossier banner. [volume] (Bellevue, Bossier Parish, La.) 1859-1952, 1891-05-14

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 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, fu-
neral of soul. Three funerals in one
day.
A good book-who can exaggerate it's
power? Benjamin Franklin said that his
reading of Cotton Mather's Essays to
Do Good" in childhood gave him holy
aspirations for all the rest of his life.
George Law declared that biography
he read in childhood gave him all his
subsequent properties. A clergyman,
many years ago, passing to the far
west, stopped at an hotel. He saw a
woman copying something from Dodd-
ridges Rise and Progress" 1t
seemed that she had borrowed the book,
and there were some things she wanted
especially to remember. The clergy
man had in his satchel copy of Dodd-
ridges Rise and Progress, /" and so he
made her present of it. Thirty years
passed on. The clergyman came that
way and he asked where the woman
was whom he had seen years ago.
They said: ''She lives yonder in that
| beautiful house." He went there and
said to her: ''Do you remember me?"
She said: ''No, do not" He said:
''Do you remember a man gave you
Doddridge's Rise and Progress thirty
years ago?" "Oh, yes; 1 remember.
That book saved my soul. loaned
the book to all my neighbors, and they
read it and they were converted to God,
and we had revival of religion which
swept through the whole community.
We built church and called pastor
You see that spire yonder, don't you?
That church was built as the result of
that book you gave me thirty years
ago." Oh, the power of good book!
But, alasi for the influence of a bad
book. John Angel James, than whom
England never had a holier minister,
stood in his pulpit in Birmingham and
said: twenty-five years ago lad
lent me an infamous book. He would
loan it only fifteen minutes and then I
had to give it back; but that book has
haunted me like a specter ever since.
have in agony of soul, on my
knees before God, prayed that He
would obliterate from my soul the mem
DRY of it; but l shall carry the dam
age of it until the day of my death"
The assassin of Sir William Russell de-
clared that he got the inspiration for
his crime by reading what was then a
new and popular novel, slack Shop
pard" ''Homer's "Iliad'' made Alex
ander the warrior. Alexander said so.
The story of Alexander made Julius
Caesar and Charles XII. both men of
blood. Have you in your pocket, or in
your trunk, or in your desk at business,
a bad book, bad picture, bad pam
| phlet? In Gods name / warn you to
destroy it.
Against every bad pamphlet send
good pamphlet; against every unclean
picture send an innocent picture;
against every scurrilous song send a
Christian song; against every bad book
!
it was in ancient Toledo, where the
Toletum missals were kept by the
saints in six churches, and the sacrile-
| gious Romans demanded that those mis-
sails be destroyed, and that the Roman
missals be substituted; and the war
came on, and am glad to say that the
whole matter having been referred to
champions, the champion of the Tole-
tum missals with one blow brought
down the champion of Roman missals.
So it will be in our day. The good lit
erature, the Christian literature in its
championships for God and the truth, will
bring down the evil literature in it's
championship for the devil I feel tin
Cling to the tips of my fingers and
through all the nerves of my body, and
all the depths of my soul, the certainty
of our triumphs. Cheer up, O, men and
women who are toiling for the purifca-
ton of society! Toll with your faces in
the sunlight. 'If God be for us, who
can be against us?"
! Lady Hester Stanhope was the daugh-
ter 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 sick who would come in. She
made her castle a home for the
unfortunate. She was devout Chris.
tian 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 magnifi.
cent stables of her palace she had two
horses .groomed and bridled and sad
died and caparisoned, and all ready for
the day in which her Lord should de-
scend, and He on one of them and
she on the other would start for .Ieru-
salem, the city of the great King.
1t was fanaticism and a delusion;
but there was romance, and there was
splendor, and there was thrilling ex-
pectation in the dream! All! my friends,
we need no earthly palfreys groomed
and saddled and bridled and caparisoned
for our Lord when He shall come. The