The Monitor-register., 1896-03-27
TUTORS OF NATIONS.
NEWSPAPERS THE SUBJECT OF DR.
TALMAoE,s SERMON.

Ttme-The Most Potent Influence For
Good ON Earth.
WASHINGTON, March 22.-Newspa'
nor row. as it is called here in Wash
inpton. the long row of offices connected
with prominent journals throughout the
land, pays so much attention to LII.
Talmage they may be glad to hear what
he thinks of them while he discusses a
snbieet in which the whole country is
interested. His text today was, land
the wheels were full Of eyes" ezekiel
=. 10y. "For all the Athenians and
strangers which were there spent their
time in nothing else but either to tel
or to hear some new thing" (Acts xviii
BY.
What is a preacher to do when ne
finds two texts equally good and sug-
eestive? In that perplexity I take BOTH
Wheels full of eyes? What but tne
wheels Of a newspaper printing press
Otbar wheels are blind. They roll on,
pulling or crushing. The manufacturer !
wheel-how it grinds the operator Win
f-st;pues and rolls over nerve and mus
ole and hone and heart, not knowing
what it does. The sewing machine
wheel sees not the aches and pains las
tened to it-tighter than the band That
moves il. sharper than the needle which
it plies. Every moment OF every hour OF
every day of every month OF every year
there are hundreds of thousands Oh
wheels of mechanism, wheels of enter
nrisa. wheels of hard work, in motion,
but they are eyeless.
Not so the wheels of the printing
nress. Their entire business is to look
and report. They are full of optic
nerves, from axle to periphery. They
are like those spoken Of by Ezekiel as
9ull of ewes. Sharp eyes, near sighted,
far sighted. They look up. They look
down. They look far away. They take
in the next street and the next hemi-
sphere. Eyes of criticism, eyes of inves-
t~ieation, eyes that twinkle with mirth,
eyes glowering with Indignation. eyes
tender with love, eyes Of suspicion,
ewes Of hope, blue eyes, black eyes.
green eyes, holy eyes, evil eyes. sore
ewes, political eyes, literary eyes, his
toricai eyes, religious eyes, eyes that
see everything. "And the wheels were
full of eyes," But in my second text is
the worlds cry for the newspaper. Paul
describes a class of people in Athens
who spent their time either in gather
ing the news OF telling it. Why espe-
ciaIly in Athens? Because the more intel
ligent people become, the more inquisi-
tive they are-not about small things,
but great things.
GeneaIogy of the Newspaper.
The question then most frequently is
the question now most frequently
asked, What is the news? To answer
that cry in the text for the newspaper
the centuries have put their wits to
work. China first succeeded, and has
at Picking a newspaper that has been
printed every week for 1000 years.
printed on silk. Rome succeeded by
publishing The Acta Diurna, in the
same column putting fires, murders,
marriages and tempests. France sue
oeeded by a physician writing out the
news of the day for his patients. Eng
land succeeded under Queen Elizabeth
in first publishing the news of the Span
ish armada, and going on until she had
enough enterprise, when the battle of
Waterloo was fought, deciding the des-
tiny of Europe, to give it one-third of a
column in the London Morning Chron-
icle, about as much as the newspaper of
our day gives of a small fire. America
succeeded by Benjamin Harris first
weekly paper called Public Occurrences,
published in Boston in 1890, and by the
first daily, The American Advertiser,
published in Philadelphia in 1884.
The newspaper did not suddenly spring
upon the world, but came gradually.
The genealogical line of the Newspaper
is this: The Adam of the race was q cir
cular or news letter, created by divine
impulse in human nature, and the cir
cular begat the pamphlet, and the pam
phlet begat the quarterly, and the quar-
terly begat the weekly, and the weekly
begat the semiweekly, and the semi.
weekly begat the daily. But alas, by
what a struggle it came to its present
Development No sooner had its power
been demonstrated than tyranny and su.
perstition shaekled it. There is nothing
that despotism SC fears and hates as a
printing press. 1t has too many eyes in
its wheel. A great writer declared that
the king Of Naples made it unsafe for
him to write Of anything but natural
history. Austria could not endure Kos
pufh,c o1rpalictio NON n1oodiDo fo, tbo
redemption of Hungary. Napoleon 1,
trying to keep his iron heel Oh the neck
Of nations, said, Editors are the re-
gents of sovereigns and the tutors of ma
tions and are only fit for prison." But
the battle for the freedom of the press
was fought in the courtrooms of England
and America and decided before this
century began by Hamilton's eloquent
plea for ]. Peter Zenger's Gazette in
America, and Erskine's advocacy of the
freedom Of publication in England.
These were the Marathon and Their
mopylae ia which the freedom of the
press was established in the United
States and Great Britain, and all the
powers of earth and hell will never
again be able to put ON the handouts
and topples of literary and political des-
potism. 1t is notable that Thomas JEFF
ferson, who wrote the Declaration of
American Independence, wrote also "If
1 had to choose between a government
without newspapers or newspapers with
out a government, I should prefer the
latter. Stung by some base fabrication
coming to is in print, we come to write
or speak of the unbridled printing press /;
or, our new book ground up by an un-
just critic, we come to write or speak of
the unfairness of the printing press; or,
perhaps, through our own indistinctness
Of utterance, we are reported as saying
just the opposite Of what we did say,
and there is a small riot of semicolons,
hyphens and commas, and we come to
speak or write of the laundering print
Ing press; or. seeing a paper filed with
divorce cases or social scandal, we speak
and write Of the filthy printing press ;
or, seeing a journal, through bribery,
wheel round from n political side to
the other In one night, we speak of the
corrupt printing press, and many talk
about the lampoonry, and the empiri-
cism, and the sans .culottism Of the
printing press.
An Everlasting Blessing.
But I discourse now on a subject you
have never heard-the Unreasonable
and everlasting blessing of a good news
paper. Thank God for the wheel full of
eyes. Thank God that we do not have,
like the Athenians, to go about to gath
or up and relate the tidings of the day,
since the omnivorous newspaper does
both for us. The grandest temporal
blessing that God has given to the nine
taenth cauturY is the neWsnanar. We