The Iola register. [volume] (Iola, Allen County, Kansas) 1875-1902, 1896-03-27
THE NEWSPAPER.
Dr.. Talmaze Discourses On It's
Divine Mission.
How the Athenians Spent All Their Time
In Telling or Hearing Something
New-The Question of
the Day.

The latest sermon preached at Wash
ington by Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
was on the mission of newspapers. His
text was: And the wheels were full
of eyes."-Ezekiel, x:i2. For all the
Athenians and strangers which were
there spent their time in nothing else
but either to tell or to hear some new
thing. Acts xvii:2I. DIR. Talmage
said:
What is a preacher to do when he
finds two texts equally good and sug-
gestive? In that perplexity l take
both. Wheels full of eyes? What out
the wheels of newspaper press? 9th
er wheels are blind. They roll on,
pulling or crushing. The manufac-
turer's wheel, how it grinds the oper-
ator with fatigues, and rolls over
nerve and muscle and bone and heart,
not knowing what it does. The sew
ing machine wheel sees not the aches
and pains fastened to Tighter than
the band that moves it, sharper than
the needle which it plies.
Every moment of every hour of ev-
| cry day of every month of every year
there are hundreds of thousands of
wheels of mechanism, wheels of en-
terprise, wheels of hard work, in mo-
ton, but they are eyeless. Not so the
wheels of the printing press. Their
entire business is to look and report
They are full of optic nerves, from
axle to periphery. They are like
these spoken of by Ezekiel as full of
eyes 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
hemisphere. Eyes of criticism, eyes of
investigation; eyes that twinkle with
mirth; eyes glowering with indigna-
ton; eyes tender with love; eyes of
suspicion; eyes of hope; blue eyes,
black eyes, green eyes, holy eyes, evil
eyes, sore eyes, political eyes, literary
eyes, historical 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 class Of
people in Athens who spend their time
either in gathering the news or telling
it. Why especially in Athens? Be-
cause the more intelligent people be-
come, the more inquisitive they are
not about small things, but great
things.
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 Pekin 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
ceeded by a physician writing out the
news of the day for his patients. En-
gland succeeded under Queen Eliza
beth in first publishing the news of
the Spanish Armada, and going on I'M
til she had enough enterprise, when
the battle of Waterloo was fought, de-
Gliding the destiny of Europe, to give
it one-third of column in the London
Morning Chronicle, about as much as
the newspaper of our day gives a small
fire. America succeeded by Benjamin
Harris first weekly paper called Pub
lie Occurrences, published in Boston in
1890, and by the first daily, the Amer
lean Advertiser, published in Phila-
delphia in 1884.
The newspaper did not suddenly
spring upon the world, but came grad
ually. The genealogical line of the
newspaper is this: The Adam Of the
race was a circular or news letter, ere
ated by Divine impulse in human ma
ture; and the circular begat the PAM
phlet, and the pamphlet .begat the
quarterly, and the quarterly begat the
weekly. and the weekly begat the
semi-weekly, and the semi-weekly be-
gat the daily. But alas, by what
struggle it came to its present devel-
opment. No sooner had its power been
demonstrated, than tyranny and SUI
pecstition shackled it There is moth
ing that despotism so fears and hates
rs a printing press
1t has too many eyes in the wheel
A great writer declared that the king
of Naples made it unsafe for him to
Write OF an lHlug UuJ bdluTdA HlSlOEE.
Austria could not endure Kossuth's
journalistic pen, pleading for the re-
demption of Hungary. Napoleon l.,
trying to keep his iron heel on the
neck of nations, said: Editors are
the regents of sovereigns and the tu-
toys of nations and are only fit for
prison" But the battle for the free
dom of the press was fought in the
court rooms of England and America,
and decided before this century began
by Hamilton's eloquent plea for j.
Peter Zanger's Gazette in America and
Erskine's advocacy of the freedom of
publication in England. These were
the Marathon and Thermopyle in
which the freedom of the press was es-
tablished in the United States and
Great Britain, and all the powers of
earth and hell will never again be able
10 put on the handouts and topples of
literary and political despotism- 1t
s notable that Thomas jefferson,
who wrote the declaration of Amer
lean independence, wrote also: IF
had to choose between a government