The Leon reporter. (Leon, Iowa) 1887-1930, 1900-08-02

mltten the morbldlty OF the
n vorld and led great many to appre-
ciate the poetry of sound health,
strong muscles and fresh air. Thack-
cray did grand work in caricaturing
the pretenders to gentility and high
blood. Dickens has built his own
monument in his books, which are a
plea for the poor and the anathema
or injustice, and there are score OF
novelistic pens today doing mighty
work for God and righteousness.
Ennobling and Purifying.
Now, say, books like these, read
at right times and read in right pro-
portion with other books, cannot help
but be enrolling and purifying; but,
alas, for the loathsome and impure
literature that has come in the shape
OF novels, like freshet overf1owing
all the banks of decency and common
sense! They are coming from some of
the most celebrated publishing houses.
| They are coming with recommended
ton Of some of our religious newspa-
pers. They lie on your center tables
to curse your children and blast with
their Internal fires generations I'M
born. You find these books in the
| desk of the school miss, in the trunk
of the young man, in the steamboat
cabin, on the table of the hotel recep-
ton room. You see light in your
child's room late at night. You sud-
denly go in and say, What are you
doing?" II am reading" What are
you reading?" "a book" You look
at the book. 1t is bad book Where
did you get it?" II borrowed it." Alas,
there are always those abroad who
would like to loan your son or daugh-
ter bad book! Everywhere, every
where, an unclean literature. charge
upon it the destruction of 10000 inn
mortal souls, and / bid you wake up
to the magnitude of the evil.
l shall take all the worlds litera-
ture-good novels and bad, travels
true and false, histories faithful and
incorrect, legends beautiful and mon
strous, all tracts, all chronicles all
poems, all family, city, state and ma
tional libraries-and pile them up in
pyramid of literature, and then
shall bring to bear upon it some
grand, glorious, infallible, unmistak-
able Christian principles. God help
me to speak with referenuce to my
last account and help you to listen.
l charge you in the first place to
stand aloof from all books that give
false pictures Of life Life is neither
tragedy nor farce. Men are not
all either knaves or heroes. Women
are neither angels nor furies. And
yet if you depended upon much of the
literature of the day you would get
an idea that life instead of being
something earnest, something practi-
CAL is titful and fantastic and ex-
travagant thing How poorly prepar-
ed are that young man and woman for
the duties of today who spent last
night wading through brilliant pas
sages descriptive of magnificent
knavery and wickedness! The man
will be looking all day long for his
heroine in the Office, by the forge, in
the factory, in the counting room, and
he will not find her, and he will be
dissatisfied. man wiz ziyes him
self up to the indiscrimi.Treading
of novels Will be neryeIess, inane and
nuisance. He will be fit neithgB(
store, nor the shop, nor the field. A
woman who gives herself up to the in
discriminate reading of novels will be
untitled for the duties of wife, mother,
sister, daughter. There she is, hair
disheveled, countenance vacant,
cheeks pale, hands trembling, burst
ing into tears at midnight over the
fate of some unfortunate lover; in
the daytime, when she ought to be
busy, staring by the half hour at
nothing, biting her finger nails into
the quick. The carpet that was plain
before will be palmer after having
wandered through romance all night
long in tessellated halls of castles.
And your Industrious companion will
be more unattractive than ever, now
that you have walked in the romance
through parks with plumed princesses
or lounged in the arbor with the pol
ished desperate. Oh, these confirmed
novel readers! They are untitled for
this life, which is tremendous disci-
pline. They know not how to 20
through the furnaces of trial through
which they must pass, and they are
untitled for world where everything
we gain we achieve by hard and long
continuing work
Avoid Partially Bad Books.
Again abstain from all those hoo1,e
which, while they have some good
things, have also an admixture of evil.
You have read books that had two ele-
ments in them-the good and the bad.
Which stuck to you? The bad. The
heart of most people is like a sieve,
which lets the small particles of gold
fall through, but keeps the great Gin
ders. Once in awhile there is mind
like loadstone, which, plunged amid
steel and brass filings, gathers up the
steel and repels the brass. But it is
generally exactly the opposite. If you
attempt to plunge through hedge of
burs to get one blackberry you will
get more burs than blackberries. You
cannot afford to read bad book, how
ever good you are. You say, THE in
fluence is insignificant" I tell you
that the scratch of pin has sometimes
produced lockjaw. Also, if through
curiosity, as many do, you pry into an
evil book, your curiosity is as danger
Gus as that of the man who would
take a torch into gunpowder mill