The Canton times. (Canton, Miss.) 1893-1906, 1900-08-10

ing, unWaShed literature, enough 10
poison all the fountains of public vir-
tue and smite your sons and daugh-
ters as with the wing of destroying
angel, and it is time that the minis
tiers of the Gospel blew the trumpet
and rallied the forces of righteous
ness, all armed to this great battle
against depraved literature.
Again, abstain from those books
which are apologize of crime. 1t is
a sad thing that some of the best aud
most beautiful bookbindery and some
of the finest rhetoric have been
brought to make sin attractive. Vice
is horrible thing anyhow. It is
born in shame, and it dies bowling
in the darkness. In this world it is
scourged with a whip of scorpions,
but afterward the thunders of Gods
wrath pursue it across a boundless
desert, beating it with ruin and woe.
| When you come to paint carnality,
do not paint it as looking from behind
embroidered curtains or through lat
tice of royal seraglio, but as writhing
in the agonies of a city hospital.
Cursed be the books that try to make
impurities decent and crime attractive
and hypocrisy noble! Cursed be the
books that swarm with libertines and
desperadoes, who make the brain of
the young people whirl with vii
lainy! Ye authors who write them,
We publishers who print them, We
booksellers who distribute them, shall
be cut to pieces, if not by an aroused
community, then at last by the hail
of Divine vengeance, which shall sweep
to the lowest pit of perdition all ye
murderers of souls. l tell you,
though you may escape in this world,
you will be ground at last under the
hoof of eternal calamities, and you
will be chained to the rock, and you
will have the vultures of despair
clawing at your soul, and those whom
you have destroyed will come around
to torment you, and to pour hotter
Goals of fury upon your head, and re.
joice eternally in the cutlery of your
pain, and the howl of your damna-
ton. God shall wound the hairy
scalp of him that goeth on in his
trespasses."
But what shall say of the prostitu-
ton of art to the purposes of iniquity?
These dea warrants of the soul are a
every street corner. They smite the
vision of the young man with pollu-
ton. Many young man buying copy
has bought his eternal discontinue.
There may be enough poison in one bad
picture to poison one soul and that
soul may poison ten, and ten fifty, and
fifty hundreds and the hundreds thou.
sands, until nothing but the measuring
line of eternity can tell the height and
depth and ghastliness and horror of
the great undoing. The work of death
that the wicked author does in a whole
book the bad engraver may do on
half side of a pictorial. Under the |
guse of pure mirth the young man |
buys one of these sheets. He unrolls it |
before his comrades amid roars of |
but long after the paper is
gone the result may, perhaps, be seen
in the blasted imaginations of those
who it. The queen of death holds
banquet every night, and these period
icals are the invitation to her guests.
Young man, buy not this moral
strychnine for your soul! Pick not up
this nest of coiled adders for your
pocket! Patronize no news stand that
keeps them. Have your room bright
with good engravings, but for these
outrageous pictures have not one wall,
not one bureau, not one pocket. man
IS no better than the picture he loves
to look at. If your eyes are not pure
-FOUR heart cannot be. At the news
stand one can guess the character of
man by the kind of pictorial he pur-
,hases. When the devil fails to get a
nan to read bad book, he sometimes
succeeds in getting him to look at a
Dad picture. When Satan goes a-fish-
ng he does not care whether it is
ong line or a short line, if he only
lraws his victim in. Beware of lasciv-
GUS pictoria.s. young man, in the
lame of Almighty God, 1 charge you.
Cherish good books and newspapers.
beware of bad ones. The assassin of
Lord Russell declared that he was led
nto crime by reading one vivid ro-
nance. The consecrated John Angel
ames, than whom England never pro-
uced a better man, declared in his old
ge that he had never yet got over the
vii effects of havingefor Is minutes
nee read a bad book. But 1 need not ,
20 so far off could tell you of COM
ade who was great hearted. noble and