Connecticut western news., 1900-08-02

| coming with recommendation of some of our religious newspapers; they lie | on your center table to curse your chill l dren and blast with their internal fires generations unborn. 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 reception room. You see n light | in your child's room late at night. You | suddenly go In and say, What are you
 doingT 'I am reading" What are | you reading?" "A book" You look at
 the book. It Is bad book. Where
 did you get it2' 'I borrowed it." | Alas, there are always those abroad
 who would like to loan your son or
 laughter bad book! Everywhere, ev-
 anywhere, an unclean literature! charge upon 1t the destruction of 10000 immortal souls, and l bid you wake | up to the magnitude of the evil.
 Books to Destroy.
 | I shall take all the worlds literature | good novels and bad, travels true and false, histories faithful and incorrect, legends beautiful and monstrous-an
 tracts, all chronicles, all poems, all pfamily, city, state and national li-
 braries, and pile them up In a pyramid | of literature, and then I shall bring to
 bear upon 1t some grand, glorious, in- [ fallible, unmistakable Christian prin- | ciples. God help me to speak with 1 reference to my last account, and help | you to listen.
 | charge you, in the first place, to | T. Arxs,, fa lao, pictures of life. Life is neither a trag- l edy nor farce. Men are not all either
 knaves or heroes. Women are neither
 angels nor furies. And yet, if you de- | pended upon much of the literature of | the day, you would get the idea that | life, instead of being something ear
 nest, something practical, Is titful and | fantastic and extrayagant thing. How | poorly prepared are that young man | and woman for the duties of today who spent last night wading through brilliant passages descriptive of mag niicent knayery 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. A man who gives him. l self up to the indiscriminate reading l of novels will be nerveless. inane and | a nuisance. He will be fit neither for | the store, nor the shop, nor the field. | A woman who gives herself up to the | indiscriminate reading of novels will | be unfitted for the duties of wife, | mother, sister, daughter. There she ! Is, hair disheveled, countenance va | cant, cheeks pale, hands trembling, bursting 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 a 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 polished desperado. Oh, these confirmed novel l readers! They are unfitted for this | life,. which Is a tremendous discipline. They know not how to go through the
 furnaces of trial through which they
 must pass, and they are unfitted for | world where everything we gain we achieve by hard and long continuing ! work.
 Dangerous Curiosity.
 | Again, abstain from all those books 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 sieve
 which let's the small particles of gold
 fall through, but keeps the great cin- ders. Once In awhile there Is q mind | like a loadstone which. plunged amid
 steel and brass filings. gathers up the
 steel and repels the brass. But 1t 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 l cannot afford to read bad book, how
 ever good you are. You say, 1.-The in-
 fiuence Is Insignificant" I tell you
 that the scratch of a pin has some
 times produced lockjaw. Alas, if
 through curiosity, as many do, you pry
 Into an evil book your curiosity is as
 dangerous as that of the man who
 would take torch into gunpowder
 mill merely to see whether 1t would
 really blow up or not!
 Tn a menagerie in New York a man
 put his arm through the bars of a
 black leopards cage. The animals
 hide looked so sleek and bright and
 beautiful. He just stroked 1t once.
 The monster seized him, and he drew
 forth a hand torn and mangled and
 bleeding. Oh, touch not evil even with
 the faintest stroke! Though 1t may be
 glossy and beautiful, touch 1t not lest
 you pull forth your soul torn and bleed
 ing under the clutch of the leopard.
 But" you say, "how can I find out
 whether book is good or bad without
 reading it?" There Is always some
 thing suspicious about a bad book.
 never knew an exceptlon-something
 suspicious in the index or style of H.
 lustration. This venomous reptile al
 ways carries warning rattle.
 Again, I charge you to stand off from
 all those books which corrupt the im-
 agination and infame the passions.
 do not refer now to that kind of book
 which the villain has under his coat
 waiting for the school to get out and
 then, looking both ways to see that
 there Is no policeman around the
 block, offers the book to your son on
 his way home. do not speak of that
 kind of literature, but that which
 evades the law and comes out in pol
 ished style and with acute plot sounds
 the toesin that rouses up all the baser
 passions of the soul. Today under the
 nostrils of the people there Is fetld, reekinQ unwashed literature enough