The Bolivar bulletin. (Bolivar, Tenn.) 1888-1946, 1900-08-03
SUBSCRIPTION: S1.OO Per Year

the young people whirl with vil-
lainy! Ye authors who write them,
We publishers who print them, ye
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. 1 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 outcry of your
pain, and the howl of your damna-
ton. "God shall wound the hairy
scalp of him that goeth on in his
trespasses.
The clock strikes midnight. A fair
form bends over a romance. The
eyes flash fire. The breath is quick
and irregular. Occasionally the color
dashes to the cheek and then dies out.
The hands tremble as though guar
dian spirit were trying to shake the
deadly book out of the grasp. Hot
tears fall. She laughs with a shrill
voice that drops dead at its own
sound. The sweat on her brow is the
spray dashed up from the river of
death. The clock strikes four, and
the rosy dawn soon after begins to
look through the lattice upon the
pale form that looks like a detained
specter of the night. Soon in mad
house she will mistake her ringlets
for curling serpents and thrust her
white hand through the bars of the
prison and smite her head, rubbing
it back as though to push the scalp
from the skull, shrieking: my
brain! My brain!" Oh, stand off
from thatI Why will you go sound
ing your way amid the reefs when
there is such vast ocean in which
you may voyage, all sail set?
Much of the impure pictorial liter
ature is most tremendous for ruin.
There is no one who can like good
pictures better than do. The quick
pressing the public mind is by pic
ture. What the painter does by his
brush for a few favorites, the en-
graver does by his knife for the mill
lion. What the author accomplishes
by so pages the artist does by flash.
The best part of painting that costs
$4,000 you may buy for ten cents.
Fine paintings belong to the aris-
tocracy of art. Engravings belong to
the democracy of art. You do well
to gather good pictures in your
homes.
But what shall say of the prostitu-
tion of art to the purposes of iniquity?
These death warrants of the soul are at
every street corner. They smite the
vision of the young man with pollu-
tion. Many a 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 a
half side of a pictorial. Under the
guise of pure mirth the young man
buys one of these sheets. He unrolls it
before his comrades amid roars of
laughter, but long after the paper is
gone the result may, perhaps, be seen
in the blasted imaginations of those
who sawit 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. A man
is no better than the picture he loves
to look at. If your eyes are not pure
your heart cannot be. At the news
man by the kind of pictorial he pur-
chases. When the devil fails to get a
man to read bad book, he sometimes
succeeds in getting him to look at a
bad picture. When Satan goes a-fsh-
ing he does not care whether it is a
long line or short line, if he only
draws his victim in. Beware of lasciv-
ious pictorials, young man, in the
name 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
into crime by reading one vivid ro-
nance. The consecrated John Angel
James, than whom England never pro-
duced a better man, declared in his old
age that he had never yet got over the
evil effects of having for Is minutes
once read a bad book But need not
go so far off. I could tell you of a COM
rade who was great hearted, noble and
generous. He was studying for an hon
orable profession, but he had an infideI
book in his trunk, and he said to me
one day: "De Witt, would you like to
read it?" l said: "Yes, | would" I
took the book and read it only for
few minutes. l was really startled
with what 1 saw there, and / handed
the book back to him and said: "You
had better destroy that book" No, he
kept it. He read it. He reread it.
After awhile he gave up religion as
myth. He gave up God as nonentity.
He gave up the Bible as fable. He
gave up the church of Christ as a use
less institution. He gave up good NOR
ais as being unnecessarily stringent.
have heard of him but twice in many
ears. The time before the last Iheardof
lim he was a confirmed inebriate. The
a St heard of him h vvas oor,,;,,c. ,,,4