on this nation has been that of unclean journalism.
It has its victims in all occupations and departments. It has helped to
fill insane asylums and penitentiaries, and alms-houses and dens of
shame. The bodies of this infection lie in the hospitals and in the
graves, while their souls are being tossed over into a lost eternity, an
avalanche of horror and despair. The London plague was nothing to it.
That counted its victims by thousands; but this modern pest has already
shoveled its millions into the charnel-house of the morally dead. The
longest rail train that ever ran over the Erie or the Hudson tracks was
not long enough or large enough to carry the beastliness and the
putrefaction which have gathered up in the bad books and newspapers of
this land in the last twenty years. Now, it is amid such circumstances
that I put the questions of overmastering importance to you and your
families: What can we do to abate this pestilence? What books and
newspapers shall we read? You see I group them together. A newspaper is
only a book in a swifter and more portable shape, and the same rules
which apply to book-reading will apply to newspaper-reading. What shall
we read? Shall our minds be the receptacle of every thing that an author
has a mind to write? Shall there be no distinction between the tree of
life and the tree of death? Shall we stoop down and drink out of the
trough which the wickedness of men has filled with pollution and shame?
Shall we mire in impurity, and chase fantastic will-o'-the-wisps across
the swamps, when we might walk in the blooming gardens of God? O, no.
For the sake of our present and everlasting welfare, we must make an
intelligent and Christian choice.

Standing, as we do, chin-deep in fictitious literature, the first
question that many of the young people are asking me is, "Shall we read
novels?" I reply, there are novels that are pure, good, Christian,
elevating to the heart, and ennobling to the life. But I have still
further to say, that I believe three-fourths of the novels in this day
are baneful and destructive to the last degree. A pure work of fiction
is history and poetry combined. It is a history of things around us,
with the licenses and the assumed names of poetry. The world can never
repay the debt which it owes to such fictitious writers as Hawthorne,
Mackenzie, and Landor and Hunt, and others whose names are familiar to
all. The follies of high life were never better exposed than by M