ook through your library, and then look on
the stand where you keep your pictorials and newspapers, and apply the
Christian principles I have laid down this morning. If there is any
thing in your home that can not stand the test do not give it away, for
it might spoil an immortal soul; do not sell it, for the money you get
would be the price of blood; but rather kindle a fire on your kitchen
hearth, or in your back yard, and then drop the poison in it, and keep
stirring the blaze until, from preface to appendix, there shall not be a
single paragraph left.

Once in a while there is a mind like a loadstone, which, plunged amidst
steel and brass filings, gathers up the steel and repels the brass. But
it is generally just the opposite. If you attempt to plunge through a
hedge of burs to get one blackberry, you get more burs than
blackberries. You can not afford to read a bad book, however good you
are. You say: "The influence is insignificant." I tell you that the
scratch of a pin has sometimes produced the lock-jaw. 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 stick a torch into a gunpowder
mill, merely to see whether it would blow up or not. In a menagerie in
New York a man put his hand through the bars of a black leopard's cage.
The animal's hide looked so slick and bright and beautiful. He just
stroked it once. The monster seized him, and he drew forth a hand, torn,
and mangled, and bleeding. O, touch not evil, even with the faintest
stroke; though it may be glossy and beautiful, touch it not, lest you
pull forth your soul torn and bleeding under the clutch of the black
leopard. "But," you say, "how can I find out whether a book is good or
bad, without reading it?" There is always something suspicious about a
bad book. I never knew an exception. Something suspicious in the index
or the style of illustration. This venomous reptile almost always
carries a warning rattle.

Again, I charge you to stand off from all those books which corrupt the
imagination and inflame the passions. I do not refer now to that kind of
a book which the villain has under his coat, waiting for the school to
be 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. I do not
speak of that kind of literature, but that which evades the law and
comes out in polished style, and with acute plot sou