Ecclesiastes 12:12 And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. If true so many years before Christ, how much more true so many years A.D.! We so often see books, we have no appreciation of what a book is. It took all civilizations, all martyr fires, all battles, all victories, all defeats, all glooms, all brightness, all centuries to make one book possible. A book; the chorus of the ages; it is the drawing-room in which kings and queens, and philosophers and poets, and orators and rhetoricians came forth to meet If I burned incense to any idol I would build an altar before a book. Thank God for books — good books, healthful books, books of men, books of women — above all, for the Book of God. "Of making many books there is no end." The printing press is the mightiest agency for good or evil. I have an idea that it is to be the chief agency for the rescue and evangelization of the world, and that the last great battle will not be fought with guns and swords, but with types and presses, a gospelized printing press triumphing over and trampling under foot and crushing out a pernicious literature. You must apply the same law to the book and the newspaper. The newspaper is a book swifter and in more portable shape. Under pernicious books and newspapers tens of thousands have gone down. The plague is nothing to it. That counts its victims by the thou- sands; this modern pest shovels its millions into the charnel-house of the morally dead. Is there anything that I can do to help stem this mighty torrent of pernicious literature? Yes. The first thing for us all to do is to keep ourselves and our families aloof from iniquitous books and newspapers. If you ask me to-day is there anything we can do to stem this tide, I say yes, very much every way. First we will stand aloof from all books that give false pictures of human life. Life is neither a tragedy nor a farce. Men are not all either knaves or heroes. Women are neither angels nor fairies. Judging, however, from much of the literature of this day, we would come to the idea that life is a fitful, fantastic and extravagant thing, instead of a practical and useful thing. Those women who are indiscriminate readers of novels are unfit for the duties of wife, mother, sister, daughter, the duties of home life, the duties of a Christian life. We will also help to stem the tide of pernicious literature by standing aloof, we and our families, from books which have some good but a large admixture of evil. I do not care how good you are, you cannot afford to read a bad book. You say, "The influence is insignificant." Ah! the scratch of a pin may produce the lockjaw. You out of curiosity plunge into a bad book, and you have the curiosity of a man who takes a torch into a gunpowder mill to see whether or not it will blow up. If you want to help stem the tide of pernicious literature you and your families must also stand back from books which corrupt the imagination. In the name of God, I warn some of you that your children are threatened with moral and spiritual typhoid, and if the evil be unarrested, there will be the funeral of the body, the funeral of the mind, and the funeral of the soul — three funerals in one day. If you want to help stem this tide keep aloof, you and your families, from all books that are apologetic for crime. Many of the fascinations of book-binding are thrown around sin. Vice is horrible anyhow. It is born in shame, and it dies howling in the darkness. Paint it as writhing in the horrors of a city hospital. Cursed are the books which make impurity decent, and crime honourable, and hypocrisy noble. I mast in this connection call to your mind the iniquitous pictorials of our time. For good pictures I have great admiration. An artist with one flash will do that which an author can accomplish in four hundred pages. Fine paintings are the aristocracy of art. Engravings are the democracy of art. A good picture on one side of a pictorial will sometimes do just as much good as a book of four or five hundred pages. But you know our cities are to-day cursed with evil pictorials. These death-warrants are on every street. A young man purchases perhaps one copy, and he purchases it with his eternal discomfiture. That one bad picture poisons one soul, that soul poisons fifty souls, the fifty despoil a hundred, the hundred a thousand, the thousand a million, and the millions other millions, until it will take the measuring line of eternity to tell the height, and the depth, and the ghastliness of the great misdoing. Remember that one column of good reading may save a soul, that one column of bad reading may destroy a soul. Years ago, a clergyman passing along through the west stopped at an hotel and saw a woman copying from a book. He found the book was Doddridge's "Rise and Progress." This woman had been pleased with the book, which she had borrowed, and was copying a passage that impressed her very much. The clergyman happened to have a copy of Doddridge's "Rise and Progress" in his valise, and gave it to her. Thirty years passed along, and that clergyman came to the same hotel and was inquiring about the family that had lived there thirty years before, and was pointed to a house near by. He went there and said to the woman, "Do you remember seeing me before?" She said, "I don't remember ever to have seen you before." "Don't you remember thirty years ago a man giving you a copy of Doddridge's 'Rise and Progres '? Oh, yes, I remember that; that saved my soul, that book. I lent it to my neighbours and they read it, and they all came into the Church, and we had a great revival. Do you see the spire of a church out yonder? That church was built as a consequence of that book." Oh, the power of a good book! Oh, the power of a bad book! Crowd your minds with good books, and there will be no room for the bad. The bushel full of the wheat, where can you put in the chaff? (T. De Witt Talmage.) Parallel Verses KJV: And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. |
    |