s wholesale denunciation
of notion pitches overboard "Pilgrim's Progress" and the parables of our
Lord. But the fact is that some of the publishing houses that once were
cautious about the moral tone of their books have become reckless about
every thing but the number of copies sold. It is all the same to them
whether the package they send out be corn starch, jujube paste or
hellebore. They wrap up fifty copies and mark them C.O.D. But if the
expressman, according to that mark, should collect on delivery all the
curses that shall come on the head of the publishing house which printed
them, he would break down his wagon and kill his horses with the load. Let
parents and guardians be especially watchful. Have a quarantine at your
front door for all books and newspapers. Let the health doctor go abroad
and see whether there is any sickness there before you let it come to
wharfage.

Whether young or old, be cautious about what you read in the newspapers.
You cannot day after day go through three columns of murder trial without
being a worse man than when you began. While you are trying to find out
whether Stokes was lying in wait for Fisk, Satan is lying in wait for you.
Skip that half page of divorce case. Keep out of the mud. The Burdell and
Sickles cases, through the unclean reading they afforded to millions of
people long ago, led their thousands into abandoned lives and pitched them
off the edge of a lost eternity. With so much healthful literature of all
sorts, there is no excuse for bringing your minds in contact with evil. If
there were a famine, there might be some reason for eating garbage, but the
land is full of bread. When we may, with our families, sit around the clean
warm fire-hearth of Christian knowledge, why go hunting in the ash barrels
for cinders?

CHAPTER XXXIV.

SHORT OR LONG PASTORATES.

The question is being discussed in many journals, "How long ought a
minister to stay in one place?" Clergymen and laymen and editors are
wagging tongue and pen on the subject--a most practical question and easy
to answer. Let a minister stay in a place till he gets done--that is, when
he has nothing more to say or do.

Some ministers are such ardent students of the Bible and of men, they are
after a twenty-five years' residence in a parish so full of things that
ought to be said, that their resignation would be a calamity. Others get
through in three months and ought to go; but it takes an earthquake to