and grand? Next to the
Bible, the _newspaper_,--swift-winged, and everywhere present,
flying over the fences, shoved under the door, tossed into the
counting-house, laid on the work-bench, hawked through the cars! All
read it: white and black, German, Irishman, Swiss, Spaniard, American,
old and young, good and bad, sick and well, before breakfast and after
tea, Monday morning, Saturday night, Sunday and week day!

I now declare that I consider the newspaper to be the grand agency
by which the Gospel is to be preached, ignorance cast out, oppression
dethroned, crime extirpated, the world raised, heaven rejoiced, and
God glorified.

In the clanking of the printing-press, as the sheets fly out, I hear
the voice of the Lord Almighty proclaiming to all the dead nations
of the earth,--"Lazarus, come forth!" And to the retreating surges
of darkness,--"Let there be light!" In many of our city newspapers,
professing no more than secular information, there have appeared
during the past ten years some of the grandest appeals in behalf of
religion, and some of the most effective interpretations of God's
government among the nations.

That man has a shrivelled heart who begrudges the five pennies he
pays to the newsboy who brings the world to his feet. There are
to-day connected with the editorial and reportorial corps of newspaper
establishments men of the highest culture and most unimpeachable
morality, who are living on the most limited stipends, martyrs to
the work to which they feel themselves called. While you sleep in the
midnight hours, their pens fly, and their brains ache in preparing
the morning intelligence. Many of them go, unrested and unappreciated,
their cheeks blanched and their eyes half quenched with midnight
work, toward premature graves, to have the "proof-sheet" of their
life corrected by Divine mercy, glad at last to escape the perpetual
annoyances of a fault-finding public, and the restless, impatient cry
for "more copy."

"Nations are to be born in a day." Will this great inrush come from
personal presence of missionary or philanthropist? No. When the time
comes for that grand demonstration I think the press in all the earth
will make the announcement, and give the call to the nations. As at
some telegraphic centre, an operator will send the messages, north and
south, and east and west, San Francisco and Heart's Content catching
the flash at the same instant; so, standing at some centre to which
shall