we cast our votes. For him
we speak our eulogies. And when he has gone we read over the heap of
compost: "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord. They rest from
their labors and their works do follow them."

In the fashionable city to-day there walk a thousand libertines. They
are a moving pest. Their breath is the sirocco of the desert. Their
bones have in them the decay of the pit. They have the eye of
a basilisk. They have been soaked in filth, and steeped in
uncleanliness, and consumed in sin, and they are all adrip with the
loathsomeness of eternal death. I take hold of the robe of one of
these elegant gentlemen, and pull it aside, and say, "Behold a Leper!"

First, if you desire to shun this evil, you will have nothing to do
with bad books and impure newspapers. With such an affluent literature
as is coming forth from our swift-revolving printing-presses, there
is no excuse for dragging one's self through sewers of unchastity. Why
walk in the ditch, when right beside the ditch is the solid flagging?
It seems that in the literature of the day the ten plagues of Egypt
have returned, and the frogs and lice have hopped and skipped over our
parlor tables.

Waiting impatiently in the house of some parishioner, for the
completion of a very protracted toilet, I have picked up a book from
the parlor table, and found that every leaf was a scale of leprosy.

Parents are delighted to have their children read, but they should be
sure as to what they read. You do not have to walk a day or two in an
infected district to get the cholera or typhoid fever; and one wave
of moral unhealth will fever and blast an immortal nature. Perhaps,
knowing not what you did, you read a bad book. Do you not remember it
altogether? Yes; and perhaps you will never get over it.

However strong and exalted your character, _never read a bad book_. By
the time you get through the first chapter you will see the drift; If
you find the marks of the hoofs of the devil in the pictures, or in
the style, or in the plot, away with it. You may tear your coat, or
break a vase, and repair them again, but the point where the rip or
fracture took place will always be evident. It takes less than an
hour to do your heart a damage which no time can entirely repair. Look
carefully over your child's library; see what book it is that he reads
after he has gone to bed, with the gas turned upon the pillow. Do
not always take it for granted that a book is good becaus