iss
Edgeworth. The memories of the past were never more faithfully embalmed
than in the writings of Walter Scott. Cooper's novels are healthfully
redolent with the breath of the seaweed and the air of the American
forest. Charles Kingsley has smitten the morbidness of the world, and
led a great many to appreciate the poetry of sound health, strong
muscles, and fresh air. Thackeray did a grand work in caricaturing the
pretenders to gentility and high blood. Dickens has built his own
monument in his books, which are an everlasting plea for the poor and
the anathema of injustice. Now, I say books like these, read at right
times and read in right proportion with other books, can not help but be
ennobling and purifying. But, alas! for the loathsome and impure
literature that has come upon this country in the shape of novels like a
freshet overflowing all the banks of decency and common sense. They are
coming from some of the most celebrated publishing houses in the
country. They are coming with the recommendation of some of our
religious newspapers. They lie on your center-table, to curse your
children and blast with their infernal fires generations unborn. You
find these books in the desk of the school-miss, in the trunk of the
young man, in the steamboat cabin, and on the table of the hotel
reception-room. You see a light in your child's room late at night. You
suddenly go in and say: "What are you doing?". "I am reading." "What are
you reading?" "A book." You look at the book. It is a bad book. "Where
did you get it?" "I borrowed it." Alas! there are always those abroad
who would like to loan your son or daughter a bad book. Everywhere,
everywhere an unclean literature. I charge upon it the destruction of
ten thousand immortal souls; and I bid you this morning to wake up to
the magnitude of the theme. I shall take all the world's
literature--good novels and bad; travels, true or false; histories,
faithful and incorrect; legends, beautiful and monstrous; all tracts,
all chronicles, all epilogues, all family, city, state, national
libraries--and pile them up in a pyramid of literature; and then I shall
bring to bear upon it some grand, glorious, infallible, unmistakable
Christian principles. God help me to speak with reference to the account
I must at last render! God help you to listen.

I charge you, in the first place, to stand aloof from all books that
give false pictures of human life. Life is neither a tragedy nor a