that is, that I consider the bad
pictorial literature of the day as most tremendous for ruin. There is no
one who can like good pictures better than I do. But what shall I say to
the prostitution of this art to purposes of iniquity? These
death-warrants of the soul are at every street corner. They smite the
vision of the young with pollution. Many a young man buying a copy has
bought his eternal discomfiture. There may be enough poison in one bad
picture to poison one soul, and that soul may poison ten, and the ten
fifty, and the hundreds thousands, until nothing but the measuring line
of eternity can tell the height and depth and ghastliness and horror of
the great undoing. The work of death that the wicked author does in a
whole book the bad engraver may do on half a side of pictorial. Under
the disguise of pure mirth the young man buys one of these sheets. He
unrolls it before his comrades amid roars of laughter; but long after
the paper is gone the results may perhaps be seen in the blasted
imaginations of those who saw it. The Queen of Death every night holds a
banquet, and these periodicals are the printed invitations to her
guests. Alas! that the fair brow of American art should be blotched with
this plague spot, and that philanthropists, bothering themselves about
smaller evils, should lift up no united and vehement voice against this
great calamity! Young man, buy not this moral strychnine for your soul!
Pick not up this nest of coiled adders for your pocket! Patronize no
news-stand that keeps them! Have your room bright with good engravings,
but for these iniquitous pictorials have not one wall, not one bureau,
not one pocket. A man is no better than the picture he loves to look at.
If your eyes are not pure, you heart can not be. One can guess the
character of a man by the kind of pictorial he purchases. When the devil
fails to get a man to read a bad book, he sometimes succeeds in getting
him to look at a bad picture. When Satan goes a-fishing he does not care
whether it is a long line or a short line, if he only draws his victim
in.

If I have this morning successfully laid down any principles by which
you may judge in regard to books and newspapers, then I have done
something of which I shall not be ashamed on the day which shall try
every man's work, of what sort it is. Cherish good books and newspapers.
Beware of the bad ones. One column may save your soul; one paragraph may
ruin it. Go home to-day and l