nds the tocsin that
rouses up all the baser passions of the soul. Years ago a French lady
came forth as an authoress, under the assumed name of George Sand, She
smoked cigars. She wore gentlemen's apparel. She stepped off the bounds
of decency. She wrote with a style ardent, eloquent, mighty in its
gloom, horrible in its unchastity, glowing in its verbiage, vivid in its
portraiture, damning in its effects, transfusing into the libraries and
homes of the world an evil that has not even begun to relent, and she
has her copyists in all lands. To-day, under the nostrils of your city,
there is a fetid, reeking, unwashed literature enough to poison all the
fountains of public virtue and smite your sons and daughters as with the
wing of a destroying angel, and it is time that the ministers of the
Gospel blew the trumpet and rallied the forces of righteousness, all
armed to the teeth, in this great battle against a depraved literature.
Why are fifty per cent of the criminals in the jails and penitentiaries
of the United States to-day under twenty-one years of age? Many of them
under seventeen, under sixteen, under fifteen, under fourteen, under
thirteen. Walk along one of the corridors of the Tombs Prison in New
York and look for yourselves. Bad books, bad newspapers bewitched them
as soon as they got out of the cradle. "O," says some one, "I am a
business man, and I have no time to examine what my children read. I
have no time to inspect the books that come into my household." If your
children were threatened with typhoid fever would you have time to go
for the doctor? Would you have time to watch the progress of the
disease? Would you have time for the funeral? In the presence of my God,
I warn you of the fact that your children are threatened with moral and
spiritual typhoid, and that unless this thing be stopped, it will be to
them funeral of body, funeral of mind, funeral of soul, three funerals
in one day.

Against every bad pamphlet send a good pamphlet; against every unclean
picture send an innocent picture; against every scurrilous song send a
Christian song; against every bad book send a good book. The good
literature, the Christian literature, in its championship for God and
the truth, will bring down the evil literature in its championship for
the devil. I feel tingling to the tips of my fingers, and through all
the nerves of my body, and all the depths of my soul, the certainty of
our triumph. Cheer up! O men and w