ousands for any other reading. Exclusive reading of
fiction is to any one's mind just what highly spiced food and alcoholic
stimulants are to the body. The increasing rage for novel reading
betokens both a famine in the intellect, and a serious peril to the
mental and spiritual life. The honest truth is that quite too large a
number of fictitious works are subtle poison. The plots of some of the
most popular novels turn on the sexual relation and the violation in
some form of the seventh commandment. They kindle evil passions; they
varnish and veneer vice; they deride connubial purity; they uncover what
ought to be hid, and paint in attractive hues what never ought to be
seen by any pure eye or named by any modest tongue. Another objection to
many of the most advertised works of fiction is that they deal with the
sacred themes of religion in a very mischievous and misleading manner. A
few popular writers of fiction present evangelical religion in its
winning features; they preach with the pen the same truths that they
preach from the pulpit. Two of the perils that threaten American youths
are a licentious stage and a poisonous literature. A highly intelligent
lady, who has examined many of the novels printed during the last
decade, said to me: "The main purpose of many of these books is to knock
away the underpinning of the marriage relation or of the Bible." If
parents give house room to trashy or corrupt books, they cannot be
surprised if their children give heart-room to "the world, the flesh,
and the evil one." When interesting and profitable books are so abundant
and so cheap, this increasing rage for novels is to me one of the
sinister signs of the times.

Within the last two or three decades there has been a most marked change
as to the directions in which the human intellect has exerted its
highest activities. This change is especially marked in the literature
of the two great English-speaking nations. For example, there are now in
Great Britain no poets who are the peers of Wordsworth, Tennyson and
Browning;--no brilliant essayists who are the peers of Carlyle and
Macaulay, and no novelists who are the peers of Scott, Dickens and
Thackeray. In the United States we have no poets who are a match for
Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier and Holmes; and no essayists who are a
match for Emerson and James Russell Lowell--no jurists who are the
rivals of Marshall, Kent and Story; and no living historians equal
Bancroft, Presc