347. Two Thousandth Publication

Two Thousandth Publication

Nah_2:4 : ’93They shall seem like torches; they shall run like the lightnings.’94

Express, rail-train, and telegraphic communication are suggested, if not foretold, in this text, and from it I start to preach a sermon in gratitude to God and the newspaper press for the fact that I have had the opportunity of delivering through the newspaper press two thousand sermons or religious addresses, so that I have for many years been allowed the privilege of preaching the Gospel every week to every neighborhood in Christendom and in many lands outside of Christendom. Many have wondered at the process by which it has come to pass, and for the first time in public place I state the three causes. Many years ago, a young man who has since become eminent in his profession, was then studying law in a distant city. He came to me and said that for lack of funds he must stop his studying, unless through stenography I would give him sketches of sermons, that he might by the sale of them secure means for the completion of his education. I positively declined, because it seemed to me an impossibility, but after some months had passed and I had reflected upon the great sadness for such a brilliant young man to be defeated in his ambition for the legal profession, I undertook to serve him in the way he suggested; of course, free of charge. Within three weeks there came to me a request for those stenographic reports from many parts of the continent. Time passed on, and some gentlemen of my own profession, evidently thinking that there was hardly room for them and for myself in this continent, began to assail me, and became so violent in their assault that the chief newspapers of America put special correspondents in my church Sabbath by Sabbath to take down such reply as I might make. I never made reply, except once for about three minutes, but those correspondents could not waste their time and so they telegraphed the sermons to their particular papers. After a while, Dr. Louis Klopsch, of New York, systemized the work into a syndicate until through that and other syndicates he has put the discourses week by week before more than twenty million people on both sides of the sea. There have been so many guesses on this subject, many of them inaccurate, that I now tell the true story. I have not improved the opportunity as I ought, but I feel the time has come when as a matter of common justice to the newspaper press I should make this statement in a sermon commemorative of the two thousandth full publication of sermons and religious addresses, saying nothing of fragmentary reports, which would run up into many thousands more.

And now, how can I more appropriately commemorate the two thousandth publication than by speaking of the newspaper press as an ally of the pulpit, and mentioning some of the trials of newspaper men?

The newspaper is the great educator of the nineteenth century. There is no force compared with it. It is book, pulpit, platform, forum all in one. And there is not an interest’97religious, literary, commercial, scientific, agricultural or mechanical’97that is not within its grasp. All our churches and schools and colleges and asylums and art-galleries feel the quaking of the printing-press.

The institution of newspapers arose in Italy. In Venice the first newspaper was published, and monthly, during the time Venice was warring against Solyman II in Dalmatia, it was printed for the purpose of giving military and commercial information to the Venetians. The first newspaper published in England was in 1588, and called the English Mercury. Who can estimate the political, scientific, commercial and religious revolutions roused up in England for many years past by the press?

The first attempt at this institution in France was in 1631, by a physician, who published the News for the amusement and health of his patients. The French nation understood fully how to appreciate this power. So early as in 1820 there were in Paris one hundred and sixty-nine journals. But in the United States the newspaper has come to unlimited sway. Though in 1775 there were but thirty-seven in the whole country, the number of published journals is now counted by thousands; and to-day’97we may as well acknowledge it as not’97the religious and secular newspapers are the great educators of the country.

But alas! through what struggle the newspaper has come to its present development. Just as soon as it began to demonstrate its power, superstition and tyranny shackled it. There is nothing that despotism so much fears and hates as the printing-press. A great writer in the south of Europe declared that the King of Naples had made it unsafe for him to write on any subject save natural history. Austria could not bear Kossuth’92s journalistic pen leading for the redemption of Hungary. Napoleon I, wanting to keep his iron heel on the neck of nations, said that the newspaper was the regent of kings, and the only safe place to keep an editor was in prison. But the great battle for the freedom of the press was fought in the court-rooms of England and the United States before this century began, when Hamilton made his great speech in behalf of the freedom of J. Peter Zenger’92s Gazette in America, and when Erskine made his great speech in behalf of the freedom to publish Paine’92s Rights of Man in England. Those were the Marathon and the Thermopyl’e6 where the battle was fought which decided the freedom of the press in England and America, and all the powers of earth and hell will never again be able to put upon the printing-press the handcuffs and the hopples of literary and political despotism. It is remarkable that Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, also wrote these words: ’93If I had to choose between a government without newspapers and newspapers without a government, I would prefer the latter.’94 Stung by some new fabrication in print, we come to write or speak about an ’93unbridled printing-press.’94 Our new book ground up in unjust criticism, we come to write or speak about the ’93unfair printing-press.’94 Perhaps through our own indistinctness of utterance we are reported as saying just the opposite of what we did say, and there is a small riot of semicolons and hyphens and commas, and we come to write or talk about the ’93blundering printing-press,’94 or we take up a newspaper full of social scandal and of cases of divorce, and we write or talk about a ’93filthy, scurrilous printing-press.’94 But this morning I ask you to consider the immeasurable and everlasting blessing of a good newspaper.

I find no difficulty in accounting for the world’92s advance. What has made the change? ’93Books,’94 you say. No, sir! The vast majority of citizens do not read books. Take this audience, or any other promiscuous assemblage, and how many histories have they read? How many treatises on constitutional law or political economy or works of science? How many elaborate poems or books of travel? Not many. In the United States the people would not average one such book a year for each individual! Whence, then, this intelligence, this capacity to talk about all themes, secular and religious; this acquaintance with science and art; this power to appreciate the beautiful and grand? Next to the Bible, the newspaper, swift-winged and everywhere present, flying over the fence, shoved under the door, tossed into the counting-house, laid on the workbench, hawked through the cars! All read it: white and black, German, Irishman, Swiss, Spaniard, American, old and young, good and bad, sick and well, before breakfast and after tea. Monday morning, Saturday night, Sunday and week day. I now declare that I consider the newspaper to be the grand agency by which the Gospel is to be preached, ignorance cast out, oppression dethroned, crime extirpated, the world raised, heaven rejoiced and God glorified. In the clanking of the printing-press, as the sheets fly out, I hear the voice of the Lord Almighty proclaiming to all the dead nations of the earth, ’93Lazarus, come forth!’94 and to the retreating surges of darkness, ’93Let there be light!’94 In many of our city newspapers, professing no more than secular information, there have appeared during the past thirty years some of the grandest appeals in behalf of religion, and some of the most effective interpretations of God’92s government among the nations.

There are only two kinds of newspapers’97the one good, very good, the other bad, very bad. A newspaper may be started with an undecided character, but after it has been going on for years everybody finds out just what it is; and it is very good or it is very bad. The one paper is the embodiment of news, the ally of virtue, the foe of crime, the delectation of elevated taste, the mightiest agency on earth for making the world better. The other paper is a brigand among moral forces; it is a beslimer of reputation, it is the right arm of death and hell, it is the mightiest agency in the universe for making the world worse and battling against the cause of God. The one an angel of intelligence and mercy, the other a fiend of darkness. Between this Archangel and this Fury is to be fought the great battle which is to decide the fate of the world. If you have any doubt as to which is to be victor, ask the prophecies, ask God; the chief batteries with which he would vindicate the right and thunder down the wrong are now unlimbered. The great Armageddon of the nations is not to be fought with swords, but with steel pens; not with bullets, but with type; not with cannon, but with lightning perfecting presses; and the Sumters and the Moultries and the Pulaskis and the Gibraltars of that conflict will be the editorial and reportorial rooms of our great newspaper establishments. Men of the press, God has put a more stupendous responsibility upon you than upon any other class of persons. What long strides your profession has made in influence and power since the day when Peter Sheffer invented cast metal type, and because two books were found just alike they were ascribed to the work of the devil; and books were printed on strips of bamboo; and Rev. Jesse Glover originated the first American printing-press; and the Common Council of New York, in solemn resolution, offered two hundred dollars to any printer who would come there and live; and when the Speaker of the House of Parliament in England announced with indignation that the public prints had recognized some of their doings, until in this day, when we have in this country many thousands of skilled stenographers, and newspapers sending out copies by the billion. The press and the telegraph have gone down into the same great harvest-field to reap, and the telegraph says to the newspaper: ’93I’92ll rake, while you bind’94; and the iron teeth of the telegraph are set down at one end of the harvest-field and drawn clean across, and the newspaper gathers up the sheaves, setting down one sheaf on the breakfast-table in the shape of a morning newspaper, and putting down another sheaf on the tea-table in the shape of an evening newspaper; and that man who neither reads nor takes a newspaper would be a curiosity. What vast progress since the days when Cardinal Wolsey declared that either the printing-press must go down or the Church of God must go down, to this time, when the printing-press and the pulpit are in glorious combination and alliance.

One of the great trials of this newspaper profession is the fact that they are compelled to see more of the shams of the world than any other profession. Through every newspaper office, day by day, go the weakness of the world, the vanities that want to be puffed, the revenges that want to be wreaked, all the mistakes that want to be corrected, all the dull speakers who want to be thought eloquent, all the meanness that wants to get its wares noticed gratis in the editorial columns in order to save the tax of the advertising column, all the men who want to be set right who never were right, all the crack-brained philosophers, with story as long as their hair and as gloomy as their finger-nails, all the itinerant bores who come to stay five minutes and stop an hour. From the editorial and reportorial rooms all the follies and shams of the world are seen day by day, and the temptation is to believe neither in God, man nor woman. It is no surprise to me that in your profession there are some sceptical men. I only wonder that you believe anything. Unless an editor or a reporter has in his present or in his early home a model of earnest character, or he throw himself upon the upholding grace of God he may make temporal and enternal shipwreck.

Another great trial of the newspaper profession is inadequate compensation. Since the days of Hazlitt and Sheridan and John Milton, and the wailings of Grub Street, London, literary toil, with very few exceptions, has not been properly requited. When Oliver Goldsmith received a friend in his house, he (the author) had to sit on the window, because there was only one chair. Linn’e6us sold his splendid work for a ducat. De Foe, the author of so many volumes, died penniless. The learned Johnson dined behind a screen because his clothes were too shabby to allow him to dine with the gentlemen who, on the other side of the screen, were applauding his works. And so on down to the present time literary toil is a great struggle for bread. The world seems to have a grudge against a man who, as they say, gets his living by his wits; and the day laborer says to the man of literary toil: ’93You come down here and shove a plane and hammer a shoe-last and break cobble-stones and earn an honest living as I do, instead of sitting there in idleness scribbling!’94 But there are no harder-worked men in all the earth than the newspaper people of this country. It is not a matter of hard times; it is characteristic at all times. Men have a better appreciation for that which appeals to the stomach than for that which appeals to the brain. They have no idea of the immense financial and intellectual exhaustion of the newspaper press. O men of the press! it will be a great help to you, if when you get home late at night, fagged out and nervous with your work, you would just kneel down and commend your case to God, who has watched all the fatigues of the day and the night and who has promised to be your God and the God of your children forever!

Another great trial of the newspaper profession is the diseased appetite for unhealthy intelligence. You blame the newspaper press for giving such prominence to murders and scandals. Do you suppose that so many papers would give prominence to these things if the people did not demand them? If I go into the meat-market of a foreign city, and I find that the butchers hang up on the most conspicuous hooks meat that is tainted, while the meat that is fresh and savory is put away without any special care, I come to the conclusion that the people of that city love tainted meat. You know very well that if the great mass of people in this country get hold of a newspaper, and there are in it no runaway matches, no broken-up families, no defamation of men in high position, they pronounce the paper insipid. They say, ’93It is shockingly dull to-night.’94 I believe it is one of the trials of the newspaper press that the people of this country demand moral slush instead of healthy and intellectual food. Now, you are a respectable man, an intelligent man, and a paper comes into your hand. You open it, and there are three columns of splendidly-written editorial, recommending some moral sentiment, or evolving some scientific theory. In the next column there is a miserable, contemptible divorce case. Which do you read first? You dip into the editorial long enough to say, ’93Well, that’92s very ably written,’94 and you read the divorce case from the ’93long primer’94 type at the top to the ’93nonpareil’94 type at the bottom, and then you ask your wife if she has read it! Oh, it is only a case of supply and demand! Newspaper men are not fools. They know what you want, and they give it to you. I believe that if the Church and the world bought nothing but pure, honest, healthful newspapers, nothing but pure, honest, and healthful newspapers would be published. If you should gather all the editors and the reporters of this country in one great conventions and ask of them what kind of a paper they would prefer to publish, I believe they would unanimously say, ’93We would prefer to publish an elevating paper.’94 So long as there is an iniquitous demand, there will be an iniquitous supply. I make no apology for a debauched newspaper, but I am saying these things in order to divide the responsibility between those who print and those who read.

Another temptation of the newspaper profession is the great allurement that surrounds them. Every occupation and profession has temptations peculiar to itself, and the newspaper profession is not an exception. The great demand, as you know, is on the nervous force, and the brain is racked. The blundering political speech must read well for the sake of the party, and so the reporter or the editor has to make it read well, although every sentence were a catastrophe to the English language. The reporter must hear all that an inaudible speaker, who thinks it is vulgar to speak out, says; and it must be right the next morning or the next night in the papers, though the night before the whole audience sat with its hand behind its ear, in vain trying to catch it. This man must go through killing night-work. He must go into heated assemblages and into unventilated audience-rooms that are enough to take the life out of him. He must visit court-rooms, which are almost always disgusting with rum and tobacco. He must expose himself at the fire. He must write in fetid alley-ways. Added to all that, he must have hasty mastication and irregular habits. To bear up under this tremendous nervous strain, they are tempted to artificial stimulus, and how many thousands have gone down under their pressure God only knows. They must have something to counteract the wet, they must have something to keep out the chill, and after a scant night’92s sleep they must have something to revive them for the morning’92s work. This is what made Horace Greeley such a stout temperance man. I said to him, ’93Mr. Greeley, why are you more eloquent on the subject of temperance than any other subject?’94 He replied, ’93I have seen so many of my best friends in journalism go down under intemperance.’94 Oh, my dear brother of the newspaper profession, what you cannot do without artificial stimulus, God does not want you to do? There is no half-way ground for our literary people between teetotalism and dissipation. Your professional success, your domestic peace, your eternal salvation, will depend upon your theories in regard to artificial stimulus. I have had so many friends go down under the temptation, their brilliancy quenched, their homes blasted, that I cry out this morning in the words of another, ’93Look not upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth its color in the cup, when it moveth itself aright; for at the last it biteth like a serpent, and it stingeth like an adder.’94

Another trial of this profession is the fact, no one seems to care for their souls. They feel bitterly about it, though they laugh. People sometimes laugh the loudest when they feel the worst. They are expected to gather up religious proceedings, and to discuss religious doctrines in the editorial columns, but who expects them to be saved by the sermons they stenograph, or by the doctrines they discuss in the editorial columns? The world looks upon them as professional. Who preaches to reporters and editors? Some of them came from religious homes, and when they left the parental roof, whoever regarded or disregarded, they came off with a father’92s benediction and a mother’92s prayer. They never think of those good old times but tears come into their eyes, and they move through these great cities homesick. Oh, if they only know what a helpful thing it is for a man to put his weary head down on the bosom of a sympathetic Christ! He knows how nervous and tired you are. He has a heart large enough to take in all your interests for this world and the next. Oh, men of the newspaper press, you sometimes get sick of this world, it seems so hollow and unsatisfying. If there are any people in all the earth that need God, you are the men, and you shall have him, if only this day you implore his mercy.

A man was found at the foot of Canal Street, New York. As they picked him up from the water and brought him to the morgue, they saw by the contour of his forehead that he had great mental capacity. He had entered the newspaper profession. He had gone down in health. He took to artificial stimulus. He went down further and further, until one summer day, hot and hungry and sick and in despair, he flung himself off the dock. They found in his pocket a reporter’92s pad, a lead pencil, a photograph of some one who had loved him long ago. Death, as sometimes it will, smoothed out all the wrinkles that had gathered prematurely on his brow, and as he lay there his face was as fair as when, seven years before, he left his country home, and they bade him good-by forever. The world looked through the window of the morgue and said, ’93It’92s nothing but an outcast’94; but God said it was a gigantic soul that perished, because the world gave him no chance.

Let me ask all men connected with the printing-press that they help us more and more in the effort to make the world better. I charge you in the name of God, before whom you must account for the tremendous influence you hold in this country, to consecrate yourselves to higher endeavors. You are the men to fight back this invasion of corrupt literature. Lift up your right hand and swear new allegiance to the cause of philanthropy and religion. And when, at last, standing on the plains of judgment, you look out upon the unnumbered throngs over whom you have had influence, may it be found that you were amongst the mightiest energies that lifted men upon the exalted pathway that leads to the renown of heaven. Better than to have sat in editorial chair, from which, with the finger of type, you decided the destinies of empires, but decided them wrong, that you had been some dungeoned exile, who, by the light of window iron-grated, on scraps of a New Testament leaf, picked up from the earth, spelled out the story of him who taketh away the sins of the world. In eternity, Dives is the Beggar! Well, my friends, we will all soon get through writing and printing and proofreading and publishing. What then? Our life is a book. Our years are the chapters. Our months are the paragraphs. Our days are the sentences. Our doubts are the interrogation points. Our imitation of others the quotation marks. Our attempts at display a dash. Death the period. Eternity the peroration. O God, where will we spend it? Have you heard the news, more startling than any found in the journals of the last six weeks? It is the tidings that man is lost. Have you heard the news, the gladdest that was ever announced, coming this day from the throne of God, lightning couriers leaping from the palace gate? The news! The glorious news! That there is pardon for all guilt and comfort for all trouble. Set it up in ’93double-leaded’94 columns and direct it to the whole race.

And now before I close this sermon, thankfully commemorative of the ’93Two Thousandth’94 publication, I wish more fully to acknowledge the services rendered by the secular press in the matter of evangelization. All the secular newspapers of the day’97for I am not speaking this morning of the religious newspapers’97all the secular newspapers of the day discuss all the questions of God, eternity and the dead, and all the questions of the past, present and future. There is not a single doctrine of theology but has been discussed in the last ten years by the secular newspapers of the country. They gather up all the news of all the earth bearing on religious subjects, and then they scatter the news abroad again. The Christian newspaper will be the right* wing of the apocalyptic angel. The cylinder of the Christianized printing-press will be the front wheel of the Lord’92s chariot. I take the music of this day and I do not mark it diminuendo’97I mark it crescendo. A pastor on a Sabbath preaches to a few hundred or a few thousand people, and on Monday, or during the week, the printing-press will take the same sermon and preach it to millions of people. God speed the printing-press! God save the printing-press! God Christianize the printing-press!

When I see the printing-press standing with the electric telegraph on the one side gathering up material, and the lightning express train on the other side waiting for the tons of folded sheets of newspapers, I pronounce it the mightiest force in our civilization. So I commend you to pray for all those who manage the newspapers of the land, for all typesetters, for all editors, for all publishers, that, sitting or standing in positions of such great influence, they may give all that influence for God and the betterment of the human race. An aged woman was making her living by knitting unwound yarn from the ball until she found in the center of the ball there was an old piece of newspaper. She opened it and read an advertisement which announced that she had become heiress to a large property, and that fragment of a newspaper lifted her up from pauperism to affluence. And I do not know but as the thread of time unrolls and unwinds a little further, through the silent yet speaking newspaper may be found the vast inheritance of the world’92s redemption.

Jesus shall reign where’92er the sun

Does his successive journeys run;

His kingdom stretch from shore to shore,

Till suns shall rise and set no more.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage