Biblia

425. Pulpit and Press

425. Pulpit and Press

Pulpit and Press

Luk_16:8 : ’93The children of this world are, in their generation, wiser than the children of light.’94

Sacred stupidity, and solemn incompetency, and sanctified laziness are here rebuked by Christ. He says worldings are wider awake for opportunities than are Christians. Men of the world grab occasions, while Christian people let the most valuable occasions drift by unimproved. That is the meaning of our Lord when he says: ’93The children of this world are, in their generation, wiser than the children of light.’94

A marked illustration of the truth of that maxim is in the slowness of the Christian religion to take possession of the secular printing press. The opportunity is open, and has been for some time open, but the ecclesiastical courts, and the churches, and the ministers of religion are, for the most part, allowing the golden opportunity to pass unimproved. That the opportunity is open, I declare, from the fact that all the secular newspapers are glad of any religious facts or statistics that you present to them. Any animated and stirring article delating to religious themes they would gladly print. They thank you for any information in regard to churches. If a wrong has been done to any Christian church, or Christian institution, you could go into any newspaper of the land and have the real truth stated. Dedication services, ministerial ordinations and pastoral installations, cornerstone-laying of a church, anniversary of a charitable society, will have reasonable space in any secular journal, if it have previous notice given. If I had some great injustice done me, there is not an editorial or a reportorial room in the United States into which I could not go and get myself set right; and that is true of any well-known Christian man. Already the daily and secular press, during the course of each week, publishes as much religious information and high moral sentiment as does the weekly religious press. Why, then, does not our glorious Christianity embrace these magnificent opportunities? I have before me a subject of first and last importance: How shall we secure the secular press as a mightier reinforcement to religion and the pulpit?

The first thing toward this result is cessation of indiscriminate hostility against newspaperdom. You might as well denounce the legal profession because of the shysters, or the medical profession because of the quacks, or merchandise because of the swindling bargain-makers, as to abuse newspapers because there are recreant editors, and unfair reporters, and unclean columns. Guttenberg, the inventor of the art of printing, was about to destroy his types and extinguish the art, because it was suggested to him that printing might be suborned into the service of the devil; but afterward he bethought himself that the right use of the art might more than overcome the evil use of it; and so he spared the type, and the intelligence of all following ages. But there are many today in the depressed mood of Guttenberg, with uplifted hammer, wanting to pound to pieces the type, who have not reached his better mood, in which he saw the art of printing to be the rising sun of the world’92s illumination.

If, instead of fighting newspapers, we spend the same length of time, and the same vehemence, in marshaling their help in religious directions, we would be as much wiser as the man who gets consent of the railroad superintendent to fasten a car to the end of a rail-train, shows better sense than he who runs his wheelbarrow up the track to meet and drive back the Chicago limited express. The silliest thing that a man ever does is to fight a newspaper, for you may have the floor for utterance perhaps for one day in the week, while the newspaper has the floor every day of the week. Napoleon, though a mighty man, had many weaknesses, and one of the weakest things he ever did was to threaten that if the English newspapers did not stop their adverse criticism of himself, he would, with four hundred thousand bayonets, cross the Channel for their chastisement. Do not fight newspapers. Attack provokes attack. Better wait till the excitement blows over and then go in and get justice, for get it you will if you have patience, and common sense, and equipoise of disposition. It ought to be a mighty sedative that there is an enormous amount of common sense in the world, and you will eventually be taken for what you are really worth, and you cannot be puffed up, and you cannot be written down, and if you are the enemy of good society, that fact will come out, and if you are the friend of good society that fact will be established.

I know what I am talking about, for I can draw on my own experience. All the respectable newspapers, so far as I know, are my friends now. But many of you remember the time when I was the most continuously and meanly attacked man in this country. God gave me grace not to answer back, and I kept silence for ten years, and much grace was required. What I said was perverted and twisted into just the opposite of what I did say. My person was maligned, and I was presented as a gorgon, and I was maliciously described by persons who had never seen me, as a monstrosity in body, mind, and soul. There were millions of people who believed that there was a large sofa in my pulpit, although we never had anything but a chair, and that during the singing by the congregation I was accustomed to lie down on that sofa and dangle my feet over the end. Imaginative correspondents for ten years misrepresented our church services, but we waited, and people from every neighborhood of Christendom came to find the magnitude of the falsehoods concerning the church and concerning myself. A reaction set in, and we ultimately had justice, full justice, more than justice, and as much over-praise as once we had under-appreciation; and no man who ever lived was so much indebted to the newspaper press for opportunity to preach the Gospel as I am. Young men in the ministry, young men in all professions and occupations, wait. You can afford to wait. Take rough misrepresentation as a Turkish towel to start up your languid circulation, or a system of massage or Swedish movement, whose pokes and pulls and twists and thrusts are salutary treatment. There is only one person you need to manage, and that is yourself. Keep your disposition sweet by communion with the Christ, who answered not again, by the society of genial people, and walk out in the sunshine, and you will come out all right. And do not join the crowd of people in our day who spend much of their time condemning newspapers.

Again: in this effort to secure the secular press as a mightier reinforcement of religion, let us make it the avenue of religious information. If you put the facts of churches and denominations of Christians only into the columns of religious papers, which do not in this country have an average of more than seven thousand subscribers, what have you done as compared with what you do if you put these facts through the daily papers, which have hundreds of thousands of readers? Every little denomination must have its little organ, supported at great expense, when, with one-half the outlay, a column or half a column of room might be rented in some semi-omnipotent secular publication, and so the religious information would be sent round and round the world. The world moves so swiftly today that news a week old is stale. Give us all the great church facts and all the revival tidings the next morning or the same evening.

My advice, often given to friends who propose to start a new paper, is: ’93Don’92t! Don’92t! Employ the papers already started.’94 The biggest financial hole ever dug in this American continent is the hole in which good people throw their money when they start a newspaper. The most distinguished editor and publisher of a daily newspaper said that there were three ways in which a fortune could be more quickly lost than by any other means: the first, by supporting a standing army; the second, by running a theatre, and the third, by starting a newspaper’97and the last he regarded as the surest of the three. It is almost as good and as quick a way of getting rid of money as buying stock in a gold mine in Colorado. Not more printing presses, but the right use of those already established. All their cylinders, all their steam power, all their pens, all their types, all their editorial chairs and reportorial rooms, are available if you would engage them in behalf of civilization and Christianity.

Again: if you would secure the secular press as a mightier reinforcement of religion and the pulpit, extend widest and highest courtesies to the representatives of journalism. Give them easy chairs and plenty of room when they come to report your meetings. For the most part they are gentlemen of education and refinement, graduates of colleges, with families to support by their literary craft, many of them weary with the push of a business that is precarious and fluctuating, each one of them the avenue of information to thousands of readers, their impression of the services to be the impression adopted by multitudes. They are connecting links between a sermon, or a song, or a prayer, and this great population that tramp up and down the streets day by day and year by year with their sorrows uncomforted and their sins unpardoned. More than eight hundred thousand people in Brooklyn, and less than seventy-five thousand in churches, so that our cities are not so much preached to by ministers of religion as by reporters. Put all journalists into our prayers and sermons. Of all the hundred thousand sermons preached today, there will not be three preached to journalists, and probably not one. Of all the prayers offered for classes of men innumerable, the prayers offered for the most potential class will be so few and rare that they will be thought a preacher’92s idiosyncrasy. This world will never be brought to God until some revival of religion sweeps over the land, and takes into the kingdom of God editors and reporters, compositors, pressmen, and newsboys. And if you have not faith enough to pray for that and toil for that, you had better get out of our ranks and join the other side, for you are the unbelievers who make the wheels of the Lord’92s chariot drag heavily. The great final battle between truth and error, the Armageddon, I think, will not be fought with swords and shells and guns, but with pens’97quill pens, steel pens, gold pens, fountain pens, and, before that, the pens must be converted. The most divinely-honored weapon of the past has been the pen, and the most divinely-honored weapon of the future will be the pen; prophet’92s pen and evangelist’92s pen and apostle’92s pen, followed by editor’92s pen and reporter’92s pen and author’92s pen. God save the pen! The wing of the Apocalyptic angel will be the printed page. The printing press will roll ahead of Christ’92s chariot to clear the way.

’93But,’94 some one might ask, ’93would you make Sunday newspapers also a reinforcement?’94 I have learned to take things as they are, I would like to see the much-scoffed-at old Puritan Sabbaths come back again. I do not think the modern Sunday will turn out any better men and women than were your grandfathers and grandmothers under the old-fashioned Sunday. To say nothing of other results, Sunday newspapers are killing editors, reporters, compositors, and pressmen. Every man, woman, and child is entitled to twenty-four hours of nothing to do. If the newspapers put on another set of hands, that does not relieve the editorial and reportorial room of its cares and responsibilities. Our literary men die fast enough without killing them with Sunday work. If, as many say, the Sunday newspaper is to continue, let us implore all those who have anything to do with issuing it to fill it with moral and religious information, live sermons, and facts elevating. Urge that all divorce cases be dropped, and instead thereof have good advice as to how husbands and wives ought to live happily together. Put in small type the behavior of the swindling church member, and in large type the contribution of some Christian toward an asylum for feeble-minded children, or a seaside sanitarium. Urge all managing editors to put meanness and impurity in pearl or agate type and charity and fidelity and Christian consistency in brevier or bourgeois. If we cannot drive out the Sunday newspaper, let us have the Sunday newspaper converted. The fact is that the modern Sunday newspaper is a great improvement on the old Sunday newspaper. What a wretched thing was a Sunday newspaper thirty years ago! It was enough to destroy a man’92s respectability to leave the tip end of it sticking out of his coat pocket. What editorials! What advertisements! What pictures! The modern Sunday newspaper is as much an improvement on the old-time Sunday newspaper as one hundred is more than twenty-five; in other words, about seventy-five cent. improvement. Who knows that by prayer and kindly consultation with our literary friends, we may have it lifted into a positively religious sheet, printed on Saturday night and only distributed on Sabbath mornings.

The first book ever printed was the Bible, by Faust and his son-in-law Schoeffer, in 1460, and that consecration of type to the Holy Scriptures was a prophecy of the great mission of printing for the evangelization of all the nations. The father of the American printing press was a clergyman, Rev. Jesse Glover, and that was a prophecy of the religious use that the Gospel ministry in this country were to make of the types.

All things are possible with God, and my faith is up until nothing in the way of religious victory would surprise me. All the newspaper printing presses of the earth are going to be the Lord’92s, and telegraph and telephone and type will yet announce nations born in a day.

Again: we shall secure the secular press as a mightier reinforcement of religion and the pulpit, by making our religious utterances more interesting and spirited, and then the press will reproduce them. On the way to church many years ago, a journalist said a thing that has kept me ever since thinking: ’93Are you going to give us any points today?’94 ’93What do you mean?’94 I asked. He said: ’93I mean by that anything that will be striking enough to be remembered.’94 Then I said to myself: What right have we in our pulpits and Sunday-schools to take the time of people if we have nothing to say that is memorable! David did not have any difficulty in remembering Nathan’92s trust: ’93Thou art the man;’94 nor Felix in remembering Paul’92s point-blank utterance on righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come; nor the English king any difficulty in remembering what the court preacher said, when, during the sermon against sin, the preacher threw his handkerchief into the king’92s pew to indicate whom he meant.

The tendency of criticism in the theological seminaries is to file off from our young men all the sharp points and make them too smooth for any kind of execution. What we want, all of us, is more point, less humdrum. If we say the right thing in the right way, the press will be glad to echo and re-echo it. Sabbath-school teachers, reformers, young men and old men in the ministry, what we all want if we are to make the printing press an ally in Christian work is that which the reporter spoken of suggested’97points, sharp points, memorable points. But if the thing be dead when uttered by living voice, it will be a hundred-fold more dead when it is laid out in cold type.

Now, as you all have something to do with the newspaper press, either in issuing a paper or in reading it, either as producers or patrons, either as sellers or purchasers of the printed sheet, I propose on this Sabbath morning, a treaty to be signed between the church and the printing press, a treaty to be ratified by millions of good people if we rightly fashion it, a treaty promising that we will help each other in our work of trying to illumine and felicitate the world, we by voice, you by pen, we by speaking only that which is worth printing, you by printing only that which is fit to speak. You help us, and we will help you. Side by side be these two potent agencies until the Judgment Day, when we must both be scrutinized for our work, healthful or blasting. The two worst-off men in that day will be the minister of religion and the editor if they wasted their opportunity. Both of us are the engineers of long express trains of influence, and we will run them into a depot of light or tumble them off the embankments.

What a useful life and what a glorious departure was that of the most famous of all American printers, Benjamin Franklin, whom infidels, in the penury of their resources, have often fraudulently claimed for their own, but the printer who moved that the Philadelphia convention be opened with prayer, the resolution lost because a majority thought prayer unnecessary, and who wrote at the time he was viciously attacked: ’93My rule is to go straight forward in doing what appears to me to be right, leaving the consequences to Providence,’94 and who wrote this quaint epitaph, showing his hope of resurrection, an epitaph that I hundreds of times read while living in Philadelphia:

’93The Body of Benjamin Franklin, Printer, (like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out, and stript of its lettering and gilding) lies here food for worms. Yet the work itself shall not be lost, for it will (as he believed) appear once more in a new and more beautiful edition, corrected and amended by the Author.’94

That Providence intends the profession of reporters to have a mighty share in the world’92s redemption is suggested by the fact that Paul and Christ took a reporter along with them, and he reported their addresses and their acts. Luke was a reporter, and he wrote not only the Book of Luke, but the Acts of the Apostles, and without that reporter’92s work we would have known nothing of the Pentecost, and nothing of Stephen’92s martyrdom, and nothing of Tabitha’92s resurrection, and nothing of the jailing and unjailing of Paul and Silas, and nothing of the shipwreck at Melita. Strike out the reporter’92s work from the Bible and you kill a large part of the New Testament. It makes me think that in the future of the Kingdom of God, the reporters are to bear a mighty part.

Some years ago a representative of an important newspaper took his seat in my church, one Sabbath night, about five pews from the front of the pulpit. He took out pencil and reporter’92s pad, resolved to caricature the whole scene. When the music began, he began; and with his pencil he derided that, and then derided the prayer, and then derided the reading of the Scriptures, and then began to deride the sermon. But, he says, for some reason, his hand began to tremble, and he, rallying himself, sharpened his pencil and started again, but broke down again, and then put pencil and paper in his pocket, and, his head down on the front of the pew, and began to pray. At the close of the service he came up and asked for the prayers of others, and gave his heart to God; and now, though still engaged in newspaper work, he is an evangelist, and every Sabbath afternoon preaches Jesus Christ to the people.

And the men of that profession will yet come in a body throughout the country. I know hundreds of them, and a more genial or highly educated class of men it would be hard to find. Though the tendency of their profession may be towards scepticism, an organized, common-sense, Gospel invitation would bring them to the front of all Christian endeavor. Men of the pencil and pen, in all departments, you need the help of the Christian religion. In the day when people want to get their newspapers at three cents, and are hoping for the time when they can get any of them at one cent, and, as a consequence, the attaches of the printing press are, by the thousand, ground under the cylinders, you want God to take care of you and your families. Some of your best work is as much unappreciated as was Milton’92s ’93Paradise Lost,’94 for which the author received twenty-five dollars; and the immortal poem ’93Hohenlinden’94 by Thomas Campbell, when he first offered it for publication, and in the column called ’93Notices to Correspondents,’94 appeared, the words: ’93To T. C.’97The lines commencing ’91On Linden when the sun was low,’92 are not up to our standard. Poetry is not T. C.’92s forte.’94

O men of the pencil and pen, amid your unappreciated work you need encouragement, and you can have it. Printers of all Christendom, editors, reporters, compositors, pressmen, publishers, and readers of that which is printed, resolve that you will not write, set up, edit, issue, or read anything that debases body, mind, or soul. In the name of God, by the laying on of the hands of faith and prayer, ordain the printing press for righteousness and liberty and salvation. All of us with some influence that will help in the right direction, let us put our hands to the work, imploring God to hasten the consummation. A ship with hundreds of passengers approaching the South American coast, the man on the lookout neglected his work, and in a few minutes the ship would have been dashed to ruin on the rocks. But a cricket on board the vessel, that had made no sound all the voyage, set up a shrill call at the smell of land, and the captain, knowing that habit of the insect, the vessel was stopped in time to avoid an awful wreck. And so insignificant means now may do wonders, and the scratch of a pen may save the shipwreck of a soul.

Are you all ready for signing of the contract, the league, the solemn treaty proposed between Journalism and Evangelism? Aye! Let it be a Christian marriage of the pulpit and the printing press. The ordination of the former on my head, the pen of the latter in my hand, it is appropriate that I publish the banns of such a marriage. Let them from this day be one in the magnificent work of the world’92s redemption.

Let thrones and powers and kingdoms be

Obedient, mighty God, to thee;

And over land and stream and main,

Now wave the sceptre of thy reign.

O, let that glorious anthem swell,

Let host to host the triumph tell,

Till not one rebel heart remains,

But over all the Saviour reigns.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage