463. The Burning Books
The Burning Books
Act_19:19 : ’93Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men; and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver.’94
Paul had been stirring up Ephesus with some lively sermons about the sins of that place. Among the more important results was the fact that the citizens brought out their bad books, and in a public place made a bonfire of them. I see the people coming out with their arms full of Ephesian literature and tossing it into the flames. I see an economist standing by, and hear him saying, ’93Stop this waste. Here are some thousand dollars’92 worth of books; do you propose to burn them all up? If you don’92t want to read them yourselves, sell them, and let somebody else read them.’94 ’93No,’94 said the people, ’93if these books are not good for us, they are not good for anybody else, and we shall stand and watch until the last leaf has turned to ashes. They have done us a world of harm, and they shall never do others harm.’94 Hear the flames crackle and roar!
Well, my friends, one of the wants of the cities of this country is a great bonfire of bad books and newspapers. We have enough fuel to make a blaze two hundred feet high. Many of the publishing houses would do well to dump into the blaze their entire stock of goods, and a great many of the newspaper establishments would do well to roll into the flames all their next issue of fifty or a hundred thousand copies. Bring forth the insufferable trash and put it into the fire, and let it be known in the presence of God and angels and men that you are going to rid your houses of the overtopping and underlying curse of a profligate literature.
The printing press is the mightiest agency on earth for good or evil. The position of a minister of religion standing in his pulpit is a responsible position, but it does not seem to me so responsible a position as that of the editor and the publisher. At what distant point of time, at what distant cycle of eternity, will cease the influence of the great departed editors of this country’97Henry J. Raymond, Horace Greeley, James Gordon Bennett, Henry W. Grady, George D. Prentice, and William Cullen Bryant? Men die, but the literary influences they project go on forever.
Taking into consideration the fact that our New York dailies now have a circulation of about two million copies per day, I want you to sit down and cipher out, if you can, how far up, and how far down, and how far out, reaches the influence of the American printing press. I believe that God has made the printing press to be the chief agent in the world’92s correction and evangelization, and that the great final battle of the world will be fought, not with guns and swords, but with types and presses, a Gospelized and purified literature triumphing over and trampling under foot and crushing out a corrupt literature. God speed the cylinders of an honest, intelligent, aggressive, Christian printing press!
I put to you, and to your families, the all-searching question, what books and newspapers shall we read? You see I group them together. A newspaper is a book in swifter and more portable shape, and the rule that applies to books will apply to newspapers. The best way to overcome a bad book is by publishing a good one. The best way to overcome pernicious journalism is by scattering abroad healthful newspapers.
Now, shall we make our minds the receptacle of everything that bad authors have a mind to write? Shall we make no distinction between the tree of life and the tree of death? Shall we stoop and drink out of the trough which the wickedness of men has filled with pollution and shame? Shall we chase the fantastic will-o’92-the-wisps across the swamp, and mire in impurity when we may walk in the blooming gardens of God? You and I must decide for our present welfare and our everlasting happiness what we shall read, and we cannot afford to make a mistake. God help me, and help you, that I may present the right rule, and that we may all be enabled to adopt it.
Standing, as we do, chin deep in the fictitious literature of the day, the question is asked us, What novels shall we read, if we read any? Shall we read any? What advice shall we give to our young people in regard to fictitious literature? There are good, pure, honest, Christian novels’97those that elevate the heart and purify the life. A novel is history and poetry combined’97the history of things around us, with the licenses and the assumed names of poetry. The world will never be able to pay the debt of obligation it owes to such writers of fiction as Hawthorne, and M’92Kenzie, and Landor, and Hunt, and Arthur, and Marion Harland, and Harte, and Howell, and Amelia Barr, and others whose names easily occur to you. No one has ever better set forth the follies of high life than did Miss Edgeworth. No one has ever more faithfully embalmed the memories of the past than has Walter Scott. Cooper’92s novels are healthy with the breath of seaweed and the air of the American forest. Charles Kingsley has done wonders in curing the morbidity of the world, and showing the poetry of strong muscle and good health and fresh air. Thackeray has brought the world under obligation by his caricature of the pretenders to gentility and high blood. Charles Dickens has built his monument in his own books, which are an everlasting plea for the poor and an anathema against injustice.
Now, it is certain that this style of books rightly read and read in right proportion with other books, will have an elevating and purifying and ennobling and enlarging influence; but I have to deplore, as you will deplore, the fact that there is a pernicious tide of novels pouring into this country. It is coming in like a freshet overflowing all the banks of decency and common sense. Some of the most reputable publishing houses of the country are printing them. Some of the religious papers are commending them. You find them in the school-girl’92s desk, in the young man’92s trunk, in the steamboat cabin, on the table of the reception-room.
You see a light in your child’92s room late at night. You go in and say, ’93What are you doing?’94 The boy says, ’93I am reading.’94 You say, ’93What are you reading?’94 ’93Reading a book.’94 ’93Well, what is the book?’94 You take hold of the book, and you see it is a bad book, and you say, ’93Where did you get this book?’94 ’93Oh,’94 he says, ’93I borrowed it!’94 There is always some one glad to loan a bad book to your boy. Pernicious literature everywhere. I charge upon it the destruction of tens of thousands of immortal souls, and I bid you wake up to this overwhelming evil.
I am going to gather all the books together; novels, good and bad; travels, true and false; histories, faithful and inaccurate; legends, beautiful and monstrous’97all catalogues, all chronicles, all family, city, state, and national libraries’97and I will pile them up in one great pyramid of literature, and bring to bear upon it certain grand, glorious, unmistakable and infallible Christian tests, so that instead of going away saying, I recommend this, or denounce that, every man and every woman with an awakened conscience will be able to decide for himself and for herself.
In the first place, I counsel you to avoid all those books which give false portraiture of human life. Life is neither a tragedy nor a farce; men are not all knaves or heroes; women are neither angels nor furies; and yet much of the literature of the day would seem to give you the idea that instead of life being an earnest, practical thing, it is a fantastic and extravagant thing. How are that young man and that young woman prepared for the duties of the day who, by reading romances last night, waded through stories of magnificent knavery and wickedness? An indiscriminate reader of novels is inane, useless, a nuisance, unfit for store, bank, office, factory, street, home’97anywhere. A woman who is an indiscriminate reader of novels is unfitted for her duty as wife, mother, sister, daughter. There she is at midnight, bending over the romance. Hair disheveled, countenance vacant, hand tremulous, cheek pale, bursting into tears at the story of an unfortunate lover! There she is, by day, when she ought to be busy, gazing for one long hour at’97nothing! Biting her finger-nails into the quick. The carpets that were plain before on the floor of the home will be plainer, now that in the romance she has been walking through tessellated halls of castles, beside plumed princesses, or lounging in the arbor with polished desperado. Oh, these indiscriminate readers of fiction; they are unfitted for this life, which is a trying discipline for the furnaces of trial through which they have to pass, for this life where all we gain is achieved by hard, long-continued, exhaustive and unceasing work!
Again: I counsel you to avoid all those books which, while they have good in them, have also a large admixture of evil. What has been your experience in the reading of books which were partly good and partly bad? Which stuck in the memory the longest, the good or the bad? The bad. Most human intellects are so fashioned that they allow the small particles of good as in a sieve to fall through, and hold the great cinders. There is here and there an intellect, which, like a lodestone plunged amid steel and brass filings, gathers up the steel, and repels the brass filings; but it is the exception.
The best men who ever lived cannot afford to read a bad book, unless it be for professional purposes, for the purpose of making the world better, just as a doctor may go through a smallpox hospital, or through a lazaretto studying disease, that he may go forth and benefit the world with his theories in regard to health and in regard to sickness. But if you go into a bad book to get the good out of it, you will make a terrible mistake. You will plunge through a hedge of burrs to get one blackberry, and you will surely get more burrs than blackberries. You say the evil in the book is so insignificant it will not amount to anything. I tell you that the scratch of a pin has sometimes produced lockjaw. You go out of curiosity prying into a bad book, and you are making as dangerous an experiment as the man who should take a lighted torch into a gunpowder mill to find out whether there is any danger of its blowing up. He will find out, but the experiment will never be of any advantage to anybody.
Years ago there was on exhibition in New York a black leopard, a very dangerous animal, but very beautiful. A gentleman stood looking through the bars of the cage at the leopard. It seemed so mild, so quiet, so beautiful, he felt as if he would like to stroke the sleek hide. He stood a little while considering whether it would be safe. Everything seemed safe and he put his hand through the bars of the cage and stroked the sleek and beautiful hide of the black leopard, but no sooner had he touched it than it sprang upon him, and he pulled forth his arm and his hand mauled and bleeding, and ready for amputation. Look out how you toy with iniquity. It may be very beautiful, very attractive, and seem very placid; but you attempt to stroke it and you may pull forth your soul torn and bleeding under the clutch of a black leopard. You say, ’93How are we to find out what books are good or bad without reading them?’94 Every bad book has something suspicious about it. There is something suspicious in the title or in the engraving. You take any book to any intelligent man, and in five minutes by turning the leaves and looking at the index he can tell you whether it is a good book or a bad one, and out of a thousand attempts he will not make one mistake. This reptile of bad literature carries a warning rattle.
Again: I counsel you to avoid all books that corrupt the imagination and arouse the base passions. I do not refer now to the bad book the villain has under his arm, standing at the street corner waiting for the school to come out, then looking up and down the street, and finding no police near by, offers the book to your boy on his way home. I do not refer to that, but I refer to literature which evades the law, and is written in polished style, and with acute plot sounds the tocsin that arouses all the baser passions of the soul. The great Roman orator said: ’93Beware how you think of sensuality, for if you think much of it, you will soon be able to think of nothing else.’94 Many years ago, there was a lady who came forth as an authoress under the assumed name of George Sand. She smoked cigars. She dressed like a gentleman. She wrote in style ardent and eloquent, mighty in its gloom, terrible in its unchastity, vivid in its portraiture, damnable in its influence, putting forth an evil which has never relaxed, but has hundreds of copyists. Yet so much worse are many French books coming to America than anything George Sand ever wrote that if she were alive now she might be thought almost a reformer. Right under the nostrils of your great cities there is a reeking, unwashed literature fit to poison all the fountains of public virtue and rising to smite your sons and daughters as with the wing of a destroying angel. It is high time that ministers of religion should blow the trumpet and rally the troops of righteousness, all armed to the teeth, in this battle against a corrupt literature.
Again: I remark, you are to avoid all books which are apologetic of crime. It is a deplorable fact that some of the richest bookbindery and the finest rhetoric are brought into the service of sin. Now, sin is loathsome anyhow. It is born in shame and it dies howling in the darkness. In this world it is scourged with a whip of scorpions, and afterward it is pursued by God’92s lightnings of wrath across a boundless desert of ruin and woe. All those books that represent sin as happy and congratulated, or as finally successful, are an insult to God and a blasting influence to the human race. Sin is never happy. ’93There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked.’94 Sin is never finally successful. ’93The way of the wicked He turneth upside down.’94 Those books that represent the opposite of this, that sin is happy, that sin is finally successful, are slanders on the human race and an outrage on God, who made the human race. If you must present carnality, do not present it as looking from behind embroidered curtains, or through the lattice of a royal seraglio, but as writhing in the agonies of a city hospital.
Cursed of God and man be all those books which would try to make impurity decent and iniquity right and hypocrisy honorable! Cursed be all those books swarming with libertines and desperadoes, filling the minds of young people with sin and whirring them into iniquity! Ye authors who write them, ye publishers who print them, ye booksellers who sell them, you will be cut to pieces after a while, if not with the indignation of the community, then with the wrath of that God who will by no means clear the guilty. A mighty responsibility that man undertakes who has anything to do with iniquitous literature. The hour strikes midnight. A woman is bending over a depraved romance. Her cheeks are flushed with the color that soon dies out. Hot tears fall. Her breath is quick and irregular. Her hand trembles as though a guardian angel were trying to shake the book out of her grasp. The sweat on her brow is the spray dashed up from the river of death. She laughs; the sound drops dead. Four o’92clock in the morning! The day will soon look upon her as though she were a detained spectre of the night. Soon in the madhouse, she will mistake her ringlets for coiling serpents, and she will thrust her white hand through the bars, and smite her head, and push it as though to shove the scalp from the skull, crying, ’93My brain! my brain!’94 Mad! Mad!
Oh, stand off from such an accursed literature! Why go sounding among the reefs and the warning buoys of such a dangerous coast when there is a vast ocean where you may voyage all sail set?
In this connection I class unclean pictorials doing a tremendous work for death. You find these death-warrants on all the streets. For a good, healthful picture we have great admiration. What a good author may take four hundred pages to present, a good engraver could present on the half side of a pictorial. Costly paintings are the aristocracy of art; engraving is the democracy of art. The best part of a picture that cost ten thousand dollars you may buy for ten cents. I say the best part. So we ought to rejoice in the multiplication of pictures. It is the intense, it is the quick way of presenting the truth.
A man never gets over his love for pictures. The little child is entranced with them; we all are entranced with them. If a book be presented to us, we first look at the pictures. Multiply them. When the children are gathered after the evening repast, put before them the pictures. Nail them to the wall of the nursery. Put them on the couch of the invalid. Strew them all through the railroad cars and steamboat cabins to refresh the travelers. Gather pictures in your albums and portfolios. Bless God for pictures and may they multiply all over the earth’97these messengers of knowledge and of mercy.
But the unclean pictorials are doing a vast work for death and perdition. Many a young man for ten cents buys his everlasting undoing. It poisons his soul; his soul may poison ten other souls; they may poison hundreds, the hundreds thousands, the thousands millions. It will take the measuring line of eternity to tell how far out has gone the influence of that one unclean pictorial. He may unroll it amid the roaring mirth of his comrades; but if they could see the result on that young man’92s heart and life instead of laughing they would weep.
The queen of death holds a banquet every night, and these unclean pictorials are the printed invitations to the guests. Alas! that the fair brow of American art should be blotched with this plague-spot, and that philanthropists, worried about lesser evils, should give so little time to this calamity. Young men, have nothing to do with these pictures. Do not take the moral strychnine into your soul. Do not take up this nest of coiling adders and put it in your pocket. Do not patronize the news-stand that sells them. A man is no better than the pictures he loves to look at. I will give you one thousand dollars’92 reward for any young man who remains pure, and yet has the regular habit of buying unclean pictorials’97one thousand dollars’92 reward for one specimen. Ah, my friends, Satan sometimes failing to get a soul by inducing him to read a bad book, captures him by getting him to look at an impure periodical! When Satan goes fishing he does not care whether it is a long line or a short line, if he only hauls his victim in.
If I have placed before you, fathers and mothers, young men and young women, tests by which you may know what is a good newspaper and what a bad newspaper, what are good books, and what bad books, I will have done a work that I will not be ashamed of on that day when God shall try every man’92s work of what sort it is. Encourage good literature. Do not begrudge the three or five pennies you pay for your morning newspaper. In every possible way encourage the literature of the world so far as it is pure; so far as it is bad, denounce it. Do not purchase it even out of curiosity. You remember that one column of a good newspaper may save your soul, and that one paragraph of a bad newspaper may damn it. There are men and women, scores of them, who have a tragedy connected with some book. Who does not know some young man, or some man further on in years, who remembers that his first step astray was the reading of a bad book?
I remember one infidel book in the possession of my student companion. He said, ’93De Witt, would you like to read that book?’94 ’93Well,’94 said I, ’93I would like to look at it.’94 I read it a little while. I said to him, ’93I dare not read that book; you had better destroy it; I give you my advice, you had better destroy it. I dare not read that book. I have read enough of it.’94 ’93Oh,’94 he said, ’93haven’92t you a stronger mind than that? Can’92t you read a book you don’92t exactly believe, and not be affected by it?’94 I said, ’93You had better destroy it.’94 He kept it. He read it. He pored over it. He read it and re-read it. He read it until he gave up his Bible. He read it until he gave up his belief in the existence of a God. He read it until he gave up his good morals. He read it until body, mind and soul were ruined’97the body smitten with disease, the mind deranged’97and he went into the insane asylum, and the story of that book, that one infidel book, will never be told in this world. I read too much of it. I read about fifteen or twenty pages of it. I wish I had never read it, It never did me any good; it did me harm. I have often struggled with what I read in that book. I rejected it, I denounced it, I cast it out with infinite scorn, I hated it, yet sometimes its caricature of good and its eulogium of evil have troubled me. You cannot afford to read a bad book, young man, you cannot afford it.
Now, go home to your libraries, fathers, mothers, young men, young women’97go to the libraries in your homes, and from shelf to shelf make examination, and by the Gospel tests I have presented try the books. Then, when you are through with the libraries, go to the tables where you have the newspapers and the pictorials. If you find anything either in the library or on the stand that will not endure the tests I have put before you, then take it’97do not give it to some one, for that might despoil a soul’97do not sell it, for the price of it would be the price of blood; but kindle a fire on your kitchen hearth, or in your back yard, and when it is well kindled drop in the poison, and keep stirring the blaze until from preface to appendix there shall not be a single paragraph left, and the bonfire in Brooklyn shall be as consuming as that one in the streets of Ephesus.
Autor: T. De Witt Talmage