to Hoe’s perfecting printing-press.  A book!  It took all the universities of the past, all the martyr-fires, all the civilizations, all the battles, all the victories, all the defeats, all the glooms, all the brightnesses, all the centuries, to make it possible.  A book!  It is the chorus of the ages—­it is the drawing-room in which kings and queens, and orators, and poets, and historians, and philosophers come out to greet you.  If I worshiped any thing on earth, I would worship that.  If I burned incense to any idol, I would build an altar to that.  Thank God for good books, helpful books, inspiring books, Christian books, books of men, books of women, books of God.  The printing-press is the mightiest agency on earth for good and for evil.  The minister of the Gospel standing in a pulpit has a responsible position, but I do not think it is as responsible as the position of an editor or a publisher.  Take the simple statistics that our New York dailies now have a circulation of 450,000 per day, and add to it the fact that three of our weekly periodicals have an aggregate circulation of about one million, and then cipher, if you can, how far up and how far down and how far out reach the influences of the American printing-press.  I believe the Lord intends the printing-press to be the chief means for the world’s rescue and evangelization, and I think that the great last battle of the world will not be fought with swords or guns, but with types and press—­a purified Gospel literature triumphing over, trampling down, and crushing out forever that which is depraved.  The only way to right a bad book is by printing a good one.  The only way to overcome unclean newspaper literature is by scattering abroad that which is healthful.  May God speed the cylinders of an honest, intelligent, aggressive, Christian printing-press.

I have to tell you this morning that I believe that the greatest scourge that has ever come upon this nation has been that of unclean journalism.  It has its victims in all occupations and departments.  It has helped to fill insane asylums and penitentiaries, and alms-houses and dens of shame.  The bodies of this infection lie in the hospitals and in the graves, while their souls are being tossed over into a lost eternity, an avalanche of horror and despair.  The London plague was nothing to it.  That counted its victims by thousands; but this modern pest has already shoveled its millions into the charnel-house of the morally dead.  The longest rail train that ever ran over the Erie or the Hudson tracks was not long enough or large enough to carry the beastliness and the putrefaction which have gathered up in the bad books and newspapers of this land in the last twenty years.  Now, it is amid such circumstances that I put the questions of overmastering importance to you and your families:  What can we do to abate this pestilence?  What books and newspapers shall we read?  You see I group them together.  A newspaper is only a book in a swifter and more portable