to loan your son or daughter a bad book.  Everywhere, everywhere an unclean literature.  I charge upon it the destruction of ten thousand immortal souls; and I bid you this morning to wake up to the magnitude of the theme.  I shall take all the world’s literature—­good novels and bad; travels, true or false; histories, faithful and incorrect; legends, beautiful and monstrous; all tracts, all chronicles, all epilogues, all family, city, state, national libraries—­and pile them up in a pyramid of literature; and then I shall bring to bear upon it some grand, glorious, infallible, unmistakable Christian principles.  God help me to speak with reference to the account I must at last render!  God help you to listen.

I charge you, in the first place, to stand aloof from all books that give false pictures of human life.  Life is neither a tragedy nor a farce.  Men are not all either knaves or heroes.  Women are neither angels nor furies.  And yet if you depended upon much of the literature of the day, you would get the idea that life, instead of being something earnest, something practical, is a fitful and fantastic and extravagant thing.  How poorly prepared are that young man and woman for the duties of to-day who spent last night wading through brilliant passages descriptive of magnificent knavery and wickedness!  The man will be looking all day long for his heroine in the tin-shop, by the forge or in the factory, in the counting-room, and he will not find her, and he will be dissatisfied.  A man who gives himself up to the indiscriminate reading of novels will be nerveless, inane, and a nuisance.  He will be fit neither for the store, nor the shop, nor the field.  A woman who gives herself up to the indiscriminate reading of novels will be unfitted for the duties of wife, mother, sister, daughter.  There she is, hair disheveled, countenance vacant, cheeks pale, hands trembling, bursting into tears at midnight over the woes of some unfortunate.  In the day-time, when she ought to be busy, staring by the half-hour at nothing; biting her finger-nails to the quick.  The carpet that was plain before will be plainer after having through a romance all night long wandered in tessellated halls of castles, and your industrious companion will be more unattractive than ever now that you have walked in the romance through parks with plumed princesses or lounged in the arbor with the polished desperado.  O, these confirmed novel-readers!  They are unfit for this life, which is a tremendous discipline.  They know not how to go through the furnaces of trial where they must pass, and they are unfitted for a world where every thing we gain we achieve by hard, long continuing, and exhaustive work.

Again, abstain from all those books which, while they have some good things about them, have also an admixture of evil.  You have read books that had the two elements in them—­the good and the bad.  Which stuck to you?  The bad!  The heart of most people is like a sieve, which lets the small particles of gold fall through, but keeps the great cinders.