There is one other thing I shall say this morning before I leave you, whether you want to hear it or not; that is, that I consider the bad pictorial literature of the day as most tremendous for ruin.  There is no one who can like good pictures better than I do.  But what shall I say to the prostitution of this art to purposes of iniquity?  These death-warrants of the soul are at every street corner.  They smite the vision of the young with pollution.  Many a young man buying a copy has bought his eternal discomfiture.  There may be enough poison in one bad picture to poison one soul, and that soul may poison ten, and the ten fifty, and the hundreds thousands, until nothing but the measuring line of eternity can tell the height and depth and ghastliness and horror of the great undoing.  The work of death that the wicked author does in a whole book the bad engraver may do on half a side of pictorial.  Under the disguise of pure mirth the young man buys one of these sheets.  He unrolls it before his comrades amid roars of laughter; but long after the paper is gone the results may perhaps be seen in the blasted imaginations of those who saw it.  The Queen of Death every night holds a banquet, and these periodicals are the printed invitations to her guests.  Alas! that the fair brow of American art should be blotched with this plague spot, and that philanthropists, bothering themselves about smaller evils, should lift up no united and vehement voice against this great calamity!  Young man, buy not this moral strychnine for your soul!  Pick not up this nest of coiled adders for your pocket!  Patronize no news-stand that keeps them!  Have your room bright with good engravings, but for these iniquitous pictorials have not one wall, not one bureau, not one pocket.  A man is no better than the picture he loves to look at.  If your eyes are not pure, you heart can not be.  One can guess the character of a man by the kind of pictorial he purchases.  When the devil fails to get a man to read a bad book, he sometimes succeeds in getting him to look at a bad picture.  When Satan goes a-fishing he does not care whether it is a long line or a short line, if he only draws his victim in.

If I have this morning successfully laid down any principles by which you may judge in regard to books and newspapers, then I have done something of which I shall not be ashamed on the day which shall try every man’s work, of what sort it is.  Cherish good books and newspapers.  Beware of the bad ones.  One column may save your soul; one paragraph may ruin it.  Go home to-day and look through your library, and then look on the stand where you keep your pictorials and newspapers, and apply the Christian principles I have laid down this morning.  If there is any thing in your home that can not stand the test do not give it away, for it might spoil an immortal soul; do not sell it, for the money you get would be the price of blood; but rather kindle a fire on your kitchen hearth, or in your back yard, and then drop the poison in it, and keep stirring the blaze until, from preface to appendix, there shall not be a single paragraph left.