Once in a while there is a mind like a loadstone, which, plunged amidst steel and brass filings, gathers up the steel and repels the brass.  But it is generally just the opposite.  If you attempt to plunge through a hedge of burs to get one blackberry, you get more burs than blackberries.  You can not afford to read a bad book, however good you are.  You say:  “The influence is insignificant.”  I tell you that the scratch of a pin has sometimes produced the lock-jaw.  Alas, if through curiosity, as many do, you pry into an evil book, your curiosity is as dangerous as that of the man who would stick a torch into a gunpowder mill, merely to see whether it would blow up or not.  In a menagerie in New York a man put his hand through the bars of a black leopard’s cage.  The animal’s hide looked so slick and bright and beautiful.  He just stroked it once.  The monster seized him, and he drew forth a hand, torn, and mangled, and bleeding.  O, touch not evil, even with the faintest stroke; though it may be glossy and beautiful, touch it not, lest you pull forth your soul torn and bleeding under the clutch of the black leopard.  “But,” you say, “how can I find out whether a book is good or bad, without reading it?” There is always something suspicious about a bad book.  I never knew an exception.  Something suspicious in the index or the style of illustration.  This venomous reptile almost always carries a warning rattle.

Again, I charge you to stand off from all those books which corrupt the imagination and inflame the passions.  I do not refer now to that kind of a book which the villain has under his coat, waiting for the school to be out, and then looking both ways to see that there is no policeman around the block, offers the book to your son on his way home.  I do not speak of that kind of literature, but that which evades the law and comes out in polished style, and with acute plot sounds the tocsin that rouses up all the baser passions of the soul.  Years ago a French lady came forth as an authoress, under the assumed name of George Sand, She smoked cigars.  She wore gentlemen’s apparel.  She stepped off the bounds of decency.  She wrote with a style ardent, eloquent, mighty in its gloom, horrible in its unchastity, glowing in its verbiage, vivid in its portraiture, damning in its effects, transfusing into the libraries and homes of the world an evil that has not even begun to relent, and she has her copyists in all lands.  To-day, under the nostrils of your city, there is a fetid, reeking, unwashed literature enough to poison all the fountains of public virtue and smite your sons and daughters as with the wing of a destroying angel, and it is time that the ministers of the Gospel blew the trumpet and rallied the forces of righteousness, all armed to the teeth, in this great battle against a depraved literature.  Why are fifty per cent of the criminals in the jails and penitentiaries of the United States to-day under twenty-one years of