Since the book needs only one for its enjoyment, while the story requires two, there is less control over reading.  There is only one way to be sure that children are not devouring vicious books and that is to make sure that they have an ample supply of healthful, helpful ones.  This is especially necessary in a day that caters to sloth in reading.  The tendency is for reading to take the facile decline from book to cheap magazine, from magazine to newspaper, and from the newspaper to skimming the headlines and the “funnies.”  The cheaper papers appeal to the lowest intelligence and strike at the line of least moral and mental resistance.  Reading enriches the life but little and may impoverish it greatly unless there is developed the habit of drawing on the world’s great treasures of thought and feeling.  Open windows in your children’s souls by giving them books; keep them open by encouraging the reading habit.  Great souls wait for them, willing to converse and become their friends and teachers if they will but take down these books from the shelves and open them with an eager mind.

Sec. 4.  DEVELOPING GOOD TASTE

What can be done to quicken a love of good reading in children? Recognize that not all children develop this appetite at the same age, that girls read more than boys, that boys usually have a period of decline in reading interest from seventeen to twenty-one or even later.  But everything really depends on whether we ourselves love good books and keep them on hand.  One of the life-centers of a family should be the bookshelf, while the picture of the evening lamp and the reading group will constitute one of its best memories.  Where books are at hand and where they are used daily, the children need little urging to read.  Now this does not mean that yards of choice editions make a book-loving family.  There is a difference between bindings and books.  It means books known and loved, familiar friends for daily converse, books on handy shelves and fit to be used as common food.

Do you know what your children read? Do you watch as carefully the food of mind and spirit as you do that of the body?  Do you show an interest in the books they plan to draw from the public library?  Can you guide them intelligently when they ask for suggestions of interesting books?  Do you know the healthful, suitable ones?

Sec. 5.  PROMOTION OF THE READING INTEREST

The Sunday school might aid greatly in promoting the habit of selecting and reading good books.  Children often come home from day school clamoring for some book which the teacher has recommended as interesting and valuable.  The Sunday-school teacher’s recommendation would also carry weight.  In every church, whether there exists a Sunday-school library or not, there ought to be a library or book committee which would watch for the right reading for the different