“OUR SOUL LOATHETH this LIGHT BREAD.” 335

out aloud, as did the manna-fed men in the wilderness, when they became sick and tired of a good thing, "My soul loatheth this light stuff.”

Milk for babes; yes, and some babes must have even milk diluted with water. And I do not beg that strong meat may be prepared for them who are not yet able to digest it. Light reading is good in its way. If grown-up men and women, business men, ministers, and other professional men would find relaxation and refreshment in light reading, they would get great good in it. The mother wearied and worn with cares many and trying may with profit and pleasure divert her thoughts, rest her mind, and benefit her health by seeking the illusion and exhilaration of a pure, wholesome, and enjoyable story of real or ideal life. It will take her out of her own troubles, and bring her into sympathy with the joys, perhaps the miseries of others, and so help her to forget or to bear the plagues by which her daily life is beset. It is very easy to tell me just here that in the sweetness of her religious faith she ought to find all that in the best of books, even the bread that cometh down from heaven; and in soulcommunion with Him who is the fount of life and the sovereign balm for every wound. Certainly, but that blessed truth does not make medicine needless when malaria has poisoned the system. Remedies for weaknesses of the body and soul are kind provisions of the great physician, and the Christian believer is wise who takes them in time. So the wisest and best of men, great authors, preachers, statesmen, captains, and financiers, have rested their wearied brains in the bowers of fiction, flying from the cabinet or the camp, from the study and the bank, to some quiet solitude, where with book in hand they could read without fatigue and be carried in fancy away from harassing cares into realms of the unreal, and therefore the enjoyable.

All this is true, but none of the men and women to whom light reading is thus commended could stand such stuff and nonsense as now lies in heaps of foam, like whipped syllabub, all around me. Here is nothing to satisfy the healthy hunger or thirst of a sensible soul. There is lightness indeed,

but nothing else; bubbles only; of which millions would not quench the thirst, nor satisfy the desires of any living mind.

Lightness is not necessarily an evil; it is a positive good often -certainly always in bread and in some books. But there may be too much of it in bread and books, and then it makes them both like the sour figs of the prophet.

This light literature is the staple of the cheap circulating library. It abounds in the libraries of too many Sundayschools. It is sent forth on the wings of its own wind from the many presses driven night and day to supply the horseleech cry of the times. The supply soon creates a demand for something more stimulating. The wine-bibber by and by wants stronger drink. This light food does not satisfy the craving of the young. They want the spice of wickedness in tales of lust or blood, or both, which the devil and his angels in Paris and New York issue from their ovens every day in the year. The sugar-coating of the pill does not weaken the deadly power of the poison it conceals. The bad novel, with a pious title, professing to be made in the interest of virtue as an exposure and a scourge of vice, is but a stimulant of unholy passion, stirring thoughts of unlawful pleasures undreamed of before, luring the unlearned and unstable to their ruin. It was astounding to hear the wardens of prisons, in a recent convention, when called upon to give their opinions as to the causes of crime. They were free to declare their convictions that bad books, the cheap flash literature flooding the country, might be justly charged with a large part of the abounding evil. They spoke of what they knew from personal intercourse with tens of thousands whose crimes had thrust them into prison walls. Victims of vile literature! It was a strange revelation, extraordinary testimony to come from men who made no pretensions to being saints, and certainly had not a particle of sentimentality about them. They were for the most part plain, blunt men, who spoke right on and said what they knew, and this they did know, that the popular novels of the day make thieves and robbers and man-slayers and libertines,

to the ruin of morals and crowding of prisons. There is not one book in the heap near me that would inspire any one with an evil thought. In most of them there is not force enough to inspire a thought of any kind. Thinking is not the effect they produce. I wonder greatly that anybody reads them, and to buy them, paying good money for them, money that would buy beef and bread, this the greatest wonder is.

During the last three weeks (since coming home) I have read ten or twelve volumes of three or four hundred pages each, all of them published in this country by the great bookmakers, whose works go out into all the earth and their words to the end of the world. What charms invest these pages! They bring us into the society of the wise and good, heroes and heroines of religious life and victory, into regions of romance and chivalry, realms of history and fancy, illumined and enlivened with song and art and story, filling the chamber with the companionship of the greatest and brightest and best of the sons and daughters of men. If evil enters in the form of villains of history or fiction, the stern features of justice, armed and wakeful, appear, and the lesson learned is wholesome. The men who write and they who multiply such books are benefactors of their race. How great the debt we owe them! If they have become rich by writing or by publishing such books so much the better, and every right man wishes them happiness in their prosperity. But to them who strew the land with good-for-nothing, empty, frivolous, inane, jejune books we are compelled to cry, “Our soul loatheth this light food."

ON TRAINING BOYS TO BE GOOD CITIZENS.

PERHAPS you think it were better for me to speak of training them to be good Christians. And that is the highest style of man. We will talk about it another time. Now, in the wake of the great national election, when all minds are

exercised with the duties and privileges of citizens, it may be well to think seriously of the boys who are coming to the front and will soon be the actors in such dramas as the one on which the curtain has just fallen in the sight of fifty millions of people.

After the fathers shall be the children. The boy is father of the man. Just as the twig is bent, etc. From such sayings we have the simple truth, known from the beginning, that the germ of the man is in the boy. We shall see in the meat what is bred in the bone. I do not insure the character of any coming man. With perfect trust in the promises of God, I know the conditions of success in the education of children are so many and so hard that it may easily be shown to be the fault of the parent when the boy grows up to be a bad man. Nevertheless the promise standeth sure, and the facts in the history of families verify the promise. It is a gross falsehood to say that the best parents have the worst sons. It is an old slander, refuted a thousand times, that the sons of ministers are the wildest boys in the parish. One prodigal from the parsonage makes more talk and scandal than a dozen among the people. It remains true in spite of all the gibes and sneers of a censorious world, that the home life is the atmosphere in which the foundation of character is laid, and the parent is responsible for the principles which the son imbibes while yet beneath the parental roof, and which for the most part make the character for life. I am writing these lines to fathers and mothers, teachers, guardians, and to all who have the opportunity and the power to impress upon the minds and hearts of children and youths that moral purity of life and heart is essential to the character of a good citizen. A boy who is not truthful is a bad boy, and a man who is not truthful is rotten to the core. A boy may be tempted to tell a lie and be very sorry for it afterward, but when the fault has grown into a habit the little fellow has become a scamp, and there is a strong probability that he will go to the bad. Growing up to manhood without regard to truth, there is no vice into which he may not fall, for the sheet-anchor of an upright life is lost, and he drifts

at the mercy of storms and waves. A minister of the gospel once came to me from a neighboring city and said, “A dreadful thing has happened in our ministerial circle: one of our men has fallen."

“And I can name him," said I, "though I never heard a word against him."

I did name him, and when called on to give the reason for thus singling him out, I replied, “In a controversy had with him some time ago I discovered that he would lie, and ever since I have been looking for his fall."

Want of truthfulness implies weakness as well as wickedness, and without courage and fortitude a tempted man falls into the first trap that is set for him or the first pit in his way. It is often and truthfully said that civilized society cannot exist without confidence between man and man. We live on it every hour. In the deepest recesses of domestic life and in all intercourse with our fellows, if we could not rely on the word of those who are near us, the wheels of society and business would cease to move. This is true in every-day affairs as well as when we come to the matter of witnessbearing. How the law seeks to prevent lying when the property, life, or character is at stake in the court of justice! What unspeakable mischief is wrought by the wretch who bears false witness. The greatest danger a good man has to fear is the tongue of malice or envy or avarice, wagging to take away his good name. And no sadder sight in all this world is ever seen than a good man sinking under the poisonous wounds of slander. Honest men have often suffered extortion and paid large sums rather than to endure the pain and injury of a false accusation. Others, braver and

in the panoply of

wiser, have defied the evil one, and, clad innocence, have said, “Do your worst. God is my witness and judge." Two persons entered the hall of one of the noblest and best pastors in this city, asked for a private interview, told him they had unimpeachable evidence that he had been living in secret vice, and unless he would pay them a sum they named they would expose him to the world." He defied them. They tried their cruel game. Their lying