LITERARY ABSTINENCE.
It is as much an art not to read as to read. With what pains, and thumps,
and whacks at school we first learned the way to put words together!
We did not mind so much being whipped by the schoolmaster for not knowing
how to read our lesson, but to have to go out ourselves and cut the hickory
switch with which the chastisement was to be inflicted seemed to us then,
as it does now, a great injustice.
Notwithstanding all our hard work in learning to read we find it quite as
hard now to learn how not to read. There are innumerable books and
newspapers from which one had better abstain.
There are but very few newspapers which it is safe to read all through,
though we know of one that it is best to peruse from beginning to end, but
modesty forbids us stating which one that is. In this day readers need as
never before to carry a sieve.
It requires some heroism to say you have not read such and such a book.
Your friend gives you a stare which implies your literary inferiority. Do
not, in order to answer the question affirmatively, wade through
indiscriminate slush.
We have to say that three-fourths of the novels of the day are a mental
depletion to those who read them. The man who makes wholesale denunciation
of notion pitches overboard "Pilgrim's Progress" and the parables of our
Lord. But the fact is that some of the publishing houses that once were
cautious about the moral tone of their books have become reckless about
every thing but the number of copies sold. It is all the same to them
whether the package they send out be corn starch, jujube paste or
hellebore. They wrap up fifty copies and mark them C.O.D. But if the
expressman, according to that mark, should collect on delivery all the
curses that shall come on the head of the publishing house which printed
them, he would break down his wagon and kill his horses with the load. Let
parents and guardians be especially watchful. Have a quarantine at your
front door for all books and newspapers. Let the health doctor go abroad
and see whether there is any sickness there before you let it come to
wharfage.
Whether young or old, be cautious about what you read in the newspapers.
You cannot day after day go through three columns of murder trial without
being a worse man than when you began. While you are trying to find out
whether Stokes was lying in wait for Fisk, Satan is lying in wait for you.
Skip that half page of divorce case. Keep out of the mud. The Burdell and
Sickles cases, through the unclean reading they afforded to millions of
people long ago, led their thousands into abandoned lives and pitched them
off the edge of a lost eternity. With so much healthful literature of all
sorts, there is no excuse for bringing your minds in contact with evil. If
there were a famine, there might be some reason for eating garbage, but the
land is full of bread. When we may, with our families, sit around the clean
warm fire-hearth of Christian knowledge, why go hunting in the ash barrels
for cinders?