With regard to the Sunday newspaper, I know all the arguments that are
brought in its favor--that the work on it is done during the week,
that it is the Monday paper that causes Sunday work, and so on. But
there are two hundred thousand newsboys selling the paper on Sunday.
Would you like to have your boy one of them? Men are kept running
trains in order to distribute the papers. Would you like your sabbath
taken away from you? If not, then practise the Golden Rule, and don't
touch the papers.
Their contents make them unfit for reading any day, not to say Sunday.
Some New York dailies advertise Sunday editions of sixty pages. Many
dirty pieces of scandal in this and other countries are raked up and
put into them. "Eight pages of fun!"--that is splendid reading for
Sunday, isn't it? Even when a so-called sermon is printed, it is
completely buried by the fiction and news matter. It is time that
ministers went into their pulpits and preached against Sunday
newspapers if they haven't done it already. Put the man in the scales
that buys and reads Sunday papers. After reading them for two or three
hours he might go and hear the best sermon in the world, but you
couldn't preach anything into him. His mind is filled up with what he
has read, and there is no room for thoughts of God. I believe that the
archangel Gabriel himself could not make an impression on an audience
that has its head full of such trash. If you bored a hole into a man's
head, you could not inject any thoughts of God and heaven.
I don't believe that the publishers would allow their own children to
read them. Why then should they give them to my children and to yours?
A merchant who advertises in Sunday papers is not keeping the sabbath.
It is a master-stroke of the devil to induce Christian men to do this
in order to make trade for Monday. But if a man makes money, and yet
his sons are ruined and his home broken up, what has he gained?
Ladies buy the Sunday papers and read the advertisements of Monday
bargains to see what they can buy cheap. Just so with their religion.
They are willing to have it if it doesn't cost anything.
If Christian men and women refused to buy them, if Christian merchants
refused to advertise in them, they would soon die out, because that is
where they get most of their support.
They tell me the Sunday paper has come to stay, and I may as well let
it alone. Never! I believe it is a great evil, and I shall fight it
while I live. I never read a Sunday paper, and wouldn't have one in my
house. They are often sent me, but I tear them up without reading
them. I will have nothing to do with them. They do more harm to
religion than any other one agency I know. Their whole influence is
against keeping the sabbath holy. They are an unnecessary evil. Can't
a man read enough news on week days without desecrating the sabbath?
We had no Sunday papers till the war came, and we got along very well
without them. They have been increasing in size and in number ever
since then, and I think they have been lowering their tone ever since.
If you believe that, help to fight them too. Stamp them out, beginning
with yourself.