Worse than all, it destroys the soul. The day
must come when the worthless scrip will fall out of
the clutches of the stock-gambler. Satan will
play upon him the “cornering” game which,
down on Wall street, he played upon a fellow-operator.
Now he would be glad to exchange all his interest
in Venango County for one share in the Christian’s
prospect of heaven. Hopeless, he falls back in
his last sickness. His delirium is filled with
senseless talk about “percentages” and
“commissions” and “buyer, sixty days,”
and “stocks up,” and “stocks down.”
He thinks that the physician who feels his pulse is
trying to steal his “board book.”
He starts up at midnight, saying: “One
thousand shares of Reading at 116-1/2. Take it!”
Falls back dead. No more dividends....
Swindled out of heaven. STOCKS DOWN!
LEPROUS NEWSPAPERS.
The newspaper is the great educator of the nineteenth
century. There is no force compared with it.
It is book, pulpit, platform, forum, all in one.
And there is not an interest—religious,
literary, commercial, scientific, agricultural, or
mechanical—that is not within its grasp.
All our churches, and schools, and colleges, and asylums,
and art-galleries feel the quaking of the printing-press.
I shall try to bring to your parlor-tables the periodicals
that are worthy of the Christian fireside, and try
to pitch into the gutter of scorn and contempt those
newspapers that are not fit for the hand of your child
or the vision of your wife.
The institution of newspapers arose in Italy.
In Venice the first newspaper was published, and monthly,
during the time that Venice was warring against Solyman
the Second in Dalmatia. It was printed for the
purpose of giving military and commercial information
to the Venetians. The first newspaper published
in England was in 1588, and called the English
Mercury. Others were styled the Weekly
Discoverer, the Secret Owl, Heraclitus
Ridens, etc.
Who can estimate the political, scientific, commercial,
and religious revolutions roused up in England for
many years past by Bell’s Weekly Dispatch,
the Standard, the Morning Chronicle,
the Post, and the London Times?
The first attempt at this institution in France was
in 1631, by a physician, who published the News,
for the amusement and health of his patients.
The French nation understood fully how to appreciate
this power. Napoleon, with his own hand, wrote
articles for the press, and so early as in 1829 there
were in Paris 169 journals. But in the United
States the newspaper has come to unlimited sway.
Though in 1775 there were but thirty-seven in the
whole country, the number of published journals is
now counted by thousands; and to-day—we
may as well acknowledge it as not—the religious
and secular newspapers are the great educators
of the country.
