shape, and the same rules which apply to book-reading will apply to newspaper-reading.  What shall we read?  Shall our minds be the receptacle of every thing that an author has a mind to write?  Shall there be no distinction between the tree of life and the tree of death?  Shall we stoop down and drink out of the trough which the wickedness of men has filled with pollution and shame?  Shall we mire in impurity, and chase fantastic will-o’-the-wisps across the swamps, when we might walk in the blooming gardens of God?  O, no.  For the sake of our present and everlasting welfare, we must make an intelligent and Christian choice.

Standing, as we do, chin-deep in fictitious literature, the first question that many of the young people are asking me is, “Shall we read novels?” I reply, there are novels that are pure, good, Christian, elevating to the heart, and ennobling to the life.  But I have still further to say, that I believe three-fourths of the novels in this day are baneful and destructive to the last degree.  A pure work of fiction is history and poetry combined.  It is a history of things around us, with the licenses and the assumed names of poetry.  The world can never repay the debt which it owes to such fictitious writers as Hawthorne, Mackenzie, and Landor and Hunt, and others whose names are familiar to all.  The follies of high life were never better exposed than by Miss Edgeworth.  The memories of the past were never more faithfully embalmed than in the writings of Walter Scott.  Cooper’s novels are healthfully redolent with the breath of the seaweed and the air of the American forest.  Charles Kingsley has smitten the morbidness of the world, and led a great many to appreciate the poetry of sound health, strong muscles, and fresh air.  Thackeray did a grand work in caricaturing the pretenders to gentility and high blood.  Dickens has built his own monument in his books, which are an everlasting plea for the poor and the anathema of injustice.  Now, I say books like these, read at right times and read in right proportion with other books, can not help but be ennobling and purifying.  But, alas! for the loathsome and impure literature that has come upon this country in the shape of novels like a freshet overflowing all the banks of decency and common sense.  They are coming from some of the most celebrated publishing houses in the country.  They are coming with the recommendation of some of our religious newspapers.  They lie on your center-table, to curse your children and blast with their infernal fires generations unborn.  You find these books in the desk of the school-miss, in the trunk of the young man, in the steamboat cabin, and on the table of the hotel reception-room.  You see a light in your child’s room late at night.  You suddenly go in and say:  “What are you doing?”.  “I am reading.”  “What are you reading?” “A book.”  You look at the book.  It is a bad book.  “Where did you get it?” “I borrowed it.”  Alas! there are always those abroad who would like