* When we look for a moment at the mass of fictitious reading that is flung out broadcast over the world, can we wonder that the young so early wander away into the paths of vice, or that the vile dens in our cities, that are seething in impurity, are peopled with wrecked manhood and fallen womanhood? We look in astonishment at the evidences of blighted intellects, lost virtue, and ruined lives; and yet how many of these learned their first lesson in vice at home, over the pages of some impure novel! In how many of our homes does the Bible lay, all covered with dust from disuse, while dime novels are eagerly read by parents and children day after day! And I have seen professed Christian parents remain away from the house of God, to read a weekly journal burdened with impure thoughts, to feed the imagination and the heart. Parents, you cannot keep your homes too pure. If the young heart is not educated to love purity, it will love sin and follow after it; and if you crowd your libraries with fiction, and pervert your own lives by its perusal, how can you expect to lead your children heavenward! The young gain far more education from novels to-day, than from the sciences. They pore over the unchaste pages, and shed fountains of tears over some luckless heroine that never lived, and whose counterpart never will live; but they have no sympathy for the sorrows of a beggared widow or orphan, and their hearts are unmoved at the sight of actual human suffering. Can it be that those to whom God has given ten talents, will waste them all in wrecking humanity? Shall they be willing, for dollars and cents, to send young souls, reeling beneath a burden of shame, into penitentiaries, dance-houses, and groggeries? Will it pay at the bar of God?—Rural New Yorker.