NOVEL READING by L. D. Santee

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 19, 1879

NOVEL READING.

By L. D. Santee

Said the dying prostitute, “Novels are my prayers;” and, of every soul-destroying habit, this is about the worst. Here is one of the greatest causes of prostitution and of crime. Men who are masters in the use of language are using their talents in the interests of the devil; and, while their words are not absolutely obscene, pictures are left in the mind that are destructive to all purity.

Many and many a life has been wrecked and made miserable by mistaken ideas gathered from the pages of romance. The simple maid is on the lookout for a chance to elope, expecting some such event will transform her into a heroine; and the boy hardly in his teens is hoping by some act of lawlessness or crime to render himself a hero. “Novel reading did it all,” said an old man whose son was in jail for murder. Novel reading has been a mighty agent in producing all the moral rottenness, the communism, the libertinism, and the trampism with which our nation is cursed.

One of its worst features is that it works mainly upon the ardent imaginations of the young; and the once pure fountain being poisoned, the same results follow that the apostle James speaks of as following the improper use of the tongue: “It defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell.” Duties to parents are disregarded, the little kindnesses of life are set aside; daily duties are neglected, while the mind is intoxicated by the fancies of the novelist, and the soul admires, almost worships, the daring ruffian laden with crime. All other reading becomes irksome, and the ordinary affairs of life distasteful. The whole being is fired with a restless fever, perchance weeping over the woes of some heroine who never existed, or reading, with bated breath, the exploits of some highwayman who held human life as worthless.

No one can go, in imagination, into the haunts of infamy, and drink in the slang and profanity of the bar room, without becoming in some degree polluted. “By beholding we become changed,” and these associations will unfit any one for the companionship of the virtuous and the pure. If I could abolish either the saloons of our land or the trashy literature of the day, I would sweep the latter into oblivion, as being the greater of the two evils. But says one, “Over eighty thousand drunkards perish annually.” I know it; but bar room scenes are being repeated in a hundred thousand homes, and the reserves of this great army of the lost are being made up out of virtuous homes,—many times of those who never would darken the doors of the saloon or the brothel were not their imaginations inflamed and their passions enkindled by the witching scenes of fiction. The sympathizing novel-reading miss is the material that develops into the painted and bedizened courtesan, and the son of religious parents is drawn by this magnet of the wicked one into the great army

that is filling our jails and penitentiaries, and dying deaths of violence and shame, in the embraces of the scaffold.

The trashy books, with their illuminated covers, if they are read and pondered, will counteract all the influences of the church, of the minister, of the Sabbath-school, of the praying father and mother, filling the chambers of the heart with their own pollution. The issues of life are poisoned, and the whole body made a servant willing to yield to the temptations of the devil.

Dear young friends, for your own sake, for Christ's sake, don't read novels. You have been purchased by his blood; you may be saved by his grace. Do not persist in that which will unfit you for the duties of this life and the joys of the world to come. The labyrinths of fiction never give content, never give hope or peace. As you value the happiness of your own home, the welfare of your younger brothers and sisters, the peace and approval of God, don't read novels.

L. D. SANTEE.