Bookless Houses by Episcopalian

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, Cal. · Aug 12, 1875

Bookless Houses.

By Episcopalian

WE form judgments of men from little things about their houses, of which the owners perhaps never think. Flowers about a rich man's house may signify only that he has a good gardner, or that he has refined neighbors, and does what he sees them do. But men are not accustomed to buy books unless they want them. If, on visiting the dwelling of a man of slender means, we find that he contents himself with cheap carpets and very plain furniture, in order that he may purchase books, he rises at once in our esteem. Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. The plainest row of books is more significant of refinement than the most elaborately carved sideboard.

Give us a house furnished with books rather than furniture. Both if you can; but books at any rate. To spend several days in a friend's house, and hunger for something to read, while you are treading on costly carpets, and sitting on luxurious chairs, and sleeping upon down, is as if one were bribing your body for the sake of cheating your mind.

Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. A house without them is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading, and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge in a young mind is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passion and vice.

Let us pity those poor rich men who live barrenly in great bookless houses. Let us congratulate the poor that, in our day, books are so cheap that a man may every year add a hundred volumes to his library, for the price of what his tobacco and his beer would cost him. Among the earliest ambitions to be excited in clerks, workmen, journeymen—and, indeed, among all who are struggling in the race of life—is that of owning, and constantly adding to, a library of good books. A little library, growing larger every year, is an honorable part of a young man's history. It is a man's duty to have books. A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessities of life.—Episcopalian.