Corrupt Reading | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 4, 1875

Corrupt Reading.

WATCH with an eagle eye against the corrupt literature that the agents of Satan are insinuating into the hands of youth and innocence all over the land. Hear what T. DeWitt Talmage says of this matter in his sermon in The Christian at Work, of Jan. 28, 1875:—

Again I remark, that the corrupt literature of this day is the cause of much uncleanness. I referred to this in a former sermon,

but I reserved to this day some facts which will appall you. You know that there are hundreds of thousands of sheets in the shape of impure novelette literature going abroad, every plot of those novelettes turning on libertinism and full of salacious suggestion. Much of the printing-press of the country

REEKS WITH POLLUTION.

The child that comes to fifteen or sixteen years of age now in these cities has read more bad books and seen more bad pictures than your grandmother and grandfather read or saw up to the time they put on spectacles. There was one citizen in Brooklyn who made four hundred thousand dollars by publishing obscene books, and when he was seized by governmental authority there was found thirty thousand dollars’ worth of stock on hand. That man is dead, and gone to perdition; but his wife has his money, and now moves, I am told, in respectable circles. Let it be known that of the four men who originally published all the obscene books and newspapers in this country, three of them lived in Brooklyn. Two of them are dead, thank God! I wish they all were.

In the city of New York there was one house under the control of a man who was a member of the church, and that house did nothing but make bad books, circulars, and pictures. When the authorities seized upon the place, they found whole tons of stereotyped plates for doing nothing but the printing of bad circulars and books. That man was a member of the church. He was awfully pious! He had on the mantel in his factory a rack containing religious tracts, with the inscription on the outside, “Take one.” I do not know whether to this day he has been excommunicated, for other churches have not the moral courage which the session of this church had when, last spring, finding a bad man in our membership, they unanimously ejected him, all the sixteen men of the session having the moral daring to vote, “Aye.”

GOD SPEED THE DAY

when it shall be impossible for a man to practice iniquity and yet keep his place in the membership of a Christian church.

But to go back to my theme. There was one man in our neighboring city who published and sold to one dealer one hundred and twenty-five thousand obscene books. When the authorities came upon him there were found forty thousand copies yet unsold. Binding these bad books in one of the factories were forty young women. One hundred and ninety thousand obscene photographs and engravings have been arrested in their flight of death. Twenty tons of iniquitous literature have been thrown into the flames. But the tide of evil goes on. How many are engaged in it! Some with the title of M. D. at the end of their names, implying themselves public benefactors and friends of humanity. These people despoil the souls of men and women, if not in one way, then in another. They send their circulars and handbills far away. They put their infamous pictures on the back of playing-cards. They cut them into watch-cases. The vendors in this business have the names of all the boarding-schools in the country, male and female, and not only the names of all the schools, but the names of all the students. The catalogues have been found in possession of these vultures, and their circulars and their pictures and their books go through the Post Office Department to all the young. The base circulars and advertisements are thrown into your door-way. They are flinging across this land the plagues of Egypt, the frogs and the boils and the murrain and the lice, turning the rivers into blood and the heavens into darkness. You, the father and mother, do not know it; but your children come to fifteen or sixteen years of age have seen the pictures and have read the books. There is not a school, not a shop, not a factory, not a home, but has been assaulted in some way by this literature. So far from exaggerating the evil, if you could to-day understand its magnitude, it seems to me you would rise up from your seats and

SHRIEK OUT WITH HORROR.

These villains, be they authors, engravers, publishers or venders, ought to be seized by the law, summarily tried, sentenced to the full extent of the statute, and on the swiftest express train hurried up to Sing Sing Penitentiary; and no man ever to be found in gubernatorial or presidential chair should ever dare to pardon one of them. This evil does not need the snail-pace of the law; it wants the quick spring of human and divine indignation.

NEVER do we truly value our bits and drops, as when we see the hand of God stretched out to bestow them.