How Can You Do It

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 6, 1857

How Can You Do It.

EDITORS of truth, whom we love, it is marvelous in our eyes. You believe, you know, that romance, this "light bread of the day," is doing a sweeping work, a death work, undermining your own foundations. Bunyan, good old Bunyan, is cast into the shade; Doddridge, Baxter, Martin, Gurney, Fletcher, Brainerd, also—the Bible dusted over; your own labors cramped and crippled; still you puff folly, fashion, sickly, sentimental, heart-sickening love ditties, and some things positively infidel! How can you do it? We beseech you, on our bended knee, stop this thing. Why speed the car of Satan? why lash his steeds? The very heavens are darkened, centre-tables are loaded with poison! Beloved, we still hope better things of you, though we thus speak. Are you willing that your little ones, those precious gifts of God, should sip at these sickly, poisonous fountains? Where the golden rule?

Booksellers, also termed theological, one word, if you please, in meekness. Why circulate, for ready cash, froth, the scummings of the pit? Why scatter damnation in the path of the just? A single spark of the infidel and impure may kindle a flame that will burn to the lowest hell! even "seven times hotter than is wont." "Don't! don't!" False—you do! We can single out, and single out, on those shelves, books positively baneful, deleterious, which should be committed to the flames. For every book issued, God holds you responsible;—at his flaming bar the fearful harvest will be reaped!

Make a bonfire—consume the trash—burn every shade, every lineament satanic; scatter the ashes to the four winds. Pious booksellers, would you suffer a child of yours to drink in those dregs? And still you denounce the rumseller, the man of blood. Where is consistency?—Golden Rule.