What Do Your Children Read?
A lad of sixteen lay upon his death-bed. A wasting consumption was slowly, but surely, doing its fatal work. He was a former pupil of mine. I approached his bedside, took him by the hand, and gazed a moment on his thin, emaciated form, pale, hollow cheeks, and sunken eyes, all telling me that his sojourn on earth must be brief. "How are you to-day, Arthur?" I asked. "Do you suffer much lying here?" "Sometimes I suffer a good deal, especially from difficulty in breathing." "Do you think you will get well?" "Would you like to get well?" "It makes but little difference with me, whether I do or not." "Does the thought of approaching death give you any anxiety or alarm?" "I have no fears nor care about it." "Do you feel willing to die?" "I have wished I were dead a hundred times since I have been sick, to get rid of my sufferings." "What is your hope for the future?" "I do not concern myself at all about the future." He answered all these inquiries in a strong, clear voice, but with the most stoical indifference. He seemed not to manifest, by look or tone, the least solicitude, feeling or care, in view of his speedy entrance upon the untried realities of eternity. I spoke to him of the Saviour, as the only hope of the sinner; the only one who can give sweet visions of glory, and peace, and rest, in the hour of death, and save forever in Heaven. Afterward I asked him if I should pray with him. "I do not care, if you want to," he replied, with the listlessness and coldness which deeply impressed me. I knelt by the bedside, and commended him to the Saviour of sinners. In two or three days he died, apparently without any change in his feelings. A short time after, his father made this remark in my hearing: "My son lies in yonder cemetery—an INFIDEL—from the effects of novel reading!" Parents, what do your children read? Are they allowed to select for themselves, and suffered unconsciously to imbibe the moral poison subtly permeating too many books of the present day?