all reasoning, all eloquence, and all positive knowledge whatever, are more or less imaginative, and are fitted either to exercise and stimulate, and consequently to elevate or degrade the imagination. Literature in all these higher relations must therefore be ethically good or ethically bad. It cannot be morally indifferent. It must be healthful or injurious.

The imagination forms and controls the conscience so far as it forms and enforces the ideals of what we can and ought to become. The ideals which it actually forms and enforces must inevitably raise us upward or drag us downward. Literature in all its products, as history, essay, oration, or argument, modifies and energizes these ideals— entering into all by an unobserved but most potent influence. This influence is especially subtle and effective when the imaginative element gives character and name to the product, i. e., when, as poem, novel, or drama, it stimulates and directly addresses this controlling power. It follows that all those ethical criteria and rules by which we estimate and use confessedly imaginative writers, apply as properly to every department of literature.

There is a very abundant class of writings that are sometimes denominated cheap literature, which, only by courtesy, deserve to be called literature at all. It is a class somewhat miscellaneous and comprehensive, consisting as it does of novels, novelettes, journals, and newspapers, in which so-called stories abound. Of many of these productions nothing worse can be said—though that is bad enough-than that they are utterly frivolous and vapid, that they while away the time, and interest the feelings, but neither elevate the tastes nor brighten the life. They are simply a reflex of the commonplace aims and the vulgar feelings of the mass of readers for whom they are written. They are made to take and made to sell, and they both take and sell, because they humor what their

readers like, in respect to characters, incidents, illustrations, and style.

Much of this sort of literature is open to the more serious objection, that it stimulates and inflames the passions, ignores or misleads the conscience, and studiously presents views of life that are fundamentally false. The lower appetites are often directly addressed, or their indulgence is indirectly justified through the gravity that becomes a book, and the sophistical art which every writer must use to keep for himself and his reader the semblance of a becoming self-respect. Writings of this class lead men to believe that they can be rich without toil and saving; that they can be amiable and attractive, and yet be intensely hypocritical and selfish; that they can have exquisite moral sensibilities and lofty moral aspirations, and yet be debased by appetite and passion; that they can be profanely blasphemous, and yet fervently religious; in short, that they can be successful for the present and future life, without complying with a single condition of success for either.

And they find readers, too-scores, hundreds, thousands, myriads of readers. Yes, of myriads they constitute the sole reading. The man of business, whose tastes are low and whose aims are vulgar, reads them when he lays down his favorite newspaper-too often like them-and he becomes more intensely mean and animalized than before; the clerk reads them, and they furnish him with the slang of his loose conversation, or train him to rob his master's drawer, or tamper with his accounts, that he may visit the gambling-house and the brothel. The silly and unprotected girl reads them, and she is ripened by them to yield to the flatteries of her seducer. The neglected boy reads them, and they make him an incendiary or a pirate, a hater of law and a despiser of God. They are the Bible and the Primer to myriads of the rising generation at this very hour. One can never see a bale of books or papers

of this sort without thinking, there goes a package of the seeds of robbery and lust. It were almost better to import living lecturers in behalf of sensualism and crime, and furnish them with pulpit and hall, for then we should have the disgusting facts of sin to give the lie to its flattering words. It were almost no worse that a procession of harlots should walk the streets of every city or village, for these would bear the brand of their own shame upon their foreheads.

But are not these books brilliant? Yes, brilliant as a rotten log, or a putrescent carcass, which shine because they are decayed, and are phosphorescent just in proportion as they are offensive. But do they not sparkle and delight? Yes, just as the will-o'-wisp, which is created of foul gases, and leads the silly pursuer through brush and brier, till it lands him in some miry swamp, or chokes him with the damps of death. No language can describe the influence of this so-called literature in degrading the tastes, in weakening or corrupting the principles, and in provoking the passions. No man can easily estimate the evil consequences that are to come of it, in a character at once frivolous, conceited, and vulgar, or sensual, ferocious, and atheistic.

It is grateful to turn from this painful picture to a higher and better kind of popular literature which we believe to be gaining a surer hold and a widening influence. While with one class of readers there is certain degradation, as there must be with forces so active as to carry them downwards, with another there is a steady and progressive elevation, as there are books to foster such an improve

ment.

Such are the histories which attract and instruct; the biographies which leave a glow in the minds of their readers; the poetry that is both popular and elevating; the criticism that discerns undiscovered beauties in our favor

ite authors; the travels that almost reconcile us to the necessity that forbids us to wander; and the tales that sparkle without corrupting, and that let us laugh and still be wise.

It is still more grateful to imagine the time when Books and Reading for the people shall become altogether good in their influence; when their agency, which is to the health of the mind what the atmosphere is to that of the body, shall be like a fine June or October morning; invigorating, exciting, inspiring-an atmosphere in whose breath is no poison, detected or concealed; no seeds of plague, neither the rank and offensive nor the delightful but deadly.

Such a literature would be both flower and fruit of a perfected Christian civilization, and in that sense a truly Christian literature. But what is the just conception of a Christian literature has been a matter of some question. The conception itself is also not easy in all respects to define; we must therefore defer the consideration of it to a separate discussion.

CHAPTER IX.

THE RELIGIOUS CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF BOOKS

AND READING.

FROM the moral, we proceed to the religious relations of books and reading. The two are very nearly allied, and yet each requires to be discussed apart from the other.

Their affinity suggests similar criteria in judging of books, and similar rules in using them. As the law of duty is in its very nature supreme, so the sanctions of religion are, by their very sacredness, inviolable. As what we obey from conscience should be obeyed without reserve, so what we reverence as divine must be worshiped without a rival. Duty gives law in all relations and to every kind of action, and religion asserts attractions which outshine and exclude rivals of every sort, even in the forms of culture, art, or literature.

We have seen that whatever in books or reading weakens the conscience or corrupts the moral feelings, should be rejected as evil. By the same rule, it follows that whatever in either hinders or depresses the religious life should be scrupulously avoided. The religious nature, though it is sanctioned and controlled by the conscience, is more sensitive than the conscience itself. It feels a stain like a wound, not merely as doing violence to the most sensitive emotions, but as involving dishonor to the objects and persons hallowed for its worship and trust. If, then, we converse with any book, or practice any reading which consciously interfere with our religious faith or fervor, we should dismiss the one and desist from the other without hesitation or compromise.