O, these confirmed novel-readers! They are
unfit for this life, which is a tremendous discipline. They know not how
to go through the furnaces of trial where they must pass, and they are
unfitted for a world where every thing we gain we achieve by hard, long
continuing, and exhaustive work.
Again, abstain from all those books which, while they have some good
things about them, have also an admixture of evil. You have read books
that had the two elements in them--the good and the bad. Which stuck to
you? The bad! The heart of most people is like a sieve, which lets the
small particles of gold fall through, but keeps the great cinders.
Again, abstain from those books which are apologetic of crime. It is a
sad thing that some of the best and most beautiful bookbindery, and some
of the finest rhetoric, have been brought to make sin attractive. Vice
is a horrible thing, anyhow. It is born in shame, and it dies howling in
the darkness. In this world it is scourged with a whip of scorpions, but
afterward the thunders of God's wrath pursue it across a boundless
desert, beating it with ruin and woe. When you come to paint carnality,
do not paint it as looking from behind embroidered curtains, or through
lattice of royal seraglio, but as writhing in the agonies of a city
hospital. Cursed be the books that try to make impurity decent, and
crime attractive, and hypocrisy noble! Cursed be the books that swarm
with libertines and desperadoes, who make the brain of the young people
whirl with villainy.
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