A man is no better than the picture he loves to look at.
If your eyes are not pure, you heart can not be. One can guess the
character of a man by the kind of pictorial he purchases. When the devil
fails to get a man to read a bad book, he sometimes succeeds in getting
him to look at a bad picture. When Satan goes a-fishing he does not care
whether it is a long line or a short line, if he only draws his victim
in.
If I have this morning successfully laid down any principles by which
you may judge in regard to books and newspapers, then I have done
something of which I shall not be ashamed on the day which shall try
every man's work, of what sort it is. Cherish good books and newspapers.
Beware of the bad ones. One column may save your soul; one paragraph may
ruin it. Go home to-day and look through your library, and then look on
the stand where you keep your pictorials and newspapers, and apply the
Christian principles I have laid down this morning. If there is any
thing in your home that can not stand the test do not give it away, for
it might spoil an immortal soul; do not sell it, for the money you get
would be the price of blood; but rather kindle a fire on your kitchen
hearth, or in your back yard, and then drop the poison in it, and keep
stirring the blaze until, from preface to appendix, there shall not be a
single paragraph left.
Once in a while there is a mind like a loadstone, which, plunged amidst
steel and brass filings, gathers up the steel and repels the brass.
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