experienced in the school. Doubtless other agencies were important; but without this purification of the library they might all have been neutralized. Never were the Sabbath-school books more generally drawn and read both by youth and adults. One of the deacons has been heard to say that the library was never before so efficient, and that he was reading these books from week to week with the greatest profit. We have taken pains to inquire of the children, and without exception they have said, We never liked the books so well. And all this is perfectly natural and legitimate. For there is always an unpleasant reaction after finishing an, exciting or unauthorized and questionable fiction, as there is always a loss of self-respect after the indulgence of passion or any groundless excitement. Indeed the first impression of many religious novels may be good, like the first warming and cheering effect of brandy. A parent may report to a publishing-house, My child went right to her room to pray after reading your last story-book; but even this should not be received as decisive evidence of the value of the book. The same effect might be produced on a child thoroughly educated in the Gospel, by some touching passages in the writings of Dickens, who has never yet, so far as we have seen, recognized the Christian system. Hundreds and thousands have been drawn to the "anxious seat" by the heated harangues of an ardent but superficial preacher or "exhorter," only to become more hardened and sceptical in after-life; and we have long observed that, as in the case of Julian the apostate, it is from this class that a large proportion of the leaders and champions of credulous infidels and bitter liberals are drawn. The cause is plain. There is not a relig ious basis of doctrinal truth in such harangues sufficient to make the sudden interest rational, salutary, and permanent. It requires much more than the rousing of the sympathies and better feelings of the soul to change the character of man. Sanctify them through thy truth; thy word is truth."

This craving for unnatural stimulants in Sabbath-school reading is the evidence of a diseased state of mind. Furnishing stimulants but increases the rising fever, and if persisted in will bring on delirium. It is a law of mind that whatever is sought and indulged for pleasurable excitement as an end, shall not

only aggravate the restless and insatiable craving, demanding a steady increase of the exciting element, but also react upon the mind to demoralize it permanently. The same inevitable rule applies to stimulating reading as to smoking, drinking, gaming, and the theatrical passion. The grosser indulgences are not reached at a bound. At first they are not relished. A beginning must be made with the mild wines, the sweetened brandy, in the most respectable company and place, and with the temporary refreshing and pleasing results. "At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder."

But we think we have been considering an extreme case, which we could afford to yield in the argument. It is surely a very small portion of the later issues of Sabbath-school storybooks of which it could be said that they induced any child or youth to go alone and pray. Certainly many of them tend to dissipate the mind, and unfit and disincline it either to pray or to study the Bible, and even to read books of science and history. We have heard Christian parents sorrowfully say that their children were already beginning to ask for a class of novels which cannot be found even at Sabbath-school depositories. In a neighboring village a town library was recently called for and liberally supplied. The librarian soon found that almost the only books drawn are the flashy and inflammatory novels (generally written by sceptics who have little else to do but gain a livelihood,) which so rapidly succeed each other, like the foamy bubbles of the agitated sea. And we think the clamor for this town library, and the quality of the books demanded, can be traced back quite directly to the prevailing character of the Sabbath-school books of half a dozen rival societies in the place. And now, after the churches, with their "wide-awake superintendents" and their "lively Sabbath-schools," have greatly stimulated, if not created this morbid passion for the frivolous and unreal, we are gravely told by certain apologists that there is a natural taste in the young for the imaginative and the fictitious, which we must use and control for good. If such an argument were allowed to the rum-seller as valid, the cause of temperance reform might forever despair. Perhaps it is a new theological taste scheme," specially diluted and adapted to children, and will surely have the great merit of being popular

both with the children and their confectioners. We suppose premature senility must be guarded against in the religious as in the natural life. A very good, cautious, but rather politic and narrow spirit, is in danger of meekly submitting to all kinds. of moral compromises of good and bad, and of allowing prudence and charity to degenerate into a kind of chronic timidity or indolent hopefulness. The only preventive is a larger mixture of the old, rugged, Puritanic and apostolic element of Christian doctrine.

By a peculiarly successful device of Satan, the town library alluded to (and perhaps it is the common practice) is open chiefly on Saturday afternoon and evening, as the sermons of certain popular and rattle-headed ministers and the serial "love and murder" stories are printed in the Saturday papers, that as many as possible may be kept from, or be unfitted for, the house of God by this spawn of ruinous reading. No storm will prevent these victims of attractive literature, who were but lately, if they are not now, members of Sabbath-schools and readers of their small fictions, from drawing their full quota of Saturday books. And late into the night, and into early dawn of Sabbath, or perhaps through the sanctuary hours, they may be found excitedly poring over the wonderful tales. If they attend the public worship, or the Sabbath-school service, they are in a condition not much more hopeful of benefit by the sermons and prayers than is the drooping, vacant-minded inebriate after his night of dissipation. Many a minister wonders why he has so feeble a hold upon his younger hearers in the sermon; wonders why the little cloud of spiritual promise which now and then rises in the horizon so uniformly vanishes rainless away. If at any time an impression is manifestly made upon any soul, there is some unaccountable influence which never fails to scatter and dissolve it. But let him search diligently, and he will find in many a home and under many a pillow the stimulating novel, which proves as effectual in the dissipation of conviction and soul-trouble as was the "brown jug" to the oft-convicted farmer of whom Dr. Spenser tells us in his Sketches.

There is one other argument by which, as a last resort, religious novels for Sabbath-schools are sought to be justified; and

it is that which almost every bad cause in turn has attempted to make available. It is said the Bible employs fiction, as in its parables, types, and allegories; and that it contains stories without much religious truth or spiritual impression, as in its books of Ruth and Esther. It would seem hardly possible for any one to reason thus who had ever studied, or even carefully read these great inspired productions. Do these books bear any resemblance to the modern story-books? Are they simply founded on fact? Is any liberty taken in filling out the pictures, or even in supplying fictitious names? Or do they not more nearly resemble memoirs and narratives of unadorned facts, such as it is said our Sabbath-school children will not read? We do not know where to find books more direct and simple, and yet more full of the great truths and practical lessons of religion. We should like to light upon a few such volumes among our modern publications for Sabbath-schools. We have a few older ones that have taken unchallenged rank among our best Christian literature. So fast as such works as "Pilgrim's Progress," and some of Hannah More's, such as "Parley, the Porter," and the "Shepherd of Salisbury Plain," shall appear, we will welcome them to our homes and schools. That a very few such may have lately been published we will not deny. But these, and such as these, are the very ones that are set aside as tame and uninteresting, and their places supplied with "Tabby's Travels," "Jenny and the Birds," "How I rose in the World," "The Old Red House," &c.

As to the parables and allegories of the Bible, they are the teachings of inspiration, and therefore absolutely true and safe in their teachings and impressions. But this affords no reason for confiding such precious interests to every writer who may attempt to mingle fiction and fact for our children. It is so much easier to misrepresent than to tell the exact truth. There is but one truth in regard to a fact, but there may be innumerable falsehoods." We by no means object to the use of the imagination by an author in stating, illustrating, and impressing religious truth. But we want to be secure from the thousand exaggerations and false colorings which are so imminent to those who venture, unguided by the Divine Spirit, into the boundless and trackless realm of possibilities. We want the

very wisest, maturest, and best minds to guide us and our dear ones, if we are to be led across the bounds of the known and real. We want to be satisfied that the writers are not seeking chiefly to please, not making the excitement of pleasant feeling and of curiosity an end, so that they may find numerous readers and buyers. Says the late Professor Dr. Clement Long:

...

"The so-called religious novels have, for the most part, made religion but a poor apology for the excitement of a morbid sensibility... An author of merit will go before his age. He will not be contented to reflect only the spirit of his time, conforming himself to its prejudices and feelings. He will have ideas and sentiments in advance of his contemporaries, belonging to himself, and instead of going back to them, he endeavors to bring them forward to his own position. And if his views should not be agreeable to their taste, he will not, for such a reason, suppress them, because he cares more for truth than for men. But the popular writer, whose sole object is to gratify his readers, communicates nothing of his own to them, but studies their views and feelings, and reproduces themselves, thus humoring their tastes and exciting their self-complacency. He thus exaggerates instead of reforming their defects.

"When I speak of the wrong and the inexpediency of reading works whose end it is to please, I do not allude only to such as stimulate vicious passions, or inculcate wrong principles. They may be perfectly free from all positive immorality, but if their end is the production of agreeable feeling, they are neither worthy nor proper to be read. And the principle I lay down is that excitement is not, in its nature, an end. The feeling of pity for a fellow-creature in distress, for example, is not produced for the sake of the excitement. We do not feel because we wish to feel, but because we forget ourselves and our feelings, and the object of pity seizes our minds with power. To throw the object into the background, and direct the interest to the feeling, is perfectly unnatural. And this is what those writers do whose ultimate purpose it is to arouse the feelings of their readers. This is what those readers do who read for excitement. Such writers and readers are immoral. And at the same time they neither confer nor receive intellectual benefit. These authors are intellectually wrong; and the principle of their authorship is of the lowest kind."

It is of just this manifest aim to meet the popular taste that we complain. It is against the gross exaggerations and multiform untruthfulness, as well as lack of religious soul and spirit