astray; and I stand here to-day to tell you that the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ can not only save your soul, but save your body. I look off to-day upon the desolation. Some of you are far on in this habit, although there may be no outward indications of it-you never have staggered along the street-the vast majority of people do not know that you stimulate; but God knows, and you know; and by human calculations there is not one chance out of five thousand that you will ever be stopped.

ANOTHER CASE TO THE POINT.

There is a man who was for ten years a hard drinker. The dreadful appetite had sent down its roots around the palate and the tongue, and on down until they were interlinked with the vitals of body, mind, and soul; but he has not taken any stimulants for two years. What did that? Not temperance societies. Not prohibition laws. Not moral suasion. Conversion did it.

I could tell you of a tragic scene, when once at the close of the service I found a man in one of the front seats, wrought upon most mightily. I said to him, "What is the matter?" He replied, “I am a captive of strong drink; I came from the West; I thought, perhaps, you could do me some good; I find you can't do me any good; I find there is no hope for me." I said, "Come into this side room and we will talk together."

"Oh, no," he said, "there's no need of my going in; I am a lost man; I have a beautiful wife; I have four beautiful children; I had a fine profession; I have had a thorough education; I had every opportunity a man ever had, but I am a captive of strong drink; God only knows what I suffer."

I said, "Be encouraged; come in here, and we'll talk together about it." "No," he said, “I can't come; you can't do me any good. I was on the Hudson River Railroad yesterday, and coming down, I resolved never again to touch a drop of strong drink. While I sat there a man came in—a low

creature and sat by me; he had a whiskey flask, and he said to me: Will you take a drink?' I said 'no;' but oh, how I wanted it! and as I said no, it seemed that the liquor curled up around the mouth of the flask and begged, ' Take me! take me! take me!' I felt I couldn't resist it, and yet I was determined not to drink, and I rushed out on the platform of the car, and I thought I would jump off; we were going at the rate of forty miles an hour, and I didn't dare to jump; the paroxysm went off, and I am here tonight."

I said, "Come in, I'll pray for you, and commend you to God." He came in trembling. Some of you remember. After the service, we walked up the street. I said, "You have an awful struggle. I'll take you into a drug-store; perhaps the doctor can give you some medicine that will help you in your struggle, though, after all, you will have to depend upon the grace of God." I said to the doctor, "Can you give this man something to help him in his battle. against strong drink?" "I can," replied the doctor, and he prepared a bottle of medicine.. I said, "There is no alcohol in this no strong drink?" "None at all," said the doctor. "How long will this last?" I inquired. "It will last him a week." "O!" I said, “give us another bottle."

We passed out into the street and stood under the gaslight. It was getting late, and I said to the man, "I must part with you. Put your trust in the Lord, and He will see you through. You will make use of this medicine when the paroxysm of thirst comes on." A few weeks passed away, and I got a letter from Boston saying, "Dear friend, I enclose the money you paid for that medicine. I have never used any of it. The thirst has entirely gone away from me. I send you two or three newspapers to show you what I have been doing since I came to Boston." I opened the newspapers and saw accounts of meetings of two or three thousand people to whom this man had been preaching righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come. I have heard from him again and again since. He is faithful now, and will be, I know, faithful to the last. O this work of soul-saving!

CHAPTER XII.

Corrupt Literature.

THE printing-press is the mightiest agency on earth for good or evil. The position of a minister of religion standing in his pulpit is a responsible position, but it does not seem to me so responsible a position as that of the editor and the publisher. At what distant point of time, at what distant cycle of eternity, will cease the influence of the four great departed editors of New York-Henry J. Raymond, Horace Greeley, James Gordon Bennett, and William Cullen Bryant? Men die, but the literary influences they project go on forever.

Taking into consideration the fact that there are now New York and Brooklyn dailies with a circulation of over five hundred thousand copies, and taking into consideration that there are three weekly periodicals with about one million of circulation, I want you to sit down and cipher out, if you can, how far up, and how far down, and how far out reaches the influence of the American printing-press. I believe that God has made the printing-press to be the chief agent in the world's correction and evangelization, and that the great final battle of the world will be fought, not with guns and swords, but with types and presses, a gospelized and purified literature triumphing over and trampling under foot and crushing out a corrupt literature. God speed the cylinders of an honest, intelligent, aggressive, Christian printing-press!

MULTIPLICATION OF BOOKS.

"Of making many books there is no end."-ECCLESIASTES 12: 12.

This was written centuries before the art of printing was invented, and in ages of the world when books were chiselled in stone, and baked in clay and impressed in wax, and

scratched on the bark of trees, and written on parchment. It was no unusual thing for a man to walk a hundred miles to read a book. We are told of volumes that were chained to pillars and to walls in order that men might make long pilgrimages and read them, and not be tempted to carry them away.

A Sicilian scholar parted with his entire estate to get one copy of Livy; Jerome ruined himself financially in buying the works of Origen, and if in those ages of the world Solomon was amazed at the vast literature abroad, and said in his time, "of making many books there is no end," what would he say if he could now descend and make the tour of our American and English publishing houses? Books on all subjects. Books of all styles. Books in all places. Books. Books.

The greatest blessing that has come to this world since Jesus Christ came is good journalism, and the worst scourge unclean journalism. You must apply the same law to the book and the newspaper. The newspaper is a book swifter and in more portable shape. Under unclean literature, under pernicious books and newspapers, tens of thousands have gone down; the bodies of the victims in the penitentiaries, in the dens of shame, and some of the souls in the asylums for the imbecile and the insane, more of the souls already having gone down in an avalanche of horror and despair.

The London plague was nothing to it. That counted its victims by the thousands; this modern pest shovels its millions into the charnel-house of the morally dead. The longest train of cars that ever rolled over the Erie track, or the Hudson, is not long enough, or large enough, to hold the beastliness and the putrefaction which has been gathered up in the bad books and newspapers of America for the last twenty years.

A WORSE THAN FROG PLAGUE.

There is almost a universal aversion to frogs, and yet with the Egyptians they were honored, they were sacred,

and they were objects of worship while alive, and after death they were embalmed, and to-day their remains may be found among the sepulchres of Thebes. These creatures, so attractive once to the Egyptians, at divine behest became obnoxious and loathsome, and they went croaking and hopping and leaping into the palace of the king, and into the bread-trays and the couches of the people; and even the ovens, which now are uplifted above the earth and on the side of chimneys, then being small holes in the earth with sunken pottery, were filled with frogs when the housekeepers came to look at them. If a man sat down to eat, a frog alighted on his plate. If he attempted to put on a shoe, it was preoccupied by a frog. If he attempted to put his head upon a pillow, it had been taken possession of by a frog. Frogs high and low and everywhere; loathsome frogs, slimy frogs, besieging frogs, innumerable frogs, great plague of frogs.

What made the matter worse, the magicians said there was no miracle in this, and they could by sleight-of-hand produce the same thing, and they seemed to succeed, for by sleight-of-hand wonders may be wrought. After Moses had thrown down his staff and by miracle it became a serpent, and then he took hold of it and by miracle it again became a staff, the serpent-charmers imitated the same thing, and knowing that there were serpents in Egypt which by a peculiar pressure on the neck would become as rigid as a stick of wood, they seemed to change the serpent into the staff, and then, throwing it down, the staff became a serpent. So likewise these magicians tried to imitate the plague of frogs, and perhaps by smell of food attracting a great number of them to a certain point, or by shaking them out from a hidden place, the magicians sometimes seemed to accomplish the same miracle. While these magicians made the plague worse none of them tried to make it better.

Now that plague of frogs has come back upon the earth. It is abroad to-day. It is smiting this nation. It comes in the shape of corrupt literature. These frogs hop into the store, the shop, the office, the banking-house, the factory