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Christian the means of satisfying his taste while they cultivate the spiritual feelings or express them in acts of worship. Watts, Doddridge, Ken, Cowper, and Heber, C. Wesley, Bonar, C. Elliott, R. Palmer and many others have given us too many pure and high-toned hymns to make it necessary now to resort to religious doggerel. The most elevated moods and attitudes of the soul should be honored as well as sustained by the choicest accessories of language and rhythm. Good religious poetry and biography usually serve most effectually the purposes of edification and devotion. The Confessions of St. Augustine, The Imitation of Christ, Taylor's Holy Living and Dying, Bp. Wilson's Sacra Privata and Maxims of Piety and Christianity, The Whole Duty of Man, Baxter's Saints' Rest, Howe's Blessedness of the Righteous, and W. Law's Serious Call have stood the test of time. Arnold's Sermons on the Christian Life, Bushnell's Sermons for the New Life, C. J. Vaughan's well known Volumes Christ the Light, etc, Hopkins' Lessons from the Cross, Taylor's Christian Aspects of Faith and Duty are specimens of varied types of modern practical works.

A word or two may be added touching reading for Sundays. We trust we shall offend none of the advocates for the strictest religious use of the Lord's day, when we suggest that every reader should make a business and a conscience of having his Sunday reading intellectually profitable and stimulating as well as spiritually devout. Laziness and dawdling have no affinity with true worship or the girding up of the inner man for the moral and religious conflicts of the succeeding week-days. Mysticism, pietism and asceticism all weaken the manhood and so bring insidious poison into the ethical and religious life. The exercise of the intellect on some question in Theology, some scriptural exposition, or Christian history, some quickening biography or Christian poem, and doing this

earnestly and systematically is greatly to be recommended in place of the desultory meditation, the reading of goodish books, and the sometimes not even goodish religious newspapers, or the meaningless religious gossip which use up and degrade so many bright hours of so many Sundays. The mechanic and laborer, the clerk and the apprentice, the merchant and the professional man, every one who is so far subjected to task work as to find little time for continuous reading on week-days ought to make his Sundays as available as possible for intellectual excitement and enlarged information upon religious themes as well as for simple edification. Let such seek in their religious reading on Sundays for invigorating thoughts, for valuable information, for elevating impressions of character, for lofty sentiments of resolve and aspiration, with which to store the mind for the week of conflict and worldliness, of temptation and meanness to which they will certainly be exposed. No classes of subjects are so suitable for Sunday reading in combining rest and refreshment with elevating and stimulating influences as good religious biography, enlightened and liberal Church History and superior religious poetry. No subject needs attention so much from the more gifted and best cultured minds, as the preparation of religious books for Sunday use, that the day may be set apart from other days not only by its appropriately religious duties, but may become more effectually a day for spiritual culture in its more enlarged and highest signification. An attempt has been made to provide a Sunday Library, on this theory, by the publishers Macmillan, which may enable the reader to understand our ideal. This ideal other publishers and writers may more perfectly realize. These hints are all that we dare allow ourselves upon a subject in regard to which opinions differ so widely and suspicions and offense may be so easily aroused.

CHAPTER XXI.

NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS.

THE rapid growth and the enormous increase of Newspapers and Periodical journals make it necessary to discuss them separately, freely and at some length. With very many persons they have very largely taken the place of books and have induced peculiar habits of reading and of thinking, which modify the estimate and the use that are accorded to the books which continue to be read. There are many persons now living, who were bred in the wealthiest and most accessible country towns even of New-England, who can remember when the most intelligent families were content with a single weekly newspaper, issued from the nearest city or shire town. Perhaps a religious weekly was added, after religious newspapers began to be published. One or two households besides that of the clergyman or lawyer might take a Monthly as the Analectic Magazine, or possibly a Quarterly as the newly initiated North American Review; or perhaps one family read the London Quarterly and another the Edinburgh, which were then reproduced, the one in drab, and the other in blue and yellow. A daily newspaper except in the large commercial cities was unknown and unthought of, and a copy rarely found its way into the most accessible towns of the largest size. A Semi-weekly New York or Boston Advertiser, or a Philadelphia Gazette, was the height of luxury in the country towns.

But all this is now bravely changed in England and America—so far as newspapers are concerned, more em

phatically in America than in England. The United States is the paradise of newspapers, if a rank and rapid growth indicates a paradise. A daily newspaper has become a necessity of life to every city and every extemporized village on the extreme frontiers of civilization. As a medium for learning and telling news and for the manufacture and the retail of gossip, the newspaper has taken the place of the fountain and the market-place of olden times; and in times more recent, of the town-pump, the grocery and the exchange; as well as of the court-house and the cross roads of a more scattered population. We cannot finish our breakfast without the local daily, whether it be metropolitan or provincial. If we do business in the city and sleep in the country, we must despatch two or three dailies on our way to the office or the counting-room, and we reconsider and review the day by a glance at the evening journals. Instead of reading books, many read reviews of books; instead of patiently perusing history, many cram from summaries or digests in the form of partisan or critical articles. Every leading monthly has its serial novel with which to tantalize the reader and to prolong the tale; which frequently breaks off at an exciting crisis, in order to hold the tale and the periodical prominently before the minds of the greatest number of readers. Brilliant poems are secured to sell a single number. Telling articles on politics, finance and theology are no longer published in pamphlets as formerly, but they are sought for to give character to a Quarterly. Editors' " book tables," "easy chairs," "quarterly or monthly summaries" are relied upon to indicate, or regulate the current of public opinion as well as for the circulation of a variety of gossip and the discharge of any redundant editorial humor, which is various in the quality of its effervescence and pungency. The shy girl of the country, and the bold girl of the town, the fast girl of the period and the brassy girl of the pro

menade all study the fashions in some newspaper or magazine, to which are appended a flashy poem, a sensational tale and a flaunting essay. To meet the wants of those whose intellectual digestion is weak, but whose moral sense is scrupulous, newspapers of a very light pabulum are furnished, strongly flavored with a tremendously exciting story and several highly exalted essays and extracts of wonderful adventures; and these papers penetrate all parts of the country, by the force of enterprise and effrontery. The fast life which we are rightly accused of living is rendered trebly fast by the number of newspapers and journals, which allow us no repose when we seem to be at leisure either for a cheerful conversation with our fellows, or for a quiet chat with ourselves or with quiet and elevat-` ing books. The Home Library has become a place in which to read newspapers and periodicals, and sometimes its shelves contain little more than the bound volumes of the quarterlies or monthlies which a few years have accumulated.

Inasmuch as people will read newspapers and journals as well as books, and often in the place of books, it seems worth the while and almost necessary to offer some hints in respect to their value and the best or least harmful way in which they can be used. We begin with the Quarterly and Monthly journals.

The modern Quarterlies when they came into being were an inevitable necessity. The Edinburgh Review appeared as the organ of a liberal and progressive literary and political party, and it fitly ushered in the present century. The zeal and boldness of the Edinburgh as the organ of the Whigs, called forth from the Conservatives the London Quarterly and Blackwood's Magazine. Then followed the quarterlies and monthlies which were made the organs of religious parties and denominations and also of special philosophical and theological opinions. The primary object of

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