Show I BECOMING ACQUAINTED WITH EVIL In an article that cannot fail to commend itself to all right thinking and right desiring persons the New York Tribune discusses the very important im-portant question of making the acquaintance of the devil Better not read said Niebuhr books in which you make the acquaintance of the devil is the distinguishing note of the article It is truly said that there has been of late a flood of problem novels in which the problem is that of the relations ations of the sexes and that the solution so-lution sought is almost invariably to make those relations not pure natural and ennobling but unclean abnormal and debasing The article then goes on to say that the latterday predominance predomin-ance of newspapers over books does not in the least lessen the force and value of the philosophers injunction It cannot be denied that there is much truth in this also too much truth from the very necessity of the case The article then proceeds to say that it is belter not to read anything in which I the acquaintance of evil is made yet that in the current reading of the day how evil is flaunted and forced I upon the public acquaintance Here is I a wretched woman of the town illiterate i illiter-ate drunken debauched Her whole life has been given up to physical and 1 moral filth There is not an honest shopgirl in town who meeting her upon I the street would not instinctively step aside lest her skirts should brui against the creature and be deflleo The career of vice is however crowned with a capital crime or with some I participation in one Instantly that fact is made the excuse for introducing introduc-ing the woman personally to the entire public Through the medium of the press she is brought into the household house-hold into the family circle Her hideous i hid-eous I features are thrust before every eye Her ignorant and vicious words I are repeated to every ear She is made the subject of psychological studies I and every inflection of her voice as she tells her tale of infamy is descanted upon and interpreted as though it were the utterance of an oracle The example is only one of an innumerable in-numerable multitude with which the readingmatter of the day is crowded Those who read make the acquaintance not only of the devil but of all the inhabitants of pandemonium If then people are to be known by their acquaintances what is to be said of the present or of the oncoming generation genera-tion of readers It is a forbidding prospect The daily saturation of minds and of immature minds with all manner of filth inevitably conduces to unsoundness To argue otherwise is to contradict common sense When men sleep in miasmatic swamps to avoid fever and ague and soak themselves them-selves in rum to escape drunkenness they may fortify themselves against vice and crime by gloating over them and making heroes of their perpetrators perpetra-tors But when that time comes we shall have to rewrite every chapter of moral philosophy At present it is safest to shun evil to look upward if we would rise to look forward if we would make progress and if we would have earth move toward her earthly best to obey the advice given by ancient wisdom Whatsoever things are pure whatsoever things are lovely whatsoever things are of good report think on these things How true it is that evil communications communica-tions corrupt good manners And what greater source of evil communication communi-cation than that reading where the acquaintance of the devil is made I Whatever tolerates evil without condemning con-demning it or seeks to make it less I hideous than it is in the moral world encourages acquaintance with the devil Young people and old read books where the chief aim is to make evil attractive where under the pretense pre-tense of working out a psychological or social problem the moral law is treated as a small and indifferent thing a something that must give way if it interferes with the action of the story or the aspirations of the characters char-acters in it The contamination of evil is made through the mind chiefly and the fixed attention on the book or periodical where the acquaintance of the devil is to be made is the surest way to become contaminated There is a moral law no matter whence and whenever it is ignored or trespassed against at that moment the person guilty of ignoring a trespassing tres-passing against it begins to make the acquaintance of the devil and the acquaintance once begun is quite as apt to continue and become intimate as to cease It is a fact a deplorable fact that much of the reading of today to-day has a tendency to make evil prominent and laud it to make it appear ap-pear as something other than it really is and it has its effect and a bad effect ef-fect it is |