Again, I charge you to stand off from all those books which corrupt the imagination and inflame the passions. I do not refer now to that kind of a book which the villain has under his coat, waiting for the school to be out, and then looking both ways to see that there is no policeman around the block, offers the book to your son on his way home. I do not speak of that kind of literature, but that which evades the law and comes out in polished style, and with acute plot sounds the tocsin that rouses up all the baser passions of the soul. Years ago a French lady came forth as an authoress, under the assumed name of George Sand, She smoked cigars. She wore gentlemen's apparel. She stepped off the bounds of decency. She wrote with a style ardent, eloquent, mighty in its gloom, horrible in its unchastity, glowing in its verbiage, vivid in its portraiture, damning in its effects, transfusing into the libraries and homes of the world an evil that has not even begun to relent, and she has her copyists in all lands. To-day, under the nostrils of your city, there is a fetid, reeking, unwashed literature enough to poison all the fountains of public virtue and smite your sons and daughters as with the wing of a destroying angel, and it is time that the ministers of the Gospel blew the trumpet and rallied the forces of righteousness, all armed to the teeth, in this great battle against a depraved literature. Why are fifty per cent of the criminals in the jails and penitentiaries of the United States to-day under twenty-one years of age? Many of them under seventeen, under sixteen, under fifteen, under fourteen, under thirteen. Walk along one of the corridors of the Tombs Prison in New York and look for yourselves. Bad books, bad newspapers bewitched them as soon as they got out of the cradle. "O," says some one, "I am a business man, and I have no time to examine what my children read. I have no time to inspect the books that come into my household." If your children were threatened with typhoid fever would you have time to go for the doctor? Would you have time to watch the progress of the disease? Would you have time for the funeral? In the presence of my God, I warn you of the fact that your children are threatened with moral and spiritual typhoid, and that unless this thing be stopped, it will be to them funeral of body, funeral of mind, funeral of soul, three funerals in one day.