letters. The letters are set in types. The next morning thousands of sheets carry them east and west, north and south; they are read by thousands of eyes, they penetrate into thousands of hearts; they beget new thoughts and words, and sometimes very fierce acts. I talked of gunpowder at the beginning of my lecture. You might have thought it an idle or extravagant comparison; but what is there in the force of gunpowder that can be measured against this force? If we had a barrel of that in our houses, what would it be to these words that we carry with us wherever we go, which we are ready to discharge so freely, with so little recollection whither they may be borne, or what work of death or life they may do? Are not newspapers very useful if they bring that truth home. to our minds, if they make us feel that we, at all events, have no right to say "Our words are our own; who is lord over them?"

In what I have said of the uses of newspapers, I have not dwelt upon the obvious advantages which they afford to mercantile men. I have spoken of them as instruments which may contribute to awaken our minds, and set us upon enlarging our knowledge of that which surrounds us, and of that which has been in past times. Nothing is good which does not carry us beyond itself. Every wise book helps us, because it makes us understand the world, or ourselves, or God better that is what we prize it for. So a wise man does not talk about himself. He makes us honour him and love him because we feel that that is not the thing

he is chiefly occupied about. He does not want to make us worship him; if he could, he would draw us away from all false worship of every kind. This test is as good for newspapers as for anything else. They are useful when they help us to rise above themselves, and to seek for things which they cannot tell us; when they remind us for instance that we belong to a race which existed ages before they existed, and that our children will go on after they are turned to their original rags. But they are mischievous-mischievous to our knowledge, mischievous to our morality, when they lead us to be content with themselves, when they induce us to draw our knowledge or our morality from them. This is the subject I am now going to speak of. I am not going to blame them, but to point out a tendency which there is in you and in me to make them into idols, which the more we worship the more we degrade ourselves, and the less fit we are to reverence anything that is better and higher.

Let me show you in two or three ways how this tendency works. And first let me speak of the word News. I have told you that the newspaper may recall to us that which is very old, that it must do so if we feed upon it rightly, and suck the juice out of it. But you will all remember what we are told of the Athenians, that they spent their time in nothing else but either to hear or to tell some new thing. These Athenians were a very clever people, the cleverest people, perhaps, that has ever been upon this earth. They were at one time a very great people. They

loved their soil; they honoured the tombs, of their fathers; they sent forth ships; they planted colonies; they raised noble buildings; they wrote worthy books; they resisted and put down oppressors. It was not so at the time St. Luke speaks of. They had become a poor, frivolous, slavish people: just because they had become a newsmongering people. The passion for novelty had eaten up all other and better passions in them all reverence, all faith, all freedom. It is a very awful lesson. We Englishmen are not one-half as clever as the Athenians were. But men have lived among us, and deeds have been done among us, nobler than any they could boast of. We have been a more practical people than they were; less prone to speculation, but more successful in hard, tough business. Depend upon it all these qualities are in the greatest danger of perishing; depend upon it we shall become petty and frivolous, and stupid withal, if we learn to spend our time as the Athenians spent theirs. There are men among us who do. We call them Quidnuncs or What-nows. They go about from club to club, and house to house, ing, "What now? What is the last, the very last newest thing? Who can tell us? That which was heard two or three days, or two or three hours ago, is stale. We must have something fresh. That is what we are hunting for." Such men are the most miserable creatures almost that this earth brings forth. The past is nothing to them, nor the future. They live in the moment that is passing. Their life is absorbed

and street to street, say

into that.

And do not let any of us say that we are not in danger of becoming such men as these. We are all in danger of it; men of all parties and professions, men whose language sounds most serious, as well as those who never speak of any world but this. Our chatter and gossip may take different forms, may find different excuses. But if we let the newspapers of one kind or another, however high their intellectual, or moral, or spiritual pretensions may be, rule over us, gossips and chatterers we shall become, that and nothing else. I would especially beseech my friends of the working class to beware of this tendency in themselves, and to help us in correcting it. We fall into it through idleness. Everything in their position and circumstances warns them that idleness is their curse, that labour is their blessing. In their manual tasks they must be earnest if they would do anything. Let them bring the same earnestness into the little time that they can give to reading; into the words they speak when they are talking with each other; into the thoughts they think when they are walking alone. If they study ever so little, they may be honest students; and five minutes of honest study is worth days and weeks of flimsy newsmongering study, just as five minutes of honest work is worth all that produces the flimsy trumpery articles, which look fine to-day and are worn out to-morrow. If the newspapers supply us with the materials for thinking, they will do us good; if we use them as substitutes for thinking, they will destroy both our intellects and our characters.

Another point. I have tried to show you how the sense of personal responsibility may be aroused in us by much that we read in the newspapers, and especially by the reflections which they suggest on the power of the words which we hear, and which we speak. But I must tell you also that the newspapers may do more than all other literature together to weaken in us this sense of personal responsibility. We know nothing of the man who writes articles in the newspaper. He calls himself "We." If anyone complains of him, “ We" answer the charge; if "We” are convicted of a libel, the printer answers for it. Now I do not say whether this ought to be so or not. I scrupulously abstain from laying down any maxims about the conduct of newspaper writers, what it behoves the English law to require of them, or what is due from them as subjects of the law of God. I shall express no opinion on these points; perhaps I have formed none. My business is with the effects of this "We" system upon ourselves, not with the propriety or impropriety of it in them. Looking at it in that point of view, I do say very solemnly, that if any one of us gets into the habit of thinking that he is not an I, a living person, who must give account of himself, who must answer for what he says and what he does before men and before God-if any kind of phraseology leads him to lose sight of that truth, and not to keep it with him as the one that is the most serious and terrible of all in whatever business he is engaged, his moral existence is in jeopardy; he will soon be unable