A CHAPTER FOR BOYS 407 



the care that should be exercised in the selection of 

 reading-matter for the young. 



Bad books often find their way even where evil 

 companions would not intrude, and undoubtedly effect 

 a work of evil almost as great as is wrought by bad 

 associations. 



Look out, boys, for the tempter in this guise. If a 

 companion offers you a book of a suspicious character, 

 take it home to your father, your mother, or some 

 reliable older friend, for examination. If it is handed 

 to you with an air of secrecy, or if a promise to keep 

 it hidden from others is required, have nothing to do 

 with it. You might better place a coal of fire or a live 

 \aper in your bosom, than to allow yourself to read 

 such a book. The thoughts that are implanted in the 

 mind in youth will stick there through life, in spite of 

 all efforts to dislodge them. Hundreds of men who 

 have been thus injured when young, but have by some 

 providence escaped a life of vice and shame, look back 

 with most intense regret to the early days of child- 

 hood, and earnestly wish that the pictures then made 

 in the mind by bad books might be effaced. Evil im- 

 pressions thus formed, often torture the mind during 

 a whole lifetime. In the most inopportune moments 

 they will intrude themselves. When the individual 

 desires to place his mind undividedly upon sacred and 

 elevated themes, even at the most solemn moments of 

 life, these lewd pictures will sometimes intrude them- 

 selves in spite of his efforts to avoid them. It is an 

 awful thing to allow the mind to be thus contaminated ; 

 and many a man would give the world, if he possessed 

 it, to be free from the horrible incubus of a defiled 

 imagination. 



Vile Pictures. —For leading boys astray, obscene 



