I warn you against evil books
and evil pictures. Henry Ward Beecher, The Immoral
Woman, 1849 I warn you against evil books
and evil pictures. There is in every town an undercurrent
which glides beneath our feet, unsuspected by the pure, out
of which, notwithstanding, our sons scoop many a poisoned goblet. Evil books are hidden in trunks
and concealed in dark halls, evil pictures are stored in sly
portfolios or trafficked from hand to hand, and the handiwork
of depraved art is seen in forms which ought to make a harlot
blush. Those who make them are the worst
public criminals, and those who circulate them are incendiaries
of all morality. I would think a man would loathe
himself for even owning such things. A pure heart would shrink
from these abominable things as from death itself. France,
where true religion long ago was extinguished, smothered in
immorality, has flooded the world with a species of literature
redolent of the vilest depravity. Upon the plea of exhibiting human
nature, novels are now scooped out of the very lava of corrupt
passions. They are true to nature, But
to nature, as it exists in grossly vile and immoral hearts, obscene
libertines are now our teachers of morality. They scrape the
very sediment and muck of society to mould their creations. and
their books are monster galleries, in which the inhabitants of old
Sodom would have felt at home as connoisseurs, over loathsome
women and unutterably vile men huddled together in motley groups,
and over all their monstrous deeds. Their lies, their plots,
their crimes, their horrendous pleasures, their appalling conversation,
is thrown the impure light of a sensual imagination, until
they glow with an infernal luster. Such novels are the common sewers
of society, into which drain the concentrated filth of the
worst passions, of the worst creatures, of the worst cities. The ten plagues have visited
our literature. Water is turned to blood. Frogs
and lice creep and hop over our most familiar things—the couch,
the cradle, and the bread-box. Locusts, plague, and fire are
smiting every green thing. I am ashamed and outraged when
I think that wretches could be found to open these foreign seals
and let out their plagues upon us, that any satanic pilgrim
should voyage to France to dip from the dead sea of her abomination
such immoral filth for our children. It would be a mercy compared
to this, to import venomous serpents from Africa, and pour them out
in our homes, ferocious lions, and free them in our towns, poisonous
lizards and scorpions and black tarantulas, and put them in our
gardens, Men could slay these, but those offspring reptiles
of the French mind, who can kill these? You might as well draw
sword on a plague, or charge malaria with a bayonet. This
black, smut-lettered literature circulates in our towns, floats
in our stores, nestles in the shops, is fingered and read nightly,
and hatches broods of obscene thoughts in the young mind. While
the parent strives to infuse Christian purity into his child's
heart, he is checked by most accursed messengers of evil,
and the child's heart hisses already like a nest of young
and nimble vipers.