Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/889

1868.] testaments, sermons, and Sundays, may find their attention entrapped, and fixed perforce on higher things.

It is a very ingenious idea. Some morning, accordingly, we may find (if we are in the habit of reading them) something of this sort in the Personals of the "Herald:"

Or maybe there will occur something in this vein—

Or again, haply:

And so, too, among the auctions and mock auctions, the banks and books, the courts and quacks, the shipping news, financial news, board and lodging, we may look henceforth for moral and instructive sentences deftly introduced in display type between every two advertisements; just as we now see Helmbold's Buchu and S. T. 1860 X.

With experience, these little apophthegms could at length be so placed as to act as counter-irritants—as antidotes to the bane in the rest of the paper. For example, under the Court Calendar might be written "Thou shalt not bear false witness;" under the Sunday Excursions, "Remember the Sabbath Day;" under Amusements, "This world is all a fleeting show." It is certainly an ingenious idea.

But the first effect will be exasperating to most readers. It will stir up more unruly temper than anything of the sort I can now think of, save, perhaps, the City Directory, which last is not only packed full of advertising fly leaves, but has every blank margin and every space which ought to be white, so beplastered with business notices that you are in doubt whether you are looking into a directory or a descriptive catalogue. So, when an irascible man searches in haste for shipping news, and finds instead an injunction to keep the third commandment, he will probably be wrought up to such a pitch as to commit the very crime he was warned against.

But the scheme is practicable. The association can print its "solid chunks of wisdom" in any paper in the United Slates, from the "Police Gazette" up to the "Church Journal;" it can paste them on Barnum's drop-curtain, if it likes, or put them as "gags" into the broad mouths of Clown and Pantaloon. So long as it is in funds, it can advertise anywhere and anyhow. The Rev. Homer Wilbur once offered to furnish a sermon gratis to the "Boston Courier," adding, as an inducement, that "by omitting the advertisements, it might easily be got within the limits of a single number, and I venture to assure you the sale of some scores of copies in this town." I have always thought it a great pity that the mercenary publishers declined this lavish offer—but the truth is that nowhere will love do so little for a man, and money so much, as in the advertising columns of a daily paper. There it is an affair not of sentiment but of sixpences; there business is business, insomuch that you will often see flaunted, beheralded by its own bravura, the very thing denounced in the editorial columns.

The "Evangelical Advertising Association" is worldly-wiser than delightful old Parson Wilbur. It pays for its homilies at regular rates, and so long as it does that, all doors will open before its magic talisman. But is the scheme wise? That it is thoroughly philanthropic, that its projectors are inspired by the highest motives, is admitted. But it must use the newspapers for its purpose with great discretion, since any odor of quackery about religious means repels people from religious ends. A genuine man of business naturally itches to transact affairs of the affection like everything else, on "sound business principles," and hence believes in the virtues of advertising; and he is always commendably anxious that the children of darkness should not be wiser in their generation than the children of light. But sound judgment is needed in this matter. On the ground that "the devil must not have the best tunes," we sometimes see most extraordinary feats of comic and operatic hymn-making. In the same way, in order to secure the business element of sensationalism, we see such