The Printing Press as Evangelist: Books and the Battle for Souls

Ecclesiastes 11:12 observes that "of making many books there is no end." This was profoundly true in Solomon's day; how infinitely more so in A.D. 1887, when the printing press has become the mightiest agency for good or evil ever unleashed upon civilization.

Consider what a single book represents: the accumulated wisdom of ages, the collected sacrifice of martyrs, the distilled experience of countless battles and victories. A book is a drawing-room where kings, philosophers, poets, and orators meet the reader across centuries. If we honored books as they deserve, we would build altars before them—especially before the Book of God.

Yet this same printing press has become a plague deadlier than pestilence itself. Where the plague counts victims by thousands, pernicious literature shovels millions into the charnel-house of the morally dead. False narratives present life as fitful fantasy rather than practical reality; women become unfit for duties of wife and mother through indiscriminate novel-reading; poisonous newspapers and books corrupt entire families.

The great battle for the world's soul will not be fought with guns and swords, but with types and presses. A gospelized printing press must triumph over and crush out corrupting literature. Our defense begins at home: we must keep ourselves and our families aloof from iniquitous books and newspapers that give false pictures of human life. No book—however skillfully written—is worth the moral compromise of reading evil mixed with good.