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FRONTISPIECE (Steel Engraving).—North View of Soham Church.

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SOHAM

PLAYFORD'S

MAGAZINE,

AND

Friendly Monitor.

JANUARY, 1847.

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VERY sincere friend of morality and social order, has much reason for anxiety in these eventful times. The Press-that powerful engine for good or evil, while, on the one hand, it pours the streams of sound principle and religious belief through the land, poisons, on the other, the pure fountain of truth with the deadly weeds of infidelity and vice. It is no libel, except so far as truth may be a libel, to say, that a large proportion of the publications that find their way into the libraries of the rich, and the cottages of the pooreither with the view of gain, by pandering to the lowest propensities of fallen humanity, or by a neglect and indifference almost equally culpable-are silently, but surely loosening the bands of society, or heaping fuel upon the flame of man's insatiable desires. But while so grave a charge may be too easily supported even against many periodicals which have far different ends in view, are there not others which present one uniform picture of immorality and crime? What writings are those which are read, with such avidity, at the houses of resort No. 1. Vol. I.

B

of the labourer and the artisan? Go from the gilded spirit shop of the Metropolis to its squalid associate in the fen, and is the tone of the blackened journal, that lies upon the table, most calculated to humanize, or to degrade its readers? Are they likely to become more intelligent, more upright, more pure from its perusal, or, from the depth of their depravity, to sink to a deeper still? How strangely distorted must be the views of those who maintain that the sight of vice will prove its effectual antidote! That because the Stage may sometimes faintly echo with some moral sentiment, the scenes of profligacy, which have been so broadly played before a vicious audience, will tend to check them in their career of sin! But when we find the crimes, into which our fallen nature is too often betrayed, recounted with every particularity of circumstance that can agravate their enormity, and yet the perpetrator made, so frequently, the object of interest and commiseration, it must surely be time for all who have any regard, either for the temporal or eternal condition of their fellow creatures, to cast, if but a handful, to the barrier that may repel so great a flood of evil.

It is with such a design that this little publication is set on foot, and now pleads with the Public for their countenance and support. It proposes to supply an hour's instruction, connected more immediately with the associations of the neighbourhood but still of a sufficiently general character to render it more extensively useful.

It is not, unhappily, to ephemeral publications alone, that the mischief to which we have alluded, is confined. It is interwoven alike with works of history and fiction of so established a reputation, as to find a ready access to all classes of society, and every grade of life.

If it might, with justice, have been said of a celebrated Poet, that he had "poisoned the fount of human felicity," the remark is, at least, equally applicable to many a fashionable novelist of the day; while others, whose professed aim is to administer an antidote in disguise, do but bring truth and soberness into caricature, and forget "that every idle word that men shall speak they shall give an account thereof in the day of judgment."

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