o retain: how the high standards of virtue taught in the
school and strengthened in the home vanish: how the touchy
sensitiveness of the pure soul becomes deadened and a hunger for
grosser excitements is awakened.

[Side note: The head leads the heart]

Now that we have analysed the intellectual food on which our
people live let us advance the enquiry one step further and
ask--Where must it all end? St. Thomas answers: "_Nihil volitum
nisi cognitum_." That principle is axiomatic in its truth: the
heart will ever follow the head. As you sow in thought you will
reap in action. Corrupt a nation's intellect, and as surely as
darkness succeeds sunset, as effect follows cause, so surely
corruption of that nation's heart must ensue.

How clearly the devil understands this and what use has he not
made of it!

For the past four hundred years the greatest evils that have
afflicted the Church are traceable to a licentious Press.
Printing was scarcely invented till Satan seized it for his own
purposes. By it the Humanists of the fifteenth century scattered
broadcast pagan ideas. The disentombed paganism continued to
ferment and rot the hearts of the people till in the next century
it burst forth in the deluge of unbridled passions that marked
the Reformation.

[Side note: France]

Voltaire and his disciples did not openly cry "down with the
Church," but they took the surest road to level it. They corroded
the foundations of Christian belief. By encyclopedias and
pamphlets they first attacked with sneer and jibe, the person of
the priest, then the sacraments he administered became the butt
of their mockery, and they finally flouted the gospel he
preached. And while the agents of evil were busy, the good cures
of France sounded no trumpet of alarm, but dreamed themselves
into the comforting delusion that all would blow over, till the
ground under their feet began to rock and heave in the convulsive
throes of the Revolution.

The disciples of Satan to-day are sleepless in their endeavours
to undermine the faith of Ireland through the same agency; while
it is to be feared that some of the guardians of that sacred
treasure are inclined to imitate the dreamy lethargy that led to
such disastrous results in France.

[Side note: Europe]

Look at Europe to-day seething with socialism and anarchy, its
huge standing armies scarcely able to hold these worse than
barbarian hordes in check. Out of what dark womb have these
monster