re description of
inanimate things? He has to deal with the passions and actions of
mankind--that is to say, with a hundred problems of right and wrong. Of
course, men who have deliberately made up their mind on any question
of right and wrong, are not shaken by anything in a book; nay, they
probably scarcely remark it. But if you remember that in the inner life
of every man there must be moments of doubt and hesitation, there must
be problems vaguely knocking about, you will understand that for every
man there is the danger that in such a moment of doubt his eyes may fall
upon a sentence in a book--a sentence to other men trivial--which will
settle that doubt for ever, rightly or wrongly. There are few of us
so strong that the moment does not come when we would ask, as a good
Catholic does of a confessor, what is right and what is wrong, and take
the answer which is one of the two that have been struggling within
himself, as definite; and to us, who do not go to confession, a book,
any book casually taken up, may be this terribly powerful spiritual
director. People used to exaggerate the influence of books, because they
imagined that they could alter already settled opinions; now-a-days I
deliberately think that they underrate this influence, because they
forget how it may settle fluctuating opinion. The power of literature
is in this way very great."

"It has been formerly--yes, I grant it," answered Cyril; "but it is no
longer what it was; in our cut-and-dry days it is necessarily smaller."

"On the contrary, much greater now than perhaps almost at any other
time. These are not cut-and-dry days, Cyril, but the very reverse; you
must not let yourself be deceived by a certain superficial regularity,
by railway journeys and newspapers, and a general civilization of
hand-books and classes. In reality there is more room for indirect moral
perversion or enervation in our days than there has been for a good
while; for the upsetting of ideas, the infiltration of effete or foreign
modes of thought and feeling, is much greater in this quiet nineteenth
century than it was, for instance, in the Renaissance or the eighteenth
century. With all their scepticism, the people of those days had a great
fund of tradition about everything; they were floating about a good
deal, I admit, but they were fully persuaded of the existence of certain
very solid moral rocks, to which they might always tie their boat when
it grew over-rough; rock