er we blink them, and ignorance and innocence are entirely
different things.

The great French masters of fiction do not write merely for boys and
girls. They believe that other literature is required besides that which
is fit for bread-and-butter misses. Yet they are not therefore vicious.
They paint nature as it is, idealising without distorting, leaving the
moral to convey itself, as it inevitably will. As James Thomson said,
"Do you dread that the Satyr will be preferred to Hyperion, when both
stand imaged in clear light before us?"

Zolaism, or rather what Lord Tennyson means by the word--for _Nana_ is
a great and terrible book with all its vice--is not the chief danger to
the morals of English youth. Long before the majority of them learn to
read French with ease, there is a book put into the hands of all for
indiscriminate reading. It is the Bible. In the pages of that book they
find the lowest animal functions called by their vulgar names; frequent
references, and sometimes very brutal ones, to the generative organs;
and stories of lust, adultery, sodomy and incest, that might raise
blushes in a brothel; while in the Song of Solomon they will find the
most passionate eroticism, decked out with the most voluptuous imagery.
The "Zolaism" of the Bible is far more pernicious than the "Zolaism"
of French fiction. The one comes seductively, with an air of piety, and
authoritatively, with an air of divinity; while the other shows that
selfishness and excess lead to demoralisation and death.

There is in fact, and all history attests it, a close connexion between
religion and sensuality. No student of human nature need be surprised at
Louis XV. falling on his knees in prayer after debauching a young virgin
in the _Parc aux Cerfs_. Nor is there anything abnormal in Count Cenci,
in Shelley's play, soliciting God's aid in the pollution of his own
daughter. It is said that American camp-meetings often wound up in a
saturnalia. The Hallelujah lasses sing with especial fervor "Safe in the
arms of Jesus." How many Christian maidens are moved by the promptings
of their sexual nature when they adore the figure of their nearly naked
Savior on a cross! The very nuns, who take vows of perpetual chastity,
become spouses of Christ; and the hysterical fervor with which they
frequently worship their divine bridegroom, shows that when Nature is
thrust out of the door she comes in at the window.

Catholic books of devotion for the use