they use almost the same words as those
employed by a kindly Catholic (or Protestant) of the seventeenth
century, who was informed that his best friend whom he had always
respected and loved had fallen a victim to the terrible heresies of the
Protestant (or Catholic) church.

"Heresy" until a very short time ago was regarded as a disease. Nowadays
when we see a man neglecting the personal cleanliness of his body and
his home and exposing himself and his children to the dangers of typhoid
fever or another preventable disease, we send for the board-of-health
and the health officer calls upon the police to aid him in removing this
person who is a danger to the safety of the entire community. In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a heretic, a man or a woman who
openly doubted the fundamental principles upon which his Protestant
or Catholic religion had been founded, was considered a more terrible
menace than a typhoid carrier. Typhoid fever might (very likely would)
destroy the body. But heresy, according to them, would positively
destroy the immortal soul. It was therefore the duty of all good
and logical citizens to warn the police against the enemies of the
established order of things and those who failed to do so were as
culpable as a modern man who does not telephone to the nearest doctor
when he discovers that his fellow-tenants are suffering from cholera or
small-pox.

In the years to come you will hear a great deal about preventive
medicine. Preventive medicine simply means that our doctors do not wait
until their patients are sick, then step forward and cure them. On the
contrary, they study the patient and the conditions under which he lives
when he (the patient) is perfectly well and they remove every possible
cause of illness by cleaning up rubbish, by teaching him what to eat and
what to avoid, and by giving him a few simple ideas of personal hygiene.
They go even further than that, and these good doctors enter the
schools and teach the children how to use tooth-brushes and how to avoid
catching colds.

The sixteenth century which regarded (as I have tried to show you)
bodily illness as much less important than sickness which threatened the
soul, organised a system of spiritual preventive medicine. As soon as
a child was old enough to spell his first words, he was educated in
the true (and the "only true") principles of the Faith. Indirectly this
proved to be a good thing for the general progress of t