MODERN LITERATURE.
The day has gone by when the discussion was between Christian and Christian; it is now a stand-up fight, a fierce struggle, every day becoming more fierce, between faith and infidelity. A spurious philosophy has prevailed under one name or another in every age, from the days of Democritus down to our own; but it has received recently an impetus from the teachings of Materialists. Emboldened by their success in research, the professors of the Materialistic school have attempted to lift the mysterious veil of nature, and have challenged the truths of Revelation on the most fundamental principles of the Christian creed.
In fact the Materialistic theories which today deify reason and make matter eternal, and which recognize in matter the principle and perfection of every form of life, are the substratum underlying almost every species of modern literature. It is this materialistic philosophy in the trappings of popular literature which is filling the earth with crime and making the lives of men a veritable inferno. Its pernicious influence has been stealing over the minds of men till it has succeeded in shaking to its centre the whole fabric of social life in almost every civilized country.
The irreligious works of the European continent have been translated into English, and circulated in every variety of form from the most ornate to the cheapest and most accessible. They are on the counters in the department stores, in the most flashing advertisements where their most prurient qualities are held out as inducements to the buyer. Nor are works of a similar spirit and tendency wanting in our own literature. And these works, adapted to every class of readers, and to every grade of intellect, revive the old errors, while fertile in the production of new ones, flatter the pride of the understanding, stimulate the passions of the heart, and diffuse their poison in every department of human learning and through every form of publication by which the popular mind can be reached.
An evil press, largely circulated and read by many who suspect no evil, is rapidly sapping the faith of the multitudes.
Unfortunately there exists in our nature a propensity to evil. Whatever flatters our passions or vicious inclinations we, as a rule, are readier to follow than what is good and virtuous. Hence we find that bad books are more generally read than good ones, and that newspapers wherein religion and morality are outraged, have a very wide circulation. If anything more than bad example tends to propagate vice, it is bad reading. Vice in itself is odious, but when decked out in the false coloring of a cleverly written book it becomes enticing. Young inquisitive people—and young people are generally inquisitive—are tempted.
After perusing such a book their horror of vice is much lessened; they take up another, and so, by degrees, their ideas become perverted. Nearly all men agree that it is the familiarity with vice which develops all the immoral and vicious propensities of human nature, and it is this familiarity with the face of vice which is so contagious, and draws so many into the vortex of crime in the large cities while its absence keeps country life so pure and untarnished.
It is indeed hard to say which is the more dangerous among books—those which are written professedly against Christ, His Church and His laws, or the furtive and stealthy literature which is penetrated through and through with unbelief and passion, false principles, immoral whispers and inflaming imaginations. To read such books is a moral contagion—it is to imbibe poison—it is certain spiritual death.
It is certainly a melancholy reflection, that any such books should be extant among us. It is sad to think that any of the human species should have so far lost all sense of shame, all feelings of conscience, as to sit down deliberately and compile a work entirely in the cause of vice and immorality, which, for anything they know, may serve to pollute the minds of millions, and to propagate contagion and iniquity through generations yet unborn—living, and spreading its baneful influence long after the unhappy hand that wrote it is mouldering in the dust.
It is a striking observation made by one of the Fathers of the Church that "as the authors of good books may hope to find their future crown lightened by the degree of wisdom and virtue which their writings impart through successive generations, so the writers of evil books may well dread an increase of punishment in the future world proportionate to the pollution which they spread, and the evil effects which their writings shall produce as long as they continue to be read."