Yet these evils are neither few nor light, and are such as tend to enlarge and perpetuate themselves. Not the least of the evils of journalism, for instance, is the necessity it is under in order to live, to get readers, and to get readers it must echo public opinion or party feeling, defend causes that need no defence, and flatter passions already too strong. Instead of correcting public sentiment and laboring to form a sound public opinion or a correct moral judgment, its conductors are constantly tempted to feel the public pulse to discover what is for the moment popular, and then to echo it, and to denounce all who dissent from it or fall not down and worship it; forgetting if what is popular is erroneous or unjust, it is wrong to echo it, and if true and just, it needs no special defence, for it is already in the ascendant; and forgetting, also, that it is the unpopular truth, the unpopular cause, the cause of the wronged and oppressed, the poor and friendless, too feeble to make its own voice heard, and which has no one to speak for it, that needs the support of the journal. When John the Baptist sent two of his disciples to our Lord to ask him, "Art thou he that is to come, or are we to look for another?" our Lord said: "Go and tell John . . . that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead rise again, the poor have the gospel preached to them." Here was the evidence of his messiahship. "They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick."
This is not all: needing to be always on the popular side, the press not only plants itself on the lowest general average of intelligence and virtue, but it tends constantly to lower that general average, and hence becomes low and debasing in its influence. It grows ever more and more corrupt and corrupting, till the public mind becomes so vitiated and weakened that it will neither relish nor profit by the sounder works needed as remedies.
In the moral and intellectual sciences we write introductions where we once wrote treatises, because the publisher knows that the introductions will sell, while the elaborate treatise will only encumber his shelves, or go to the pastry-cook or the paper-maker. Not only do the journals flatter popular passions, appeal to vitiated tastes, or a low standard of morals, but books do the same, and often in a far greater degree. The great mass of books written and published in the more enlightened and advanced modern nations are immoral and hostile not only to the soul hereafter, but to all the serious interests of this life. A few years since the French government appointed a commission to investigate the subject of colportage in France and the commission reported after a conscientious examination that of nine millions of works colported eight millions were more or less immoral. Of the novels which circulate in the English-speaking world, original or translated, one not immoral and possible to be read without tainting the imagination or the heart is the rare exception. Under pretence of realism nature is oftener exhibited in her unseemly than in her seemly moods, and the imagination of the young is compelled to dwell on the grossest vices and corruptions of a moribund society. Chastity of [{465}] thought, innocence of heart, purity of imagination, cannot be preserved by a diligent reader even of the better class of the light literature of the day. This literature so vitiates the taste, so corrupts the imagination, and so sullies the heart, that its readers can see no merit and find no relish in works not highly spiced with vice, crime, or disorderly passion. The literary stomach has been so weakened by vile stimulants that it cannot bear a sound or a wholesome literature, and such works as a Christian would write, and a Christian read, would find scarcely a market, or readers sufficiently numerous to pay for its publication.
It is boasted that popular literature describes nature as it is, or society as it is, and is therefore true, and truth is never immoral. Truth truthfully told, and truthfully received, is indeed never immoral, but even truth may be so told as to have the effect of a lie. But these highly spiced novels--which one can hardly read without feeling when he has finished them as if he had been spending a night in dissipation or debauchery, and with which our English-speaking world is inundated--are neither true to nature nor to society. They give certain features of society, but really paint neither high life nor low life, nor yet middle life as it is. They rarely give a real touch of nature, and seldom come near enough to truth to caricature it. They give us sometimes the sentiment, sometimes the affection of love with a touch of truth--but, after all, only truth's surface or a distant and distorted view of it. They paint better the vices of nature, man's abuse or perversion of nature, than the virtues. Their virtuous characters are usually insipid or unnatural; nature has depths their plummets sound not, and heights to which they rise not. There they forget that in the actual providence of God nature never exists and operates alone, but either through demoniacal influence descends below, or through divine grace rises above itself. They either make nature viler than she is or nobler than she is. They never hit the just medium, and the views of nature, society, and life the young reader gets from them, are exaggerated, distorted, or totally false. The constant reading of them renders the heart and soul morbid, the mind weak and sickly, the affections capricious and fickle, the whole man ill at ease, sighing for what he has not, and incapable of being contented with any possible lot or state of life, or with any real person or thing.
Beside books which the conscience of a pagan would pronounce immoral, and which cannot be touched without defilement, there are others that by their false and heretical doctrines tend to undermine faith and to sap those moral convictions without which society cannot subsist, and religion is an empty name or idle form. The country is flooded with a literature which not only denies this or that Christian mystery, this or that Catholic dogma, that not only rejects supernatural revelation, but even natural reason itself. The tendency of what is regarded as the advanced thought of the age is not only to eliminate Christian faith from the intellect, Christian morality from the heart, Christian love from the soul, but Christian civilization from society. The most popular literature of the day recognizes no God, no Satan, no heaven, no hell, and either preaches the worship of the soul, or of humanity. Christian charity is resolved into the watery sentiment of philanthropy, and the Catholic veneration of the Blessed Virgin lapses, outside of the church, into an idolatrous worship of femininity. The idea of duty is discarded, and we are gravely told there is no merit in doing a thing because it is our duty; the merit is only in doing it from love, and love, which, in the Christian sense, is the fulfilling of the law, is defined to be a sentiment without any relation to the understanding or the conscience. Not only the authority of the church is rejected in the name of humanity [{466}] by the graver part of popular literature, but the authority of the state, the sacredness of law, the inviolability of marriage, and the duty of obedience of children to their parents, are discarded as remnants of social despotism now passing away. The tendency is in the name of humanity to eliminate the church, the state, and the family, and to make man a bigger word than God. In view of the anti-religious, anti-moral, and anti-social doctrines which in some form or in some guise or other permeate the greater part of what is looked upon as the living literature of the age, and which seem to fetch an echo from the heart of humanity, well might Pope Gregory XVI., of immortal memory, in the grief of his paternal heart exclaim, "We are struck with horror in seeing with what monstrous doctrines, or rather with what prodigies of error we are inundated by this deluge of books, pamphlets, and writings of every sort whose lamentable irruption has covered the earth with maledictions!"
"There doubtless are men," as Père Toulemont says, "who have very little to fear from the most perfidious artifices of impiety, as, prepared by a strong and masculine intellectual discipline, they are able to easily detect the most subtle sophisms. No subtlety, no tour de metier, if I may so speak, can escape them. At the first glance of the eye they seize the false shade, the confusion of ideas or of words; they redress at once the illusive perspective created by the mirage of a lying style. The fascinations of error excite in them only a smile of pity or of contempt.
"Yes, there are such men, but they are rare. Take even men of solid character, with more than ordinary instruction, and deeply attached to their faith, think you, that even they will be able always to rise from the reading of this literature perfectly unaffected? I appeal to the experience of more than one reader, if it is not true after having run over certain pages written with perfidious art, that we find ourselves troubled with an indescribable uneasiness, an incipient vertigo or bewilderment? We need then, as it were, to give a shake to the soul, to force it to throw off the impression it has received, and if we neglect to assist it more or less vigorously, it soon deepens and assumes alarming proportions. No doubt, unless in exceptional circumstances, strong convictions are not sapped to their foundation by a single blow, but one needs no long experience to be aware that this sad result is likely to follow in the long run, and much more rapidly than is commonly believed, even with persons who belong to the aristocracy of intelligence.
"This will be still more the case if we descend to a lower social stratum, to the middle classes who embody the great majority of Christian readers. With these mental culture is very defective, and sometimes we find in them an ignorance of the most elementary Catholic instruction that is really astounding. What, at any rate, is undeniable, is that their faith is not truly enlightened either in relation to its object or its grounds. It ordinarily rests on sentiment far more than on reason. They have not taken the trouble to render to themselves an account of the arguments which sustain it; much less still are they able to solve the difficulties which unbelievers suggest against it. Add to this general absence of serious intellectual instruction, the absence not less general of force and independence of character, and the position becomes frightful. In our days it must be confessed the energy of the moral temperament is singularly enfeebled, and never perhaps was the assertion of the prophet, omne caput languidum, the whole head is sick, more true than now. Robust and masculine habits seem to have given place to a sort of sybaritism of soul, which renders the soul adverse to all personal effort, or individual labor. See, for example, that multitude which devours so greedily the first books that come to hand. Takes it any care to control the things which pass before its eyes, or to [{467}] render to itself any account of them by serious reflection? Not at all. The attention it gives to what it reads is very nearly null, or, at best, it is engrossed far more with the form, the style, or the term of the phrase, than with the substance, or ground of the ideas expressed. The mind is rendered, so to say, wholly passive, ready to receive without reflection any impression or submit to any influence."
The great body of the faithful in no country can read the immoral, heretical, infidel, humanitarian, and socialistic literature of the age without more or less injury to their moral and spiritual life, or without some lesion even to their faith itself; although it be not wholly subverted. Can a man touch pitch and not be defiled? It is precisely the devouring of this literature as its daily intellectual food, or as its literary pabulum, that produces that sybaritism of soul, that feebleness of character, that aversion to all manly effort or individual exertion without which robust and masculine virtue is impossible.
There is certainly much strong faith in the Catholic population of the United States, perhaps more in proportion to their numbers than in any of the old Catholic nations of Europe; but this strong faith is found chiefly amongst those who have read very little of the enervating literature of the day. In the younger class in whom a taste for reading has been cultivated, and who are great consumers of "yellow covered literature," and the men who read only the secula and partisan journals, we witness the same weakness of moral and religious character, and the same feeble grasp of the great truths of the gospel complained of by Père Toulemont. To a great extent the reading of non-Catholic literature, non-Catholic books, periodicals, novels and journals, neutralizes in our sons and daughters the influence of Catholic schools, academies, and colleges, and often effaces the good impression received in them.