No doubt we are here pleading, to a certain extent, our own cause, but we only ask others to act on the principle on which we ourselves are acting. THE CATHOLIC WORLD is not published as a private speculation, nor with the expectation of personal gain. Our cause is what we hold to be here and now the Catholic cause, and it is from a sense of duty that we devote ourselves to it. We are deeply conscious of the need for us Catholics in the United States of a purer and more wholesome literature than any which is accessible to the great majority, and than any which can be produced outside of the Catholic community, or by other than Catholics. We need it for ourselves as Catholics, we need it for our country as a means of arresting the downward tendency of popular literature, and of influencing for good those who are our countrymen, though unhappily not within our communion. There is nothing personal to us in the cause [{472}] we serve, and it is no more ours than it is that of every Catholic who has the ability to serve it. If we plead for our magazine, it is only as it is identified with the Catholic cause in our country, and we can be as disinterested in so soliciting support for it as if it was in other hands, and we solicit support for it no farther than it appeals to the Catholic conscience. We have seen the danger to the country, and the destruction to souls threatened by the popular literature of the day, and we are doing what we can in our unpretending way to commence a reaction against it, and give to our American public a taste for something better than they now feed on. We cannot prevent our Catholic youth who have a taste for reading from reading the vile and debasing popular literature of the day, unless we give them something as attractive and more wholesome in its place, and this cannot be done without the hearty and conscientious cooperation of the Catholic community with us.
Catholics are not a feeble and helpless colony in the United States. We are a numerous body, the largest religious denomination in the country. There are but two cities in the world that have a larger Catholic population than this very city of New York, and there are several Catholic nations holding a very respectable rank in the Catholic world, that have not so large, and upon the whole so wealthy a Catholic population as the United States. We are numerous enough, and have means enough to found and sustain all the institutions, religious, charitable, educational, literary, scientific, and artistic needed by a Catholic nation, and there is no Catholic nation where Catholic activity finds fewer "lets and hindrances" from the civil government. We are free, and we have in proportion to our numbers our full share of influence in public affairs, municipal, state, and national; no part of the population partakes more largely of the general prosperity of the country, and no part has suffered less from the late lamentable civil war. We have our Church organized under a regular hierarchy, with priests rapidly increasing in numbers, churches springing up all over the land, and Catholic emigrants from the old world pouring in by thousands and hundreds of thousands. We are numerous enough and strong enough in all religious, literary, and scientific matters, to suffice for ourselves. There is no reason in the world, but our own spiritual indolence and the torpidity of our consciences, why we should continue to feed on the unwholesome literary garbage provided for us by the humanitarianism and pruriency of the age. We are able to have a general literature of our own, the production of genuine Catholic taste and genius, if we will it, and at present are better able than the Catholics of any other nation; for our means are ample, and the government and civil institutions place no obstacles in our way, which can be said of Catholics nowhere else.
Our Catholic community is large enough, and contains readers enough, to sustain as many periodicals as are needed, and to absorb large editions enough of literary and scientific works of the highest character to make it an object with the trade to publish them, as well as with authors to write them. Works of imagination, what is called light literature, if conceived in a true spirit, if they tend to give nature a normal development, and to amuse without corrupting the reader, ought to find with us a large public to welcome and profit by them. What the people of any Catholic nation can do to provide for the intellectual and aesthetic wants of a Catholic people, we Catholics in the United States can do. If we are disposed to set ourselves earnestly about it with the feeling that it is a matter of conscience.
And we must do it, if we mean to preserve our youth to the church, and have them grow up with a robust faith, and strong and masculine virtues, to keep them clear from the humanitarian sentimentality which marks the [{473}] age and the country. Universal education, whether a good or an evil, is the passion of modern society, and must be accepted. Indeed, we are doing our best to educate all our children, and the great mass of them are destined to grow up readers, and will have reading of some sort. Education will prove no blessing to them, however carefully or religiously trained while at school, if as soon as they leave the school, they seek their mental nutriment in the poisonous literature now so rife. No base companions or vicious company could do so much to corrupt as the sensation novels, the humanitarian, rationalistic, and immoral books, magazines, and journals, which, as thick as the frogs of Egypt, now infest the country. Our children and youth leave school at the most critical age, and a single popular novel, or a single sophistical essay, may undo the work of years of pious training in our colleges and conventual schools. Parents have more to apprehend for their children when they have finished their school terms than ever before, and it is precisely when they have left school, when they come home and go out into society, that the greatest dangers and temptations assail them. From their leaving school to their settlement in life is the period for which they most need ample intellectual and moral provision in literature, and it is precisely for this period that little or no such provision is made.
Hence the urgency of the appeal to Catholic consciences first to avoid as much as possible the pernicious literature of the age, and second to create and provide to the utmost of our ability, good and wholesome literature for the mass of our people, such a literature as only they who live in the communion with the saints, drink in the lessons of divine wisdom, and feast their souls on celestial beauty, can produce--a secular literature indeed, but a literature that embodies all that is pure, free, beautiful and charming in nature, and is informed with the spirit of Catholic love and truth--a robust and manly literature, that cherishes all God's works, loves all things, gentle and pure, noble and elevated, strong and enduring, and is not ashamed to draw inspiration from the cross of Christ. It will require much labor, many painful sacrifices to work our way up from the depths to which we have descended, and our progress will be slow and for a long time hardly perceptible, but Catholic faith, Catholic love, Catholic conscience, has once succeeded when things were more desperate, transformed the world, and can do so again. Nothing is impossible to it. It is your faith that overcomes the world. Leo X. said when the press was first made known, "The art of printing was invented for the glory of God, for the propagation of our holy faith, and the advancement of knowledge." [Footnote 82]
[Footnote 82: Decree of Leo X. Session 10 of the Council of Latern.]
Translated from the French.
EUGÉNIE DE GUÉRIN'S LETTERS FROM PARIS.
In the following paper we propose to fill as far as possible the hiatus which occurs between the seventh and eighth books of Mlle. de Guérin's journal, giving such details from her letters as will satisfy the curiosity that many of her readers must have felt concerning the visit she made to Paris at the time of her brother's wedding.