[Side note:  The Tropical tree]

In early autumn it is ablaze with sheaves of fairest pink; it warns you off by no repellant odour; its umbrageous shelter is most inviting; yet so fatal is the subtle breath with which it charges the air around that should an incautious traveller rest his head for one night under its treacherous shade he would wake no more.

So, the flowery brilliancy of style, the charms and graces of diction of many a modern novel are fascinating, but the pages they adorn exhale a deadly breath.

[Side note:  A sample novel]

Let us take a sample novel.  The foundation of the State is the family; the corner-stone on which the family rests is the sacred marriage bond.  Dissolve that and you convert social harmony into social chaos.  Yet how many books are there which are covert attacks on the marriage tie.

The heroine is generally a married lady who discovers that her husband is not the man she should have married.  From this centre-point the web of intrigue is woven.  Mawkish sentiment and false pity are aroused.  A glamour is thrown over the sins and the sinners.  Tears are demanded for libertines and their crimes are gilded.  Virtue becomes a tyranny; the marriage bond an intolerable yoke, and the divorce court—­which is truly a vestibule of hell—­a haven of relief.

It is unnecessary to trace the effects of such degrading teaching on the lives of the young, whose minds are as wax to receive and marble to retain:  how the high standards of virtue taught in the school and strengthened in the home vanish:  how the touchy sensitiveness of the pure soul becomes deadened and a hunger for grosser excitements is awakened.

[Side note:  The head leads the heart]

Now that we have analysed the intellectual food on which our people live let us advance the enquiry one step further and ask—­Where must it all end?  St. Thomas answers:  “Nihil volitum nisi cognitum.”  That principle is axiomatic in its truth:  the heart will ever follow the head.  As you sow in thought you will reap in action.  Corrupt a nation’s intellect, and as surely as darkness succeeds sunset, as effect follows cause, so surely corruption of that nation’s heart must ensue.

How clearly the devil understands this and what use has he not made of it!

For the past four hundred years the greatest evils that have afflicted the Church are traceable to a licentious Press.  Printing was scarcely invented till Satan seized it for his own purposes.  By it the Humanists of the fifteenth century scattered broadcast pagan ideas.  The disentombed paganism continued to ferment and rot the hearts of the people till in the next century it burst forth in the deluge of unbridled passions that marked the Reformation.

[Side note:  France]