seek the cause. The cause is lack of faith; the fires of
God's grace are burning low in their souls. They will soon go out
unless they are furnished with fuel in the shape of good, solid,
practical religion. That is their only salvation. Ignorance,
supplemented by lack of prayer and practice, goes a long way in the
destruction of faith in any soul, for two essentials are deficient.

Disorder, too, is responsible for the loss of much faith. Luther and
Henry might have retained their faith in spite of their pride, but they
were lewd, and avaricious; and there is small indulgence for such
within the Church. Not but that we are all human, and sinners are the
objects of the Church's greatest solicitude; but within her pale no
man, be he king or genius, can sit down and feast his passions and
expect her to wink at it and call it by another name than its own. The
law of God and of the Church is a thorn in the flesh of the vicious
man. The authority of the Church is a sword of Damocles held
perpetually over his head--until it is removed. Many a one denies God
in a moment of sin in order to take the sting of remorse out of it. One
gets tired of the importunities of religion that tell us not to sin, to
confess if we do sin.

When you meet a pervert who, with a glib tongue, protests that his
conscience drove him from the Church, that his enslaved intelligence
needed deliverance, search him and you will find a skeleton in his
closet; and if you do not find it, it is there just the same. A
renegade priest some years ago, held forth before a gaping audience, at
great length, on the reasons of his leaving the Church. A farmer
sitting on the last bench listened patiently to his profound
argumentation. When the lecturer was in the middle of his twelfthly,
the other arose and shouted to him across the hall: "Cut it short, and
say you wanted a wife." The heart has reasons which the reason does not
understand.

Not always, but frequently, ignorance, neglect and vice come to this.
The young, the weak and the proud have to guard themselves against
these dangers, hey work slowly, imperceptibly, but surely. Two things
increase the peril and tend to precipitate matters; reading and
companionship. The ignorant are often anxious to know the other side,
when they do not know their own. The consequence is that they will not
understand fully the question; and if they do, will not be able to
resolve the difficulty. They are handicapped by their i