s God and morality a factor in every deed. Deprived of
this, youth has nothing to fall back on when the hour of temptation
comes; and when he falls, nothing to keep him from the bottom of the
pit.

It is impossible to put this argument in detail before the Christian
and Catholic parent. If the parent docs not see it, it is because that
parent is deficient in the most essential quality of a parent. Nothing
but the atmosphere of a religious school can save our youth from being
victims of that maelstrom of impurity that sweeps the land. And that
alone, with the rigid principles of morality there inculcated, can save
the parents of to-morrow from the blight and curse of New Englandism.

CHAPTER LXXIX.
HEARTS.

THE heart, the seat of the affections, is, after the mind whose
authority and direction it is made to obey, man's noblest faculty; but
it may, in the event of its contemning reason's dictates, become the
source and fountain-head of inordinate lust and an instrument of much
moral disaster and ruin. When the intelligence becomes powerless to
command and to say what and when and how the affections shall disport
themselves, then man becomes a slave to his heart and is led like an
ass by the nose hither and thither; and when nature thus runs
unrestrained and wild, it makes for the mudholes of lust wherein to
wallow and besot itself.

The heart is made to love what is good; now, good is real or apparent.
Love is blind, and needs reason to discern for it what is good and what
is not, reason to direct its affections into their legitimate channels.
But the heart may refuse to be thus controlled, swayed by the
whisperings of ignorant pride and conceit; or it may be unable to
receive the impulse of the reason on account of the unhealthy fumes
that arise from a too exuberant animal nature unchastened by
self-denial. Then it is that, free to act as it lists, it accepts
indiscriminately everything with an appearance of good, in which gets
mixed up much of that which appeals to the inferior appetites. And in
the end it gets lost.

Again, the heart is a power for good or evil; it may be likened to a
magazine, holding within its throbbing sides an explosive deposit of
untold energy and puissance, capable of all things within the range of
the human. While it may lift man to the very pinnacle of goodness, it
may also sink him to the lowest level of infamy. Only, in one case, it
is spiritualized love, in the other, it is carna