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Conditions existing in our modern neutral universities vindicate our stand and strengthen our position.  The tendency in these universities is, without doubt, towards infidelity or to say the least, towards diluted Christianity.—­“The transformation from the old denominational education to the new undenominational education was in point of fact due to an antitheological—­and even in some of its manifestations—­anti-religious movement.  If it included a sense of the justice of equal treatment for all creeds and a sense of the liberty necessary for science, it also included some of the anti-Christian spirit of Continental liberalism.  The undenominational movement was the practical expression of the liberal and scientific movement.” (Life of Newman—­L 306.)

A few years ago there appeared in the “Cosmopolitan Review,” under the glaring title “Blasting at the Rock of Ages,” an article which startled the intellectual world.  It was a crude and biting exposure of the intellectual license and unhealthy moral atmosphere of the great American universities.  To follow the author of this powerful indictment in the proof of his facts and statements would be beyond the scope of this paper.  Only we would advise some of our near-sighted Catholics who through that snobbishness which money often gives them, have a sort of worship for non-Catholic universities, to read this indictment.  In giving them a glance of the “inside of the cup” it may change their opinion.

Dr. James Henry Leuba, professor of psychology at the Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, gave out to the public the answers he received from sociologists, biologists, psychologists and teachers of universities and other institutions in the United States, as regards their belief in the existence of God.  More than fifty per cent. admitted that they had no belief whatever in the existence of God; forty per cent. denied the immortality of the soul.  The great majority, said Dr. Leuba, were university teachers and none could compare with them in influence over the rising generation. (Cfr.  Archeological Report 1917—­published by Ontario Government.)

When subversive theories based on an absolute materialistic conception of life, and from which God, Divine Providence, Christ, Christianity are systematically excluded and ridiculed as myths of by-gone days; when, we say, such theories are rampant in the halls of our modern universities, should we be astonished to see outright infidelity, political socialism, religious anarchy, stalk the length and breadth of the land?  “Impurity, obscenity, moral corruption in many forms, with the ever consequent cynicism and pessimism, forerunners of moral decadence, destruction of the original, creative, shaping, joyous, confident energies of society, come daily more boldly to the front of the stage and defy criticism or mock at the archaic sanctions of yesterday.  One does not need to peruse the great modern historians of Roman morals to foresee the results of such an educational debauch, when allowed time enough and the working of its own, unholy but intimate and inexorable logic.” (Mgr.  Shahan—­at the Catholic Educational Convention, U.S., 1919.) Sow the wind, you will reap the whirlwind.