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 ignorance and can only make a mess out of it.  The result is that they are caught by sophistries like a fly in a web.

The company of those who believe differently, or not at all, is also pernicious to unenlightened and weak faith.  The example in itself is potent for evil.  The Catholic is usually not a persona grata as a Catholic but for some quality he possesses.  Consequently, he must hide his religion under the bushel for fear of offending.  Then a sneer, a gibe, a taunt are unpleasant things, and will be avoided even at the price of what at other times would look like being ashamed of one’s faith.  If ignorant, he will be silent; if he has not prayed, he will be weak; if vicious, he will be predisposed to fall.

If we would guard the precious deposit of faith secure against any possible emergency, we must enlighten it, we must strengthen it, we must live up to it.

CHAPTER XXVI.  HOPE.

The First Commandment bids us hope as well as believe in God.  Our trust and confidence in His mercy to give us eternal life and the means to obtain it,—­this is our hope, founded on our belief that God is what He reveals Himself to us, able and willing to do by us as we would have Him do.  Hope is the flower of our faith; faith is the substance of the things we hope for.

To desire and to hope are not one and the same thing.  We may long for what is impossible of obtaining, while hope always supposes this possibility, better, a probability, nay, even a moral certitude.  This expectation remains hope until it comes to the fruition of the things hoped for.

The desire of general happiness is anchored in the human heart, deep down in the very essence of our being.  We all desire to be happy, We may be free in many things; in this we are not free.  We must have happiness, greater than the present, happiness of one kind or another, real or apparent.  We may have different notions of this happiness; we desire it according to our notions.  Life itself is one, long, painful, unsatisfied desire.