"The saints admonish us to let our thoughts run upon whatsoever things are pure, if we would inherit the Kingdom of God; and the divine Plato tells us that we have within us a many-headed beast and a man, and that by dissoluteness we feed or strengthen the beast in us, and starve the man; and finally, following the divine Plato among the sages at a humble distance, comes the prosaic and unfashionable Paley, and says in his precise way: that 'this vice has a tendency, which other species of vice have not so directly, to unsettle and weaken the powers of the understanding; as well as, I think, in a greater degree than other vices, to render the heart thoroughly corrupt.' True; and, once admitted and fostered, it eats like a canker, and with difficulty can ever be brought to let go its hold again, but for ever tightens it. Hardness and insolence come in its train; an insolence which grows till it ends by exasperating and alienating everybody; a hardness which grows until the man can at last scarcely take pleasure in anything, outside the service of his goddess, except cupidity and greed, and cannot be touched with emotion by any language except Fustian. Such are the fruits of the worship of the great goddess Aselgeia. "So, instead of saying that Nature cares nothing about chastity, let us say that human nature, _our_ nature, cares about it a great deal.... The Eternal has attached to certain moral causes the safety or the ruin of States, and the present popular literature of France is a sign that she has a most dangerous moral disease." In the following year, he thus commented on the Festival of Christmas and its spiritual significance: "When we are asked, What really is Christmas, and what does it celebrate? We answer, the birthday of Jesus. What is the miracle of the Incarnation? A homage to the virtue of Pureness, and to the manifestation of this virtue in Jesus. What is Lent, and the miracle of the temptation? A homage to the virtue of self-control, and to the manifestation of this virtue in Jesus." "That on which Christmas, even in its popular acceptation, fixes our attention, is that to which the popular instinct in attributing to Jesus His miraculous Incarnation, in believing Him born of a pure virgin, did homage--pureness. And this, to which the popular instinct thus did homage, was an essential characteristic of Jesus and an essential virtue of Christianity, the obligation of which, though apt to be questioned and discredited in the world, is at the same time nevertheless a necessary fact of nature and eternal truth of reason."