We further assert our conviction that no amount of preaching will change the present widespread disregard of the rights of property. These must be enforced in the private life of each man, backed by a supernatural principle. The means which the Catholic Church has provided for the support and assistance of the individual conscience is the confessional. This it is which has created the very sentiment of honesty that is now dying out among us for want of it. Antiquity did not possess this sentiment. The Greeks encouraged stealing and made a god of theft. The Romans acknowledged only the claims of hospitality and the force of law. Our barbarian ancestors grew and thrived upon piracy and pillage. It was no abstract or speculative doctrine which overcame their savage traits and established the new sentiment which condemns successful villany; nor will the present decay of honesty be arrested by any system which divorces it from the institution that has brought it into existence. The most fatal symptom, however, of our lapse into paganism reveals itself in that department of morality in which the struggle is carried on with the most lawless of human passions. The morality of Protestantism offered no assistance to the individual in this conflict between reason and the excesses of that instinct which is at once the most necessary and at the same time the least governable. Developments such as Mormonism and the Oneida Community, the increasing frequency of divorce, and the freedom with which the maxims of the ancient Christian morality are questioned, are sufficient to illustrate the decay of fixed principles of morality. Such results are not strange when we recall the actual conduct of the founders of Protestantism. Nor is it unreasonable to expect a certain amount of laxity in an intellectual movement which constitutes each individual his own supreme judge and teacher of morals; but the worst is that the very source of purity is thoroughly vitiated. In ancient Christianity the laws of chastity were clearly defined, peremptory, and plainly set before the intellect. Modern individualism, having begun by denying man’s responsibility and asserting his necessary depravity, has placed the rule of virtue, not in reason, but in instinct. The old morality was a sentiment based upon dogmatic conviction. The modern Neo-protestantism has nothing upon which to depend for its purity of life except the natural feelings of modesty and shame. The very idea of attempting to subject sexual instinct to reason is scouted as an absurdity by popular writers. The license taken by those whose occupation is to amuse the public every day increases in shamelessness. Art, whether pictorial or dramatic, will not listen to any suggestion of restraint, and the natural sentiment upon which our virtue rests is constantly being weakened.