Unfortunately there exists in our nature a propensity to evil. Whatever flatters our passions or vicious inclinations we, as a rule, are readier to follow than what is good and virtuous. Hence we find that bad books are more generally read than good ones, and that newspapers wherein religion and morality are outraged, have a very wide circulation. If anything more than bad example tends to propagate vice, it is bad reading. Vice in itself is odious, but when decked out in the false coloring of a cleverly written book it becomes enticing. Young inquisitive people--and young people are generally inquisitive--are tempted. After perusing such a book their horror of vice is much lessened; they take up another, and so, by degrees, their ideas become perverted. Nearly all men agree that it is the familiarity with vice which develops all the immoral and vicious propensities of human nature, and it is this familiarity with the face of vice which is so contagious, and draws so many into the vortex of crime in the large cities while its absence keeps country life so pure and untarnished. It is indeed hard to say which is the more dangerous among books--those which are written professedly against Christ, His Church and His laws, or the furtive and stealthy literature which is penetrated through and through with unbelief and passion, false principles, immoral whispers and inflaming imaginations. To read such books is a moral contagion--it is to imbibe poison--it is certain spiritual death. It is certainly a melancholy reflection, that any such books should be extant among us. It is sad to think that any of the human species should have so far lost all sense of shame, all feelings of conscience, as to sit down deliberately and compile a work entirely in the cause of vice and immorality, which, for anything they know, may serve to pollute the minds of millions, and to propagate contagion and iniquity through generations yet unborn--living, and spreading its baneful influence long after the unhappy hand that wrote it is mouldering in the dust. It is a striking observation made by one of the Fathers of the Church that "as the authors of good books may hope to find their future crown lightened by the degree of wisdom and virtue which their writings impart through successive generations, so the writers of evil books may well dread an increase of punishment in the future world proportionate to the pollution which they spread, and the evil effects which their writings shall produce as long as they continue to be read."