To what frightful deserts must the writers of modern literature look forward in accordance with such a prediction! The literature of today, light and popular, stately and philosophical alike, teems with immorality and infidelity. It displays itself in every form of poetry and prose, in lectures, essays, histories, and in biblical criticism. There it stands palpable and terrible, like Milton's Death, black and horrible, obstructing the light of heaven, and overshadowing God's fair creation. The press is a Catholic institution: a Catholic invented it; a Catholic first printed books, and the Catholic Church first fostered it. But the enemies of Catholicity have seized it and turned it into an engine of destruction to faith and morals. The newspapers in most cases teem with scandals which absorb the thoughts or arouse the passions. Such reading familiarizes the young with the details of vice, and their better nature is overshadowed by the vicious existences pictured, while the moral strength to resist temptation is slowly but surely weakened. Then there is that inward strife and struggle--that warring of the passions from which no one is free--that tendency to evil which seeks to cast off the salutary restraints of religion, and which has carried down with the current of innate corruption the greater part of mankind. All these things are borne in upon the soul, day by day, and year by year, as though life were to last forever, until the unhappy reader begins to abandon the absolute realities of life and law and to dwell in the house of a diseased imagination like a leper waiting for the moment of final dissolution. What we want thus today is an arousing of the Catholic conscience in this regard, the cultivation of Catholic instincts, and the acquiring of Catholic habits of thought. While the banners of atheism and anarchy are waving throughout Europe, the forces of infidelity and indifference are doing their deadly work at home. The spirit of revolt, born of corruption and bred of disease, has swept across the ocean and finds a resting place nearer home. The enemy has laid hold of a great part of the Press and is using it for the destruction of morality and the perversion of truth. The wells of knowledge and the fountains of truth are being daily and hourly poisoned by means of the current literature. A spiritual pestilence is passing over the earth, and the souls of millions are perishing through its foul agencies.