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542 producing strength of character as the "rough usage" and, at the same time, less dangerous. Secondly, many of those who afterwards disgrace themselves, would have done so even had they never been inside college walls, in many cases much earlier, and perhaps more irreparably. It was college discipline that prevented them from earlier ruin. St. Ignatius used to say: "To have prevented one sin is worth all the troubles and labors of this life." Thirdly, many come to Catholic academies and colleges from public and private schools, where they have acquired such a knowledge of life and of the "ways of the world," that educators are sometimes horrified at discovering what boys of fourteen and sixteen years have heard and experienced. For such boys the quiet and seclusion of a Catholic college and its strict discipline are of the greatest benefit, and the spirit of piety and modesty pervading the whole atmosphere acts upon those poor boys as the healthy, pure air of Colorado and New Mexico upon consumptives. If the spiritual consumption has not progressed too far, two or three years spent in thoroughly Christian surroundings, often restore such youths to complete health of soul and body. There is scarcely a Jesuit teacher who could not recount many instances of boys whose reformation was so thorough, that they became most excellent men. Without this salutary influence their souls would have sunk into the abyss of vice and crime, and their bodies very likely into an early grave. Fourthly, boys who were thus protected in college, and afterwards go astray will in most cases return. Their hearts will not be happy in their pleasures and excesses; for the religious and moral principles im-