Page:The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII.djvu/173



THE RIGHT ORDERING OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 167

made to minister to depraved passions. Nor can we look to the future without fear; for new seeds of evil are con- tinually being sown broadcast in the hearts of the rising generation. As for the public schools, it is well known to you that there is no ecclesiastical authority left in them; and during the years when tender minds should be trained carefully and conscientiously in Christian virtue, the precepts of religion are for the most part even left un- taught. Youths somewhat advanced in age encounter a still graver peril, namely, from evil teaching; which is of such a kind as to deceive them by misleading words, instead of filling them with a knowledge of what is true. For many nowadays seek to learn truth by the aid of reason alone, putting divine faith entirely aside; and, through the exclusion of this strength and of this light, they fall into many errors and fail to discover the truth. They teach, for instance, that matter alone exists in the world; that men and beasts have the same origin and a like nature; and some even there are who go so far as to doubt the existence of God, the Ruler and Maker of the world, or to err most grievously, hke unto the heathen, as to His divine nature. Hence the very essence and form of virtue, of justice, and of duty are of necessity distorted. Thus it is that, while they hold up to admiration the high authority of reason, and unduly extol the subtlety of the human intellect, they fall into the just punishment of pride through ignorance of what is of the greatest importance. When the mind has thus been poisoned, the moral char- acter becomes at the same time deeply and substantially corrupt; and so diseased a state can be cured only with the utmost difficulty in this class of men, because on the one side their opinions vitiate the judgment of what is right, and on the other they have not the light of Christian faith, which is the principle and foundation of all righteous- ness.

Daily we see, with our own eyes, as it were, the numer- ous evils that afflict all classes of men from these causes.