human
This will be still more the case if we descend to a lower social stratum, to the middle classes who embody the great majority of Christian readers. With these mental culture is very defective, and sometimes we find in them an ignorance of the most elementary Catholic instruction that is really astounding. What, at any rate, is undeniable, is that their faith is not truly enlightened either in relation to its object or its grounds. It ordinarily rests on sentiment far more than on reason. They have not taken the trouble to render to themselves an account of the arguments which sustain it; much less still are they able to solve the difficulties which unbelievers suggest against it. Add to this general absence of serious intellectual instruction, the absence not less general of force and independence of character, and the position becomes frightful. In our days it must be confessed the energy of the moral temperament is singularly enfeebled, and never perhaps was the assertion of the prophet, _omne caput languidum_, the whole head is sick, more true than now. Robust and masculine habits seem to have given place to a sort of sybaritism of soul, which renders the soul adverse to all personal effort, or individual labor. See, for example, that multitude which devours so greedily the first books that come to hand. Takes it any care to control the things which pass before its eyes, or to {467} render to itself any account of them by serious reflection? Not at all. The attention it gives to what it reads is very nearly null, or, at best, it is engrossed far more with the form, the style, or the term of the phrase, than with the substance, or ground of the ideas expressed. The mind is rendered, so to say, wholly passive, ready to receive without reflection any impression or submit to any influence.