It is well if the youth be endowed with a morally feeble and obtuse nature, which does not detect the difference between make-believe and genuine righteousness of life, and is satisfied with the prevailing mutual deception. If this be the case, all goes apparently well, and such a man will sometimes quietly live on, with his moral consciousness unawakened, till death.
But it is not always thus, especially of late, now that the consciousness of the immorality of such a life fills the air, and penetrates the heart unsought. Frequently, and ever more frequently, it happens that there awakens a demand for real, unfeigned morality; and then begin the inner painful struggle and sufferings, which end but rarely in the triumph of the moral sentiment.
A man feels that his life is bad, that he must reform it from the very beginning, and he tries to do so; but here he is attacked on all sides by those that have passed through a similar struggle and been vanquished. They endeavor by every means to convince him that this reform is quite unnecessary, that goodness does not at all depend upon temperance and self-renunciation, that it is possible for a man, while addicting himself to gluttony, personal adornment, physical idleness, fornication even, to be perfectly good and useful. And the struggle, in most cases, terminates lamentably. The man, either overcome by his weakness, yields to the general opinion, stifles the voice of conscience, distorts his reason to justify himself, and continues to lead the same dissipated life, assuring himself that it is redeemed by faith in the redemption or the sacraments, or by the service of science, the state, or of art; or else he struggles, suffers, and finally becomes insane, or shoots himself.
It seldom happens that, amid all the temptations that surround him, a man of our society understands what has been for thousands of years, and still is, an elementary truth for all reasonable people, namely, that for the attainment of a good life it is necessary, in the first place, to cease to live an evil life; and for the attainment of the higher virtues it is needful, first of all, to acquire the virtue of temperance or self-control, as the heathens
