books outside of class."[1] This advice about deterring pupils from bad reading, is far more necessary now-a-days than at the time when the Ratio was drawn up. How many popular books and magazines, openly, or secretly under the name of "modern science," are advocating principles which in reality are agnostic and irreligious? How many of the novels that flood the literary market, are filled with ill-disguised nastiness? How many books are borrowed by the young people from libraries, which should never be permitted to fall into their hands? God alone knows all the harm done to faith and purity by these books. For many a talented youth, the pride and joy of a happy home, the indulging in filthy novels has been the beginning of a career of sin and crime.
As a rule it is not advisable to say this or that book is bad or indecent; for some boys, either through viciousness or curiosity, will for that very reason read the book. But should an evil publication circulate among the boys, then it should be denounced in the strongest terms.
Boys should be likewise cautioned against overindulgence in the reading of newspapers, especially of the sensational kind. There is no worse school for the mind than such papers. They not unfrequently swarm with infamous advertisements; scandalous happenings, whose very possibility ought to be unknown to young people, are there discussed in a frivolous manner and with the omission of not a single disgusting detail. If these newspapers form the daily mental food of a boy, they will dull and blunt all sense of delicacy and modesty, and disable his mind
- ↑ Reg. com. 8.
