Page:Americans (1922).djvu/97

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modern spirit itself into disrepute. They understand and declare that the modern spirit is free and curious. They have failed to recognize that it is also critical and upward striving. When the well-born soul discards the "old clothes" of outworn custom and belief, it seeks instinctively for fresh raiment; but these Adamites would persuade it to rejoice in nakedness and seek no further. They know that man is an animal; but it escapes their notice that man is an animal constituted and destined by his nature to make pilgrimages in search for a shrine, and to worship, till he finds it, the Unknown God. Because they understand so ill the needs and cravings of man, they go about eagerly hurrying him from a predicament into a disaster. They conceive that they have properly performed the emancipative function when they have cut the young generation loose from the old moorings, and set it adrift at the mercy of wind and tide.

It is these partial liberators who produce in our young people that false and bewildering sense of illumination, so eloquently described by John Henry Newman. Says that penetrating analyst of modern libertinism: "When the mind throws off as so much prejudice what it has hitherto held, and, as if waking from a dream, begins to realize to its imagination that there is no such thing as law and the transgression of law, that sin is a phantom, and punishment a bugbear, that it is free to sin, free to enjoy the world and the flesh; and still further,