However, if we examine the Canadian scene closely enough, we can see signs of this physical and spiritual rot settling into a number of our Canadian urban centres with a troubling spill-over into many of our more rural areas.
Long, continuous periods of peace and prosperity have always brought about the physical, mental and moral deterioration of the individual.
When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the religion of amulets and holy places and priestcraft: Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes
A nation dies culturally and spiritually first. Its money and its army are the last to go, but go they do once the light goes out in the nation's soul.
Until self-effacing men return again to spiritual leadership, we may expect a progressive deterioration in the quality of popular Christianity year after year till we reach the point where the grieved Holy Spirit withdraws - like the Shekinah from the temple.
We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without the means to measure our descent.
For twenty-seven years I was witness to the spiritual deterioration of my own father, watching day after day how everything human in him left him and how gradually he turned into a grim monument to his own self.
When nations are to perish in their sins, 'tis in the Church the leprosy begins.
Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away. It is the putrefaction of stagnant life, and is remedied by exercise and motion.
