hates effort?

He lived amongst rough men, men used to the ways of camps and the
speech of soldiers. Yet he not merely kept his own lips" clean, but
he shrank, as from a blow, from every coarse or indecent speech in
others. He did not go around correcting people. He was too sensible
for that. He was not a prig or a prude. But he knew, as we know,
that vile speech is hateful to God; and, as so many of us do not do,
he set his face against it.

Did that cost him no effort? Had he no human respect to fight
against? Think of how many times you may have grinned, cowardly, at
a gross remark or shady story of a comrade - because you were not
fighter enough to resent it! And then give this Stanislaus, who did
resent, credit for his stouter courage, his more manly spirit.

His biographers tell us that he was simply' free from temptations
against purity. That does not mean what many may think it means:
that he was physically unlike other boys, that he had no animal
desires, that he had nothing to fight against. It means that he was
such a magnificent fighter that he had won the battle almost from
the start. It means that he was not content, as so many of us are,
with merely pushing a temptation a little aside, and then looking
around in surprise to find it still there. He was like a skillful
boxer, who wards off every blow of his adversary, so that he goes
through the contest absolutely untouched. He watched, as we are too
lazy to watch; he kept out of danger, where we foolishly run into
it; he did not wait until temptation had set upon him and nearly
battered him down before he began to resist; he saw it coming afar
off, just as we can if we look out, and he met it with a rush that