Education and the Republic, for BQR January, 1874

Art. II.--Education in relation to the stability of the Republic, to public and private virtue, and the moral and social well-being of the peolpe.

The great misery of society is in the fact that the people do not and cannot discriminate, and are carried away by half-truths, or by some particular phase of truth.  The human mind never does or can embrace pure, unmixed falsehood, and it is the true mingled with the false, or truth misapprehended, misaplied, or perverted, that gves currency to error and renders it dangerous.  It was the mingling of the true and the false in reguard to religion that gave to the so-called Reformation its destrustive power, and it is the mingling of the true and the false in reguard to education that vitiates the popular theories of its necessity or utility in developing and sustaining the virtue of the people.

The revolutions of the last century, continued in the present, were and are defended on the ground of the natural perfectibility of man or the race, and and assumotion that error, vice, and crime originate in external causes, come from without, not from within, from a vicious training and a vicious political and social organization.  Godwin, a protestant minister, and husband of Mary Wolstonecroft, maxintains that all the evils that afflict mankind spring fom bad political government, all authority, and the recongnition of pure, unmitigated individualism.  Robert Owen held that our characters are formed, not by us, but for us purely external circumstances amidst which we grow up.  The Internationals adobt the views of Godwin, only they propose to do by violence, by fire and sword, what he proposed to effect only by "peaceful agitation." But, wise Mr. William Godwin, whence came bad governments?  Dear Mr. Owen, whence came these villanous circumstances?  And dear Internationals, as you believe neither in God nor the devil, and hold that human nature in itself is all right, be so good  as to explain to us the orgin of these evils against which you wage such fierce and relentless war.

Now the perfectibility of man is unquestionably true, but that he is indefinitely perfectibile by natural means, causes, or influences, as Cordorcet held, is unquestionably false.  Man's natural progressiviness is determined by his specific nature, which is finite, and has its bounds beyond which it cannot go.  But supernaturally, as regenerated by the Holy Ghost in Christ, man is progressive even to the Infinite.  The perfectibility of man is a Chrisitian doctrine, and can be effected only by supernatural means, or the grace that flows from the Incarnation.  The doctrine of man's perfectibility or progressiveness, save from infancy to adult age, was not known to the Greeks and Romans prior to their conversion. The Gentiles held that men and nations naturally deteriorate with the lapse of time.  But since all these modern revolutions and revolutionists reject the supernatural, scoff at the Incarnation, make a mock of the crucified God, and place all their reliance on simple unassisted nature, thay have no ground for asserting their doctrine of human perfectibility or the natural progressiviness of man; and consequently all political revolutions, social changes, or educational system based on it are found in error, and must turn out worse than failures. as all experience proves.

It is singular that men who deny the supernatural, God, and Providence, and assert only the natural, should hold the sufficiency of nature, and ascribe all the evils they war against to unnatural or extra-natural causes.  If there is only nature, these evils must have originated in nature, therefore from within, not as they pretend, from without.  Religion, we are told one time, is an invention of the priest; but how could there be a priest before there was a religion? The priest presupposes religion.  Another time we are told that tyrannical rules invented religion as a means to enslaving the people and of tyrannizing over them.  But though rulers may abuse an existing  religion, or a religion that has a strong hold on the people, for such a nefarious purpose, yet it is somewhat difficult to conceive how they could invent a religion, or how it could serve such a purpose with a people hitherto absolutely destitute of all religion!  We are told again that man is naturally religious, that religion is a law of his nature, or that he his naturally prone to superstition, and that it is this natural law or dispostion that has created the priest, and that it is to this natural law or disposition that crafty rulers appeal to support their power.  But what has been may be.  If there is only nature, and nature has hitherto produced the evils you seek to get rid of, what assurance have you that it will not, in spite of all efforts to prevent it, continue to produce them?  Do you expect by nature to rise above nature, to get out of nature, or to make for yourselves another nature?  Do you not know that from nature you can get only nature, and that you cannot by your nature more or other it is?  

Now unhappily the system of education in vogue is based on the very principle that underlines all these modern revolutionary and society reform movements, that is, the natural perfectibility of man, or his progressiviness by his own natural forces, or by natural means; that is, based on a falsehood in plain English, a lie, and Carlyle has well said, "the first of all Gospels is, that no lie shall live."  We do not think the age overrates the importance of education, for Solomon has said, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it."  The error is in not discriminating between a false and mischievous education and a true and salutary education.  Education based on the principle that means is naturally perfectiable, and which aims to cultivate the faculties of the soul in relation to the natural order alone, can never be beneficial either to the individual or to society.  Nothing is more false than Geothe's doctrine, on which he inculcates ad nauseam in his "Wilhelm Meister," that theend of education, and therefore of life, is self-culture, or the harmoniousand complete development of all the natural faculties of the sol.  Schiller was no better, for if he aimed at the ideal, as our German friends say, it was only an ideal in the natural order, to be atrained or realized, if realized at all, by our natural faculities.  Bulwer, Lord Lytton, shows, like Schiller, a straining after the ideal, but it is always an ideal of nature, and the religion which he so lavishly introduces in his later novels has in it no supernatural element, and never raises man above nature.  He was-as "Kenelm Chillingly," his last novel, shows-only a wise and accomplished pagan, like Goethe, and had never approached the frontier of the Christian kingdom.  The highest possible culture of our whole nature, intellectual, aesthetic, domestic and social, does not advance us a single step in the way we should go, or toward the true end or destiny of life. Man being perfectible or progressive only by aid of the supernatural principle in which Christianity itself originates can aid us in our lifework, be a good and salutary education, or help us either individually, socially, or politically.

Here may be seen the reason why the Holy Father and the whole Catholic hierarchy reject the educational system now in vogue with non-Catholics, assert the insufficiency of merely secular education, and demand for Catholics a Catholic education. We do not credit all that is said against our public schools by individuals who are unacquainted with them, nor do we attribute to them or to their influence the growing immorality of American society. THe evil is not especially in the schools, but in the paganism, or secularism, which prevades the American community, on which our public school system is based, and which American children imbibe with their mother's milk, and far more effectually from the domestic and social atmosphere in which they are reared than from the public schools themselves. But it is clear that we cannot in these schools give our children a Catholic education, or educate them in relation to the supernatural order, or in relation to the true destiny of the soul. We cannot, in them, train up the child in the way he should go. 

It is not so much what is taught or inculcated in the public schools that renders them objectionable to us Catholics, as what is not and cannot be taught or inculcated in them. They are and must be either sectarian or secular schools, and in either case exclude the true principle of moral and religious life. The education they give or permit to be given is a false, because an unchristian education. He who is not for Christ is against him, and separation from him is death; for he is the only name given amoung men in which there is life for the soul, life for men, or nations. An educationa that omits him as its Alpha and Omega, its beginning and end, is simply an atheistic education, and can train up the young generation only as pure secularists, and to feel that they are free from all moral and social obligation, from all accountablility to any power above themselves, and from all law not imposed by their own will. The stream cannot rise higher than its fountain. An education founded on nature alone, can give nothing above nature, nor do anything to strenghthen ir perfect it; for nature without God, or severed from God, is simply nothing, and we know no philosophy by which nothing better than "death in life."

This is not mere theory or speculation. It follows, indeed, from the invariable and inflexible principles of reason and revelation, but it is confirmed by daily and hourly experience. The public schools are not the sources for the moral corruption becoming almost universal in American society; they are at most only the exponents of the false principles and ideas that generate it. They are impotent to check it, because impotent to infuse any principles of moral and social life. The education given has no power to restrain the evil passions or propensities of men, and leaves them to the unrestrained workings of their fallen nature. These false principles and ideas in which the American youth are educated still more out of school than in it and which sectarian and secular schools, can do nothing to correct, are the real sources of the moral, domestic and social corruption of the American people. This corruption, especially since the late civil war, is hardly less, perhaps even greater amoung the easy classes, than that of ancient Sodom and Gomorrha. From the crown of the head to the soul of the foot, there is no soundness in us. We are one mass of rottenness. There is no longereven common honesty, and no man knows whom he may trust. The leaders of our society are engaged in transfering the money in their neighbors' pockets to their own. Our financial system is as inflated as our currency, and the active governing capital, of the country is invested in paper, and consists in certificates of stock, or evidence or credit, that is to say, of debts which are counted as wealth so long as payment is not demanded. But let payment be demanded, and forthwith there comes a panic; the assests, though ample as paper assests, are found to be unavailable, and banks, bankers, and brokers suspend, and thousands who yesterday thought themselves independant, or amply provided for during life, find themselves reduced to utter poverty and misery. The whole system is a sham, a fraud, and designed solely to enrich a few sharpers by impoverishing the many. The cry of the Exchange is "confidence," that is, "give us your money, and take our due-bills, without asking us to redeem them. Then all will go smoothly." No doubt of it. We know ntothing more disturbing than to be called upon to pay our debts when we lack the wherewith to pay them; it disorders the digestion, and upsets one's equanimity; or when I O U's are discredited, and will no longer pass current. The Exchange is quite right. It is confidence that is wanting. 

Aside from our general financial system , as hollow as a soap-bubble and as unsubstantial, though it reflects with rare brilliancy all the hues of the rainbow, the individual frauds, peculations, and defalcations, in all positions of turst, are becoming alarmingly frequent and on a scale so large as to be almost sublime. The government has its army of revenue-officers, and a  still larger army to keep watch over them. Detectives are everywhere, and everywhere detectives are needed to act as spies on the detectives. Trust can safely be places nowhere. We want keepers for the keepers, who for themselves equally require keepers. If the crimianl can bid the highest the police fail to arrest or to discover him. 

In the whole history of the world. we can find nothing to match the irreverence and impudence of youn America, wheater male or female. The question between modesty and immodesty is, which, upon the whole, pays the best? Children grow up without respect for therir parents, and without filial reverence or affection. They are wiser than the old fogies the law recongnizes as their parents. Husbands and wives, after the honeymoon is over, have little confidence in one another, and neither can do or day anything that is right or proper in the other's eyes. Even the mother loses the maternal sentiment, and seeks, or suffers, the destruction of the fruit of her womb before it is born. SUch, in general terms, is no exaggerated description of our American society, though we would hope not without some, even many, individual exceptions. The Reformation has gone to seed in secularism, and secilarism is now bearing its fruit. We ask, then, how can sectarianism or secularism which produces this state of thing supply a remedy? How can a system of schools based on either, or on the assumption of man's perfectability by natural means and influences alone, do anything to remedy this state of society, or to restore our American people to moral and social health? What new principle or what new power can a purley secular education introduce to counteract the deleterious causes and influences now at work amoung us? It can only accord with secularism, and cultivate and perpetuate the principles that are working our moral and social ruin. 

For these reasons it must be obvious to every reflecting mind that, however powerful our public schools may be in sharpening the wits of their pupils and rendering them efficient for evil, they cannot be relied on to work any moral or religious melioration of society. No melioration can come from nature; any melioration possible must come in the Divine order, from principles and influences which proceed from a source above nature, from the Christian order, the order of Grace, which places before men and nations a supernatural ideal, and while accepting nature elevates it by regeneration in Christ, and infuses into it the supernatural disposition and strength to aspire to that ideal and to realize it in life. The reliance that our statesmen, politicians, philanthropists, journalist, and platform orators pretend to place on our public school systemm whether of the higher or lower grades, to maintain the virtue of the people and the preserve the free and healthy working of the republic, is manifestly and undeniably misplaced. Our most corrput and dangerous classes are our educated and governing classes, and under the influence of the secularism which it represents and fosters, the American people are manifestly deteriorating. The history of Greece and Rome should teach us the impotence of mere intellectual and asthetic culture to save a nation.

Hence the condemnation of purley secular schools, and the neccessity of Catholic education. The only support for private or public virute is religion, is in training the people in those principles which religion is Christianity, the Christian religion, inseparable alike from Christ, the Incarnate Word, and the Catholic Church. The sects are all from the devil; they form no part of the Church of God, and have no lot or part in the Man Christ Jesus, the only Mediator of God and men. None but the Catholic Church cam train up the child in the way he should go, or educate in accordance with the principles of the life and the destiny of man and society. Obviously then the Church is the only competent educator, and only a thorough Catholic education has or can have any vaule for men or nations. There is no use in multiplyig words about it; there is and never has been but one religion, and that is the Catholic religion; there is and never has been but one law of life, the law committed to the Church, to be applied by her to the government of men and nations. These heahten superstitions, these ancient and modern sects, are all vain pretenders, and are as far from being the true religion as man or Satan is from being God. We must dismiss once for all the nation that there is any religion or any possibility of salvation for the soul or for society outside of the Caholic Church. All notions or persuasions of the sort are from Satan, and defamatory of Christ, whose only bride is the church whom he hath purchased with his own precious blood, and who is one all beautiful. She alone knows his will, and can educate in accordance with it. 

Yet we must not hastily conclude that the simple establishment of schools placed under the supervision of Catholics wil of themselves suffice.  The mere fact that a class of boys is taught by a Chatholic instead of a Protestant will work no wonders, if he teaches substantially the same things and in the same spirt.  We have found no worse or more troublesome boys than some of those who attend our parochial schools.  Education alone does not and will not suffice.  Grace must accompany instruction, or instruction even in the faith will not suffice for virtue.  It is littel the lesson of the school-room can effect, if they are counteracted in the home or the streets. Domestic discipline inspired and in no small number of Catholic families this domestic discipline is sadly wanting.  Into the causes of this lamentable lack of domestic discipline we need not now inquire, but there can be no doubt that it is one of the great drawbacks on the effiency of out Catholic schools.  It has been a hard struggle for our Catholic people to pay out of their poverty their quota of th tax to support the public schools, and then to establish and sustain Catholic schools of their own, and we must not be surprised to find them in many respects very defective in their appointments.

But the gravest defects we discover, or think we discover, in our Catholic schools of all grades appear to us to be comprimised in this one grand defect, that education given in them is not thouroughly Catholic.  Most of the textbooks used in out colleges and parochial schools are far from being distinctively Catholic.  The Class Readers which have fallen under our notice, with one or two expections, though containing peices written by Catholics, are hardly better fitted for Catholics than Lindey Murray's series of English Readers, and far unferior in a literanry point of view.  They seem, except the Metropolitan Series, with which we are imperfectly acquainted, to be prepared, with a view of not containing anthing offensive to Protestants, by liberal or namby-pamby Catholics, and with the hope of the publishers of getting thm introduced into the public schools.  We attended, somee years since, an examination of the schools of the Christian Brothers ina foreign city, and we found the text-book in Natural Philosophy in which the pupils were examined, absolutely irreconcilable, at least in our judgment, with Catholic principles.  The properities of matter, as taught to these Catholic children, not only exclude the Catholic dogma of the Real Presence, but are such as a sound philosophy itself rejects.

Indeed in our examinations of the higher education given in Catholic schools, colleges, and universities, we have found, or thought we found, it far from being throughly Catholic.  The Christian schools, colleges, and even the universitiesof mediaeval times, were modelled after, and we may say were based on , the impereal schools of the pagan Rome.  The branches studied were the same, and their traditions were preserved, as they are even yet in the classical colleges on the United States.  For lnguages the Latin and Greek, and for the division of studies the Trivium and Quadrivium are retained.  Christianity in Catholic colleges is superadded, but it does not transform the whole system of imperial education.  Espicially is this true of our higher schools, since the fifteenth century, or the so-called Renaissance.  The pagan classics, in Catholic colleges as in others, have since formed the basis of education given.  Christianity, when introduced at all, has been taught only in juxtaposition with heathenism, as an accessory not as the education imparted.  We do not ask that the Greek and Roman classics be excluded from all part in a liberal education, but we do object to their being made its principal part, or foundation.  Now our Catholic young men graduate, even from our Catholic colleges, with a pagan substructure, merely varnished over or veneered with Catholicity, which a little contact with world soon wears off.  

The Holy See did not, when a few years since the question was raised in France, forbid the study of the pagan classics in Catholic schools, but it did require that care should be taken that the pupils or students should be well grounded or instructed int the Catholic religion.  We have no sympathy with the present infidel movement to abolish the study of the Greek and Roman classics in non-Catholic Colleges, and to introduce the study of the physical sciences in their place.  That would only aggravate the evil we complain of, instead of remedying it, and is part and parcel of that system of educatin which is intended to exclude God and Christ from the school and to make all education purely scular-of the earth earthy.  The world is today father removed from Christian principles than it was in pagan Greece and ROme, and the study of the classics in non-Catholices schools can have only a Catholic tendancy.  The clasics contain the highest religion that is to be found in non-Catholic society.  Abolish them, and non-Catholic education would be thoroughly utilitarian, materialistic, and atheistical.  Yet Catholics do not dram their religion from the classics, and do not need them as a medium of its instruction or mental culture.  Their religion is independent of them, stands on its own bottom, and is infinitely superior to them; but it can only suffer when the pagan classics are, as in the old pagan imperial schools, made its basics and the main structure of education.

Now we do not deny that in all our Catholic colleges religion is distinctly recognized and taught, and taught in all that is necessary for educated laymen in an age or country where heresies are unknown or the faithful are guarded against them by the civil authorities, but not in all that is needed in an age or country where the dominant pubic sentiment is intensely anti-Catholic, where all opinions are legally free, and where everything is questioned, and nothing is held to be settled; or where atheism is accounted a science and blasphemy a virtue.  The graduates from our Catholic colleges come out into the world ill-prepared for the struggle that awaits them, and the majority of them either give up the content of make a miserable compromised with the enemy.  The weakest, the most milk-and-water, and least zealous and efficient Catholics one meets are precisely those who have graduated with high honors from our Catholic colleges.  They are taught the principle dogmas of the Church, but they are not taught the relation of these dogmas to one another, or shown the lightt they throw on each other when taken in their dialectic connection and as a whole.  They are taught the practice of religion, but are not shown the dependence of the practices on the dogmas out of which it grows. 

Worse than all, the graduates go fourth without the philosophical principles that either enable them to grasp religion in its unity and Catholicity, or to defend it logically against the heterodox philosophy of the day.  We have now lying before us a dozen or more text-books, which are or have been used in our colleges, not one of which furnishes principles on which Kant, Fiechte, Schelling, Hegel, Sir William Hamiliton, J. Stuart MIll, Spinoza, or Victor Cousin can be scientifically refuted.  The young Catholic graduate is not armed for the battle he must wage for the faith or fall into doubt or indifferentism.  In point of fact, he is from his training a better classical scholar than a Catholic, and is unable to assign any reason for his faith but that of eternal authority alone, which, without theinternal authority, is hardly satisfactory to any but very devout Catholics.  Under the system of education still continued in our Catholic colleges with slight modifications, we have seen the educated classes of all old Catholic nations become infields, Callicans, revolutionists, or so-called Liberal Catholics, a polite name for secularists, or those who would divorce society from religion, or the state from the church, and under pretece of supporting liberty and social progress, really exert all their influence in favor of Caesarism, or Bismarckism.  What sort of Christian education can the Italian and Spanish revolutionists have recieved that permits them to make war on the Pope, the clergy. the religious orders, the Catholic religion itself, and still to profess, perhaps to believe, themselves Catholics?  And these really aint-Catholic leaders, like Cavour, Minghetti, Castelar, and Figueras, have all been trained in Catholic schools and colleges.  It is all very well to ascribe the fact to the perveristy of human nature or to satanic influences, but may it not, in part at least, be ascribed to the defective or half pagan education given in our schools and college?

Then there is in our judgment another grave mistake in not educating children and youth for what is to be their state of life.  We have heretofore touched upon this, but its importance will justify us in treating it again.  We take France before the revolution of 1789.  She had too large a number of liberally educated men, raised by their education above the state of the laboring and industrial classes, unfitter by it for the humble pursuits of their parents, and unable to obtain an honest living by any career opened to them by their education.  The learned professions, even the clerical, to which few of them, by the way, had any vocation, were crowded, over-rowded; the government could absord but comparatively few of them in its offices; without and patrimonial estates to fall back upon, discontentented, hungry, closed in on every side, they became an educated mob, whose only chance to gratify their taste, or even obtain a bare subsistence, was to agitate for a revolution, and seek a general bouleversement of the state and society; not otherwise cold they gain a position and a livelihood.  Revolutions are never made by those who have a career open tot hem in thich bread can be honestly obtained.  The leaders of the Internationals are not ignorant mechanics laborers, but educated and desperate men.  Italy and Spain may be cited as examples of the sad effects of educating children and youth out of their normal state in life, as may also Catholic Canada.  It is the principal cause of the political insurrections and revolutionists, and which is so fruitful in crimes, and, as physicans who have studied the question say, of insanity and suicide.

We do not reguard the multiplication of Catholice colleges, even in our own country, designed to give what used to be called a "liberal education," as a cause for gratulation, and we cannot, and of the highest class, say one for the cis-Alleghany region, one for the trans- Alleghany region extending to the Rocky Mountains, the other for the Pasific slope and mountain terriorities, would be a great gain.  It would release to be missionaries so much needed, a large number of priests now shut up in colleges, employed in teaching and educating the children for a state far above that of their parents, which  can be little else than a source of misery to them and evil to society.  We think, regard to female education, it is a great misteak on the part of our teaching communities of women to make an sccompllished lady of the daughter of a washerwoman or keeper of a dramshop, or to give to any of their pupils habits, taste, and wants which unfit them for the cirlce in which they were born, in which alone their parents can move, and out of which the daughters themselves, except in rare instances, cannot hope to marry.  We know no class more to be pitied, or who are doomed to greater misery through life, than the sons and daughters of the laboring classes, who, if they have no vocation to religion, are, so to speak, declassed, by their education.  We know nothing worse, even for parents, than to feel that their sons and daughters are trained for a higher rank in the social scale than their own, and are too knowing and too refined for them.  It kills all domestic discipline, destroys all mutual confidence between parents and children, makes the children tyrants over their parents, and, if the parents assert any parental authority, it makes home a sort of hell upon earth.  Children should be trained to live and perform their duties in the sphere of life in which their parents live and move, never, as a rule, for a higher social sphere; though in a world like ours, where little is permanent, no harm can come to the children of the upper classes from being trained to habits of industry or useful labor, but possibly, in the vicissitudes of life, no little benefit.

Very full religious instruction and training of the children of all classes is a neccessity, and should never be neglected, if possible to be given. But religion teaches is, whatever our lot, if we have food, clothing and shelter, though of the coarsest kind, therewith ti be content. We cannot but think that "the masses," as this materialistic age says, were better educated, though unable "to read, write, or eipher," in those ages and nations when they had a fixed costume which never changed its fashion from generation to generation, and the peasant or the citizen never dreamed of going out of his class, but was as firmly wedded to it as the nobleman was to the class of nobles, than they are now, when the hierarchical classification of society is abolished, and a universal sturggle ranges to get up and to pull or keep down. We as a Catholic honor the pooe, and hold ourselves bound to do all in all power for their benefit both here and hereafter, but we do not believe it for their benefit to educate or assist them out of their class. We ourselves sprung from them but by our own personal efforts; yet never have we known in the life of letters the peace and contentment, the joy and happieness we experienced as a day-laborer, though in the roughest and hardest species of labor. Our suffering and our sin began when the future reviewer and author aspired to a station reputed above that to which he had the happiness to be born. How gladly, we have often since felt, would we return to the humble condition of our childhood and youth, and exchange all the honors of the orator, the author and reviewer for the peace and security of the woodchopper, the mechanic, or the ordinary farm laborer, aspiring only to perform well his day's work. It is a great mistake to say that the wealthy are the favored classes, though perhaps the class most to be pitied are those who have all the habits, tastes, and wants only wealth can satisfy and yet have no wealth, those who constitute the class Carlyle calls "gigmanity disgigged," those who are educated to ride in a gig, and have no gig in which to ride. We are told in life of that great saint, St, Thomas of Villanova that these were the special objects of his compassion, whom he studied in his exhaulstless charity to relieve without wounding their sensibility or their shrinking delicacy. These suffer a thousand-fold more than the poor of the laboring classes. 

The nobility have great vices and crimes, but they have also in all countries and ages great virtues, and not seldom prove themselves capable of grand penitences and grand expiations, and it is worthy or remark that their class has furnished to the Church the great majority of the saints in the calendar. But the most wretched class of all, and the most barren of good works in all ages and nations, is the so called middle class, who are the chief worshippers of Mammon, engrosed in money-making or the accumulation of wealth. They are the chief suporters of heresy, and the bitterest enemies if the religion of Christ. Their conversion is, in modern society at least, wellnigh hopeless, and they are the class that now governs the world, especially our own country, since the success of the abolition fanatics. Hence the great difficulty in the way of converting the ruling people to the Catholic religion, which teaches, "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon." They are inborn Protestants.

But to return to our subject; we must remember that it is the smallest part of the education of children and youth that is given or acquired in the school-room or the college hall. Much more is acquired in the family, in the streets, in social intercourse, and from the general tone of thought and manners of the country. The Children of Catholic parents breathe the atmosphere breathed by the children of non-Catholic parents, and after a little while become assimilated to them, even in their physical features. We cannot, let us do our best, educate the rising generation in schools and colleges much above the average standard of the adult generation. Educatoin itself has no reforming or progressive power. Its office is conservative, and it serves chiefly to perpetuate, and to perpetuate the errors as well as the truths and virutes of the  generation that educates. This law is as effective in a Catholic as in a non-Catholic community. In Catholic schools, as in non-Catholic schools, the children of Catholics, without other influences than education itself can exert, may fall below, but can hardly rise above the average faith and virute of the Catholic community to which they belong. 

Hence we cannot ecpect Cathoic schools and colleges themselves to correct the defects even in Catholic education. The great mass of men, educated or not, are men of routine. Schoolmasters and professors follow the beaten track, and educate as they have been educated, nor is it desirable that they should do otherwise, or become innovators. The correction must come from an authority above the school or the college, and in subordination to which either must educate. But even authority, however elearly and distinctively it speaks, cannot correct the evil at once. The educators must be themselves educated up to the standard of the reform to be introduced, and as these comprise the parents and the whole Catholic people, the education of parents or the people must precede the introduction of and effective reforms in the schools and colleges. The pagan element, condemned in the Syllabus, and repudiated by the Council of the Vatican, must be eliminated from the intelligence and manners of the Catholic people, before it can be eliminated from the schools. 

This work of educating the people and of eliminating from their minds and manners the paganism which has long created in the intelligence and habits of Catholic populations a dualism which has resulted in the destruction of Christendom, is the work of the bishops and clergy, aided in some feeble measure by the Catholic press, if really and thoroughly Catholic. The education of the young is also their charge, and should go on pari passu with the education of the people: but for ourselves er hold the education of the people the more important of the two, for if not thoroughly grounded in the principles of Catholicity, and thoroughly emancipated in their intelligence, habits, and manners from paganism, they will neutralize the best training childhood and youth can receive in the school or college. We asserted as much nearly forty years ago, and observation, reflection, and experience have tended only to confirm it. The new generation can be educated only by the old, which can only reproduce its own image and likeness.  Hence nations that have not the Church, and have no supernaturally endowed body of instrctors, can never be progressive nations, and the nation that ceases to be progressive begins to decline, and if left to itself is sure to fall.  All modern nation, save in the mterial order, if not even in that, are deteriorating, and only those in which the Catholic faith survives have and recuperative energy.  The others, like the great Pagan empires of antiquity, must eventually fall, and when they fall, they fall to rise no more.

We agree with our non-Catholic countrymen that education is necessary to save or to sustain the republic, but we do not admit that a sectarian or secular education, the only education non-Catholics can give, will answer or even aid that purpose.  Such education is worse than none, and the more universal and complete you make it, the greater the danger to the state and to society, as all modern experience proves.  Man and society are created and exist for God, and neither can forget him and nelet his law, and live.  "In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."  Non-Catholic nations have no true life, only a life in death, as well the case with the acient Gentile nations, who apostatized from GOd, their creator.  Only Catholic nations have any real life, or any hope for the future.  Only thoroughly Catholc education of both old and young can secure their safety, for no other is in accordance with the moral or divine order of the universe.  The universe is created and ordered to the glory of the Word, as is well maintained by Frederick Schlegel, and virtually by Bossuet in his Discourse of the Universal History, and, we may add, the glory of the Word, or Logos, is in the Incarnation in the Catholic Church, of which the successor of Peter in the See of ROme is the visible head.  It is only through this Church that GOd is or can be glorified, or safety for men or nations be secured.

Obviously, then, it is only a thorough Catholic education, such as only the Catholic Church can give, rendered efficient by her sacraments, that the eternal salvation of the soul, or sustain the republic.  If grace supposes nature, nature needs grace, and is impotent without it.  THe natural is for the supernatural, and not for itself, and therefore never suffices for itself.  Reason is insufficient for reason, and if not supplemented by revelations, is a blind guide, may lead us into difficulties, but is impotent to extricate us from them; for it was never intended to operate without the supernatural revelations, of which the Church is the only depositary.  The Church alone, the Spouse ofChrist the Lord, has the secret of life, knows the purpose of creation, and can educate men and nations for its fulfilment, or serve as the medium of light and strength to enable them to fulfil it, and attain to their supreme good.

Catholic nations, through perversity, or even an education more or less defective, may decline, and fall very low, as we see in the present condition of Catholic Europe, but as long as the seed of faith remains, they retain a reuperative power, and have in the Church all the means and influences necessary to their revival or restoration.  We, therefore, without believing our Catholic schools perfect or holding them alone sufficient to keep, in a community like ours, even our Catholic population thoroughly Catholic, support them as the only Christian schools in the country, and hold that the education they give is the country, and hold that the education they give is the only education that can in the slightest degree contribute to the safety of the republic.  There is no less short-sightedness than injustice in refusing us our proportion of the public schools.

But in conclusion we must add that education in the ordinary sense of the word, while it is necessary to preserve the children of Catholic parents to the Church, will not suffice to save our daily deteriorating republic.  Nothing will save it but the conversion of the people to Catholicity.  The blaspheming heretic, the self-conceited infidel, puffed up with the pride of his pretended science, may treat this assertion with derision, but we know whereof we affirm, and in humility, not in pride, we tell them that they have nothing to teach us.  We believe that this country will yet be converted.  Catholicity has the right to it, for it was first discovered by Catholics, and taken possession of in the name of the Cross.  But our reliance for its conversion is on missions and the missionary orders, who strengthen the faithful, quicken their zeal, and recall them to their duties.