The education of boys

Class ^

Book__

J^r

Copyright lf_

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT.

THE EDUCATION
OF BOYS

BY

CONDE B. PALLEN,Ph.D.,LL.D.

NEW YORK
THE AMERICA PRESS

1916

\CA*6

nihil PUstat

REMEGIUS LAFORT, S.T.D.

Censor

HmjJrimatu*

JOHN CARDINAL FARLEY

Archbishop of New York

March 30t 1916

Copyright, 1916, by
The America Press

0.9

5 1916

©CLA431519

FOREWORD

These letters on the Christian educa-
tion of boys were published serially some
years ago in the Dolphin, an admirable
magazine for the Catholic laity, whose
brief but useful career was due to the
scholarly zeal of the Reverend H. J. Heu-
ser. It is with Father Heuser's kind per-
mission, that the series is here reproduced
in a more permanent form.

I believe that the letters are more per-
tinent now than when they first saw the
light in the pages of the Dolphin. The un-
happy practice of sending Catholic boys to
non-Catholic educational institutions has
been waxing rather than waning. I know
the ancient excuse that there are exceptions,
i. e., circumstances which justify the prac-
tice on the part of some parents, but when
exceptions cease to prove the rule and be-
gin to be the rule among a certain type of

iii

iv FOREWORD

Catholics, it should give us pause. Per-
sonally I have never met an exception that
would bear analysis. When boiled down
to the real ingredients, parental weakness
or parental ambition proves generally to
be the residue. Either the boy determines
the choice out of his own immaturity and
ignorance of danger, or the parent weighs
a pseudo-worldly advantage over against
the spiritual hazard and tips the beam
against the Faith. If there be real excep-
tions, they are like the stories of the man-
eating shark and the sea-serpent. I do not
deny their possibility, but I am prone to
skepticism.

When I look at results I see disaster as
the rule. It is a rare and extraordinary boy
who gets a non-Catholic education and re-
mains stanch all through and always.
Either the Faith is entirely lost or becomes
so diluted that it disappears entirely in
the second generation. As for the coun-
ter-charge, sometimes advanced by the ad-
vocates of the exceptions, that even some
Catholic boys who have received a Catholic
education, abandon their Faith in after

FOREWORD v

years, I can only say that this unfortu-
nately happens sometimes; not, however,
because they have received a Catholic edu-
cation, but in spite of their Catholic edu-
cation. Some well-trained boys afterwards
become criminals in spite of their excellent
home and school training. It would be
foolish to advocate the abolition of the Ten
Commandments, because some people, who
have been reared under their discipline,
refuse in later life to observe them.

The singular notion is sometimes enter-
tained that education is like a man's ap-
parel, an external adornment, whose fash-
ion constitutes its value. Education is not
only more than a man 's apparel, it is even
more than his skin ; it belongs to the mar-
row of his being. It is the making of his
character, and has to do with the immortal
and most intimate part of man's nature, his
soul. The Church has always understood
this, wherefore she fully realizes that re-
ligion is educative and education is relig-
ious, and that the natural fusing of the two
in one makes a man to be what he ought to
be, a completely balanced rational animal.

vi FOREWORD

This is the ground I take in these letters.
It is the only sane ground even for tem-
poral salvation. Even the ancient pagans
understood it, and when they ceased to
practise it their civilization fell into decay
and they perished.

Conde B. Pallet*.

CONTENTS

PAGE

iii

Foreword

I. The Flowing Tide .... 9

II. Our Eesponsibilities as Parents . . 16

III. The Vital Principle in Education . 24

IV. Not a Loss 35

V. On the Source of Eesignation . . 39

VI. On Disciplining Young Children . 43

VII. A Sweeping Charge and a Eebuttal 50

VIII. Truth versus Knowledge as the End

of Education 59

IX. Specialism in Education ... 68

X. Electivism in Education . . .76

XI. Utilitarianism in Education and a

Classical Flourish ... 84

XII. The Object of the Classics in Edu-
cation 90

XIII. Education and Taste .... 95

XIV. The World versus God in Education 101

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

I

The Flowing Tide.

My Dear Henry:

You may be sure that I was delighted to
hear from you and learn all about you and
yours after so long an interval. It will,
indeed, afford me much pleasure to resume
our long interrupted correspondence, bro-
ken off, I know not how, so many years ago.
We easily drift apart on the currents of
life : distance, diversity of pursuits and in-
terests soon divide us, as we each seek our
several ways in the divergent avocations
that open up before us. But I am sincerely
glad to get word from you again, and re-
new those old ties which held us so closely
together in the freshness of our youth and
the buoyancy of our early hopes, when life

9

10 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

was very fair to look upon. As we get on
in years we learn to appreciate more fully
the affection of sincere friendship. When
we look with the sober eyes of experience
through the long vista of the past, how
clearly we see what might have been, and
realize how carelessly we have allowed
much that is precious to drift idly away
from us. I have often thought of this in
regard to our early friendship, and have
been moved to write you in the hope of its
renewal, but deferring action for one or
another reason at the time, I allowed the
thief, procrastination, to steal away the
golden resolve.

Though not hearing from you, I have
heard of you several times in recent years.
Once through our old college mate, Jack
Hutton, who called upon me some two
years ago as he was passing through my
city. He gave me a very glowing account
of your prosperity and success; how high
you stand in your community and how sub-
stantially you have advanced in the affairs
of life. I was about to write you then,
but I was called away on an important

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 11

business matter to another city, and so
again deferring, the delay proved fatal.
But now that you have written, I am more
than glad to bridge our long silence and re-
sume the familiar intercourse of "auld
lang syne."

You write me, you say, with a very defi-
nite purpose and on a very vital matter,
about which you are somewhat perplexed.
You are right, my dear friend; nothing
could be of greater moment or fraught with
higher responsibilities than the question
of the education of your boys. Indeed, I do
not know what concern in a father's life
carries with it such tremendous duties. I
have often trembled in my own soul upon
thinking of the far-reaching results of a
father's direction and guidance in this af-
fair of education. Into our hands are com-
mitted the destinies of precious souls ! It
is a fearful trust ! What a burden we take
upon our shoulders when we accept the
cares of paternity ! I, for one, would fairly
stagger under the heavy responsibilities
which it entails, did I not feel and appre-
ciate the aids and alleviations of our Faith.

12 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

As it is, the Church is so definite in her
teaching in this regard, so insistent, so un-
mistakably clear, and so helpfully direc-
tive, that I have but to follow her wisdom
to make the burden sweet and the yoke
light.

By this I do not, of course, mean that the
Church takes the affair off my hands. Not
at all; she illuminates and guides my re-
sponsibilities, but leaves them mine none
the less. In fact, she emphasizes my re-
sponsibilities by a tremendous enforce-
ment. She declares that upon the proper
fulfilment of my paternal duties in this af-
fair of education depends in great measure
my own salvation; neglect here is at the
peril of my own soul! The greater the
dangers and the temptations around us,
the more ardent, the more zealous, the
more outspoken, the more pressing does
she become in prompting, urging and di-
recting us, nay, more, in imperatively de-
manding our obedience, where she sees we
would easily succumb to the dread peril of
recreancy under the stress of seductive and
constant temptations.

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 13

For you must have realized, as I have,
the vast and unremitting forces in our day
and country, which are constantly pulling
against the anchorage of the Faith in the
hearts of our people. The social and polit-
ical traditions around us are not rooted in
the Faith; our present surroundings are
distinctly un-Catholic and are becoming,
day by day, more secularized, until the life
about us has become practically desuper-
naturalized, if I may use the expression.
In our relations with our fellow-men, the
vast majority of whom have not the faint-
est idea of what the Faith is, nay, rather,
oftener know it only as it has been de-
formed in their eyes by the calumnies and
misrepresentations of long generations of
bigoted hostility, there are ten thousand
filaments of ignorance, prejudice, and mis-
understanding, that are woven around us
to hold us down bound and gagged, as Gul-
liver by the Lilliputians, until we too often
passively submit under the false impres-
sion that our case is helpless. In our intel-
lectual life we take the impress of current
literature, back of which are centuries of

14 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

anti-Catholic tradition. As yon know,
English literature is anything but Catholic
in its spirit and its attitude. Witness the
books, the magazines, the newspapers we
are ever reading. Now you cannot fail to
realize that this constant inflow of un-
Catholic, not to say anti-Catholic, matter
has the effect of setting the mind in its di-
rection, and so turning the soul, indeed
very subtly, away from the Faith.

Eemembering all this, note our very nat-
ural desire to succeed in life, to achieve,
each in his particular avocation, what the
world calls success. It is human nature, of
course, to bend to circumstances, to
adapt itself to conditions and assimilate
out of its environment all that will go to
make up its temporal well-being. This I
say is human nature, and human nature,
when left to stand by itself, is a very weak
brother.

Considering all these things, then, you
see that we have much to contend against ;
that we are not going with, but against,
the stream, if we are true to our Faith ; that
we need extraordinary strengthening with-

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 15

in to resist successfully the foe without,
and, what I most especially want to urge
as a conclusion, that we require, as our
prime need, a thorough training of our
powers, spiritual and mental, in Catholic
truth and discipline to make us capable,
active and valiant soldiers in the inevitable
combat which we have to face ; in short, that
we require a thorough Catholic education
to hold the Faith against the tremendous
odds that confront us. We need to be
steeped, saturated in Catholic principles,
until our mental and moral fiber partakes
of the nature of that upon which it feeds.

But I have gone beyond the limits of
your patience as well as of my time, and
have not directly answered your question :
Do you think I am in conscience bound to
send my boys to a Catholic school? I have
laid down some considerations which may
serve you as a premise, but must reserve
for another letter, the particular circum-
stances in your case as you put it. Do not
delay in answering.

Yours sincerely,

C. B. P.

II.

Oub Eesponsibilities as Pakents.

My Dear Henry:

So you think that I was dealing in mere
abstractions in my last letter to yon; "the-
orizing in the air, ' ' yon are pleased to call
it. No, my dear friend ; I was simply gener-
alizing the very concrete conditions that
prevail around ns. Eead your morning pa-
per, the current magazine on your library
table ; visit the nearest non-Catholic school ;
talk with your next-door neighbor, and dis-
cover, if you can, the faintest trace of the
spirit of positive religion. Eeflect on your
past experience and tell me if you have not
usually found in all these sources an utter
ignoring of religion. Is not the dominant
principle in all of them what we call secu-
larism, i. e., the banishment of God from
the affairs of life?

16

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 17

What I wished to convey to you by my
picture was, that we are living in untoward
social conditions, whose trend is away from
the Faith, and, unless we are ourselves vig-
orous in the truth of positive, supernatural
religion, we will surely be dislodged from
our foundations. It is the weakness of hu-
man nature to go with the tide, and it is
only the strong swimmer that can buffet
the flood triumphantly. You yourself are
a witness to what I say; I speak frankly,
for you have asked me not to spare candor.
Moreover, this is a matter touching the
welfare of souls, in which friendship would
prove false indeed, if it were disloyal to
the highest interests involved.

Now the very putting of your question
shows that you have been influenced by the
un-Catholic spirit of the times. You will
no doubt chafe at what I say, even grow
indignant, accuse me of being narrow and
censorious, and aver that you are just as
good a Catholic as I am. Far be it from
me to judge you. But have you not ap-
pealed to me, and in so doing do you not
force me into a critical attitude ? Am I not,

18 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

therefore, bound, under the sacred obliga-
tion of an honest friendship, to point out
to yon the dangers of your position when I
apprehend your peril? I play the censor
but to save my friend.

You tell me that I am dogmatic, just as
I was in my college days. You are frank ;
so am I. You know me and yet you come
to me. I surmise that you are looking for
a positive statement ; that in your own se-
cret thought you are seeking for a very
positive justification of a stand you hesi-
tate to take. I shall try to satisfy you in
spite of the irritation you may feel. The
cant of the day flouts dogmatism ; contemp-
tuously labels it an ignorant survival of
medievalism. In religion as in everything
else, dogmatism, we are told, is out of fash-
ion. We must be liberal, broad-minded,
granting to every one his or her opinion
without trammel or restriction from au-
thority. This is true enough in the region
of mere opinion; but when we are on the
solid ground of positive truth, it is rank
falsehood and folly. The vogue of the
modern shibboleth lies in the uncertainty

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 19

and infidelity of modern thought. The un-
belief of today, having no certainty of its
own, furiously denies to others what it
lacks in itself. In the question we are dis-
cussing, there is neither uncertainty nor
mere opinion. I speak positively because I
know and do not simply opine. I am dog-
matic, that is, positive, because the prin-
ciples upon which I stand are positive, be-
cause the logical process through which I
move is positive, and because the conclu-
sion which follows is positive.

Let us put the matter clearly. You ask :
Am I bound in conscience to send my boys
to a Catholic school? I answer, yes. But,
you plead, in my particular circumstances
am I so bound? Before entering into the
details of your case, let us consider the
question broadly, and after we have found
our general bearings, we can consider the
special conditions, which, you urge, would
tolerate an exception in your case. I put
the matter in this way, because I notice
that there is a weakness in human nature,
which leans to the side of the exception and
not the rule. I have seen parents fix their

20 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

eyes so attentively upon the particularities
of the case, that they go blind to the prin-
ciples. The concrete so easily distracts
us from the contemplation of the abstract.

I shall begin in a very simple way by
asking in the words of the catechism:
"Why did God make us?" and answer, as
the catechism does: "To know Him, to
love Him, and serve Him in this world that
we may be happy with Him forever in the
next." You smile, perhaps, and tell me
that you know this well enough; that you
have been taught this from the very begin-
ning. Obvious enough, indeed, is this fun-
damental truth to a Catholic. But are its
consequences so evident? Do we always
realize in the practice of life all its con-
clusions? What does it mean in the con-
crete? That all things are to be directed
to that end ; that nothing escapes the ethi-
cal government of that end. Do you not
see how simply the broad principle of the
question resolves itself?

You are given children that they may
save their souls by learning to know, love,
and serve God, under your guidance, direc-

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 21

tion, and training. That end posited as the
one essential truth, for there is no latitude
here for mere opinion, your chief concern,
your peremptory duty is to bring up your
children with a view to that end. Now the
bringing up of children means the educa-
tion of children. Education, as you know,
is the development and training of all the
human powers and faculties. Does not this
begin as soon as the faculties start acting
under disciplinary guidance, as soon as the
mind learns to appreciate the difference
between this and that? We commence to
guide our children at a very tender age in
one way rather than in another, and seek
to give them a bent toward right things and
good things and away from wrong and bad
things. You have observed this in your
own family life, and acted upon this nat-
ural parental disposition. Now in the mat-
ter of religious training and instruction do
you not commence to educate at once? As
soon as the child learns to lisp, it is taught
its prayers, and told in a simple way, suit-
ed to its tender understanding, about heav-
enly things and the truths of Eevelation.

22 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

Is not the essential difference between
good and bad conduct placed before it by
holding before its mind the Divine sanc-
tion of rewards and punishments? Is not
the Catholic child given as the exemplar
of its conduct the Divine Child? We thus
train and educate our little ones into vir-
tuous habits. We recognize the necessity
of all this from the very beginning, be-
cause we appreciate the impressionability
and the pliability of the childish mind. All
this is education, the informing of the mind
by truth, the development of the faculties,
the training and discipline of the will into
habits of virtue, and the consequent for-
mation of character. We insist upon all
this, and would count ourselves moral mon-
sters if we failed to impart it to our chil-
dren.

What underlies our course of action
here? Why, that simple question and its
answer which I have just quoted from the
catechism. We realize our responsibility,
that highest and first responsibility, to
lead our children to God. We realize this
very keenly in the first stage ; why not as

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 23

keenly in subsequent stages when larger
dangers and graver temptations beset the
path of those whom we most love and
whose eternal welfare is our chief solici-
tude?

Sincerely yours,

a b. p.

HL

The Vital Pbietciple in Education.

My Dear Henry:

You tell me that I simply clubbed you
in my last, and that I must expect you to
feel sore and resentful after the drubbing.
"Well, I am not surprised. I did not min-
imize the situation, because I saw that you
had. Our bout is in earnest, though not
in rancor. I hope to force you to a proper
conclusion, because I know you to be an
educated man, who can appreciate a logical
process from an evident premise. I shall
not take your hard knocks amiss, for I can
give as well as take, and promise myself to
force the battle to a definite result.

I have laid down as my premise, what
you admit, that the end of man is God. You
also agree with me, that our life here is a
probation for the hereafter, and that the

24

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 25

whole course of life should be determined
by its final end. Now, I hold and urge
that as education is a most important, in-
deed the most important, phase in the
process of our temporal development, it
should be vitally informed by that princi-
ple. This you seek to distinguish. I see
that you have not forgotten the dialectics
of our philosophical disputations at col-
lege. You tell me that education has also
its secular ends and purposes ; that in great
measure much in an educational curricu-
lum admits of no formal religious element
at all ; that in our day and under our social
conditions, when Church and State have
been sharply separated, and modern life
in so many of its aspects has become en-
franchised— surely a queer term for a
Catholic to use — from ecclesiastical super-
vision, we must distinguish between sec-
ondary and subordinate ends, which are
often in themselves indifferent, and the
final end, which, though the ultimate norm,
is too remote to have a vital bearing and
determining influence upon merely secular
affairs. At any rate, you say, under the

26 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

changed conditions of our times, religion,
by other than formal pedagogical means,
can supply the lack of its own proper spirit
in modern educational life by home-train-
ing and the Sunday-school.

The point you here urge as a plea for an
indifferent (secular) education is the very
reason I advanced in my first letter for the
necessity of a religious education. It is the
appalling spread of secularism in all de-
partments of modern life, its subtle dan-
gers and insidious temptations, its vast and
persistent influence, exercised in a thou-
sand remote and indirect ways, that should
rouse us to our own peril and to the neces-
sity of extraordinary measures for the
preservation of the Faith. In short, it is
that very distinction so sharply drawn be-
tween religion and the affairs of life, be-
tween the Church and practical human liv-
ing, as the world now conceives it, that
forces upon us the need of a thoroughly
positive Catholic education. If we want to
hold our own we must protect our own
against the assault of the enemy, whether
it come disguised or open. Secularism is

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 27

that enemy, and its blight is deadly. To
divorce practical life from the considera-
tion of its eternal end is virtually to deny
that end; it is practical atheism; it is to
make God an abstract theory, a speculative
nothing, and not that living God in whom
we live and move and are. So much for
the general bearing of your argument ; let
us go to the particulars.

You tell me that education has its secu-
lar side; that its immediate object is to
prepare and equip the child for the practi-
cal struggle of life ; to sharpen and develop
his intelligence ; to form his character in a
practical way, that he may be the better
able to make his way in the world. This
is true, but it is not the whole truth. The
general purpose of education is to make a
stronger man in all respects. In your way
of putting it, you ignore a consideration
that is vital; education should not only
make a man stronger in his mental capaci-
ties and abilities and in his resourceful-
ness to cope with the difficulties of life, for
this is your meaning of character, but it
should make the truer man, the righteous

28 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

man, i. e., the man morally stronger; not
only the man who can make his way in the
world, but the man who can make his way
against the world under the stress of its
temptations, its deceits, and its snares. In
other words, there is an ethical side to ed-
ucation, which is paramount and deter-
mines its true scope. Education may be
secular in its immediate ends, but it must
be moral in its ultimate end. It must, in-
deed, fit a man for the practical uses of
life; but it must fit him in a certain way.
Education, in reality, is a fundamental
training for conduct. Ethics, as you know,
concerns conduct ; and conduct, or rational
action, as you well know, is always meas-
ured by a final end. The norm of human
acts is always fashioned upon man's con-
ception of his final end. The man who
looks upon this life as the be-all and end-all
will have an entirely different norm or
moral standard from the man who finds the
law of life founded in an eternal existence
hereafter. The man who looks upon time
as the vestibule of eternity, and realizes
that his every act is charged with immortal

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 29

issues, sees life from a standpoint rad-
ically different from that which, he has
fashioned for himself who regards the sum
of existence to be exhausted in the limits
of time. Now, as education ultimately has
to do with life as conduct, it must have an
ethical basis. It will be postulated either
upon the theory that life is merely secular,
beginning and ending in time, or upon the
theory that life is immortal, beginning in
time and enduring through an eternity of
misery or happiness as the result of con-
duct here. As you see, these two theories
are sharply opposed. Education cannot
escape this ethical necessity, and every ed-
ucational system stands upon one or the
other postulate. In our day all education
is divided into one or the other of these
camps.

We arrive, then, at this position: You
cannot hold that education is merely secu-
lar, unless you are prepared to accept as
your premise the denial of the life here-
after. This, of course, as a Catholic, you
repudiate, and must, therefore, reject the
conclusion. By the same logical process

30 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

you are forced to hold that, though educa-
tion is immediately concerned with the
preparation for practical life, in its ulti-
mate intent it looks to the paramount in-
terests of eternity.

Your statement that there are many
things in an educational curriculum that
have no religious element or character, I
pass over with the remark, that these stud-
ies by no means constitute an education ;
and I moreover add, that though there may,
be some courses indifferent in themselves,
there are many, and these of the utmost
importance, which have a direct and inti-
mate relation with religion. You cannot
touch history or literature without consid-
ering their religious bearings, or even
geography, as it is now taught, without
some allusion to religion ; and it goes with-
out saying, that philosophy has a most es-
sential bearing upon theology.

When you declare that religion can sup-
ply at home and at Sunday-school all that
is necessary, it seems to me that you have
wof ully mistaken the significance and scope
of true education; that you forget the

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 31

weaknesses and limitations of human na-
ture, and fail to realize the exigencies of
our present conditions. When you instruct
the mind apart from God, you are laying
the foundations of religious indifference.
The mind that has been taught without God
in its knowledge, and even that God is to
be excluded from its knowledge, soon grows
into the habit of shutting out God from its
mental horizon altogether. The mind that
has been developed under a system which
excludes God and the things of God from
its consideration, soon logically learns to
divorce God from its rational processes
and to ignore Him in all its intellectual
life. God at home and God at church will
never make up in the child's mind for the
banishment of God at school. Then the
process of religious disintegration sets in;
the God who does not reign at school, who
has no relation to the intellectual life, nay,
is ignominiously thrust out of doors in the
temple of knowledge, is but half a God, not
the all-powerful Creator and Judge who
holds us in the hollow of His hand. Eev-
erence for Him dies where He is thus neg-

32 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

atively regarded. When Christ and His
Church are barred from the schoolroom, it
is not a long stride to banishing Christ and
His Church from the heart. Never have'
the enemies of the Church calculated so
shrewdly, devised so astutely, and struck
more successfully at the Spouse of Christ,
than when they laid their plans to divorce
religion from education, and so wean the
child from its Divine Mother by putting it
to suckle the empoisoned breasts of the
monster of secularism.

And the Church, with the mother's in-
stinct and love, battles for her children.
She fully realizes the danger. She is filled
with the love of Christ and cries out with
Him : i ' Suffer these little ones to come unto
me; they are mine by the authority of
Christ; they are mine under the responsi-
bilities of their eternal salvation." And
she struggles and labors, in suffering and
in sacrifice, to educate them in all that a
Catholic education means. She is not satis-
fied with the crumbs or the half -loaf for her
children; she gives them a full spiritual
feast. She educates them all in all and is

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 33

not content to give up half to God and half
to the Moloch of secularism. Body and
soul they belong to God. Christ said that
we are to love God with our whole heart,
our whole mind, and our whole soul; and
His Church insists that heart, soul, and
mind belong to God, and she is satisfied
with nothing less ; for it is her Divine com-
mission to bring man back to God in heart,
in soul, and in mind.

Education does not consist merely in
feeding the mind with knowledge, but in
informing the mind with truth, the will
with good, and training all the faculties to
the fulness and completeness of the per-
fectly rounded character. Eeligion in the
schoolroom is like the sunlight to the plant ;
it warms, it nourishes, it illuminates. It
is not sufficient for the plant to gather the
elements which it takes from the soil to
assimilate into its own being ; it must have
the light and air of heaven, the vital prin-
ciple of its energy, without which it soon
languishes and dies. Eeligion should be
the light and aroma of the schoolroom, to
be absorbed by the child's entire being. It

34 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

should radiate into his soul through the
intellect, energize through his will, fashion
and form his faculties until there is per-
fect balance of mind and heart and will in
that moral harmony of his nature of which
religion alone possesses the gift.

No, my dear friend; there is no middle
ground here for a consistent Catholic.
The Church is jealous of souls, and will
surrender nothing to the spirit of the
world, which would divide human nature
into a distracted being, one part the
world's and one part God's. To concede
anything to secularism here is to be led to
yield all in the end.

Sincerely yours,

C. B. P.

IV.

Not a Loss.

My Dear Henry:

Believe me, my heart goes out to you in
your sorrow. I was deeply moved to hear
of the death of your little girl. You know
that my sympathy is with you in your af-
fliction and how much I desire to comfort
you. There is no greater natural sorrow,
I believe, than the loss of a little child.
How the tendrils of affection gather
around our hearts and strike deep root
there, when our little ones come into our
lives! And it is like tearing our hearts
out, when they are taken from us. Death
in a young child seems so unnatural, so un-
real. Childhood is the last place in the
world to look for that dreadful visitant,
yet with ruthless scythe he cuts down the
tender flower just in the bud. So buoyant,

35

36 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

so fresh with the very ecstasy of life is
childhood, that it would seem to be immune
from death; that only old age, bent and
withered, with all its branches bare of the
fruit long ago plucked, and yielding no
more, should be fit for the harvest of that
blind reaper. Yet the sheaf of death is
mostly garnered from the delicate blos-
soms of childhood. We know that human
mortality is greatest in the tender years.
But this does not console us for our loss.
The fact

That loss is common does not make
My own less bitter.

It is a pagan consolation to accept the in-
evitable and to resign ourselves to afflic-
tion simply because it is the common lot. I
remember a legend from Buddhist sources,
which furnishes a sharp contrast between
the pagan and the Christian view of life.
A mother, inconsolable for the loss of her
infant, appeals to Gautama, the Buddha,
to restore it to her. Buddha, and this we
are told illustrates the profundity of his
wisdom, promises to do so, if she can find

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 87

a household which death has not visited.
The bereaved mother seeks in vain, and in
her hopeless quest learns to realize that
death is the common lot of humanity and
to bow submissively to the fatal decree.
With us, how different! How sublime is
our consolation! It is not because death
surely comes to all that is mortal, because
all humanity goes down to the dust of the
earth in the end, that we find the assuage-
ment of our sorrow, consolation in grief
and peaceful reconcilement with the uni-
versal affliction of death. "With the eye of
faith we look beyond the grave; we have
learned to understand that victory does not
rest with this ravager of all life. For our
faith is in Christ, whom we know has risen
from the dead, the first fruits of them that
sleep, and that we with Him shall in the
end be clothed with immortality. How
sweet, how joyous, how blessed the repose
of our hope in Him! Yes, we have His
promise that we shall be with our own
again in the fulness of the perfect life in
God ! That little one, from whom you have
just been parted, my dear friend, is even

38 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

now in the arms of her God, a pledge of
His love, awaiting yon. What consolation
is there like nnto yonr consolation !
Affectionately yonrs,

C.B.R

Ojst the Soukce of Besignation.

My Dear Henry:

I know that resignation is hard when
grief is fresh in the heart. Our affections
are so bruised, so shocked; and indeed
grief is natural. Nor is resignation a bar-
rier or a check to grief. It is rather a chan-
nel through which it flows to the great
deeps of Divine consolation provided for
us out of the fulness of God's love. It is
in the treasure-house of faith alone that
we find the jewel of resignation. It is to
your faith I appeal. If you were a man
without faith, one who believes that life
finds its all between birth and the grave,
whose philosophy is summed up in Shake-
speare's lines,

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep,

39

40 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

I would say to yon, time will heal the
wound ; the stream of life will sweep yon on
to other scenes and other interests, and yon
will learn to forget. But as a Catholic,
who possesses the sublime gift of faith,
whose eyes are ever fixed on the supernat-
ural life, who sees the hidden wisdom of
God's way, even under the hand of af-
fliction, leading to higher things, I say to
you, do not seek to forget, but rather treas-
ure a chastening remembrance of your loss
in that larger hope, which promises the
hundredfold joy of a future gain, when the
hands of time shall have been emptied of
all their gifts. Indeed, God sends us these
trials to remind us that the fulness of life
is not to be found here ; to chasten our af-
fections, that they may not wander from
Him. This thought is a commonplace of
the Catholic life, but it is fruitful if we but
take it to heart. We don't realize it until
we find ourselves under the crushing
wheels of sorrow. It is only when the
heart is bruised and torn, like the ploughed
field, that it is prepared for the planting of
this celestial seed.

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 41

Bacon says in his essay on Marriage,
that "He that hath a wife and children
hath given hostages to fortune." I would
rather expect such a sentiment from a
Greek or Roman pagan than from the
mouth of a Christian. Had he said "He
that hath a wife and children hath
given hostages to Heaven," his remark
would have been pregnant with the pro-
f oundest truth it has been given to man to
conceive. Our children are hostages to
Heaven ! Here in a nutshell is tlie Catholic
ideal of the family life. Our children are
truly our own, only inasmuch as they are
God's. Is not an affliction, such as you
have just suffered, but God's way of bring-
ing home to us this tremendous truth so
easily forgotten in the hurly-burly of our
lives ? God has enriched us with this beau-
tiful trust for Himself, and for ourselves,
if we are but faithful in its keeping.
Hostages to Heaven! they are pledged to
God. They are not ours to lead them as
we please, merely to our own uses, our own
pleasures, our own ends. God is their end ;
nothing less than the eternal possession of

42 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

God Himself ! Their right is to be Divinely
led to that Divine end.

How lucidly does this profound consid-
eration lead to the solution of the question
of education which has been the subject of
our correspondence. The Church looks
upon all souls as hostages to Heaven com-
mitted to her care. So she regards our
children. You must educate your children
for God, she insists. There is but one kind
of education which leads our children to
God, and that is Catholic education, for it
is filled with the spirit of God. To fail in
this is to betray our trust.

Sincerely yours,

0. B. P.

VI.

On Disciplining Young Children.

My Dear Henry:

You cannot discipline a child as you
would a soldier. Childhood has no under-
standing of the reason of things; it does
not foresee ends, and has no just appre-
hension of means. It lives in an atmos-
phere of simple joy. Dante somewhere, I
cannot just now recall where, but I think
in the "Paradiso," speaks of the soul as
coining bounding and joyous from the hand
of its Creator ; and Wordsworth, speaking
of childhood, says :

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.

Joy is a natural affection of childhood.
Too much and too rigid discipline cripples

43

44 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

this natural movement, and so clouds and
blights the freshness of the soul, the joy
of innocence. The iron of Puritanism sunk
into the soul in childhood sours and hard-
ens it, and often leads to revolt in maturer
years. I suppose that you have observed
that boys brought up in the strait-jacket
of puritanical discipline, when they get a
chance to relish the first taste of freedom
from the odious restraint of their younger
years, frequently rush headlong into ex-
cess. It is this observation, I suppose, that
has led to the common notion that clergy-
men's sons usually turn out badly. Prot-
estantism used to be very rigid in the im-
position of its observances upon the
young, and this doubly so in the instance
of the families of ministers. Carlyle's
brutal saying that boys are simply young
beasts, and that if he had his way, he would
bring them up in a barrel and feed them
through the bung-hole until they were
twenty-one, is simply the hyperbole of
the puritanical conception of juvenile dis-
cipline. With its recent decay, the puri-
tanical regime of Protestantism has pro-

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 45

portionately relaxed, so that the old say-
ing about clergymen's sons is somewhat
obsolete.

I do not believe in exacting too much
from children. In essential things the par-
ent should make an absolute demand upon
their obedience, letting it be understood in
such cases that the rule is inflexible; this,
of course, in all matters of religious and
moral requirements. But where there is
no question of these, we should "temper
the wind to the shorn lamb. ' ' I know noth-
ing so exasperating, so exhausting to the
temper and to the firmness of resolution as
the everlasting "don't" to a child. It
makes life a burden to both parent and
child. I learned this early in my experi-
ence, and soon realized what a road full
of thorns and briars that parent treads who
imagines that the ideal of raising children
is to march them in the straight and narrow
path of military discipline. I have learned
to overlook much that in the fervor of
my first parental experience I regarded as
my duty to enforce strictly. So stern a
course makes a child an enemy, thrusting

46 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

back upon itself that natural flow of love
which gushes so bountifully out of the
child's heart for the parent, forcing the
little soul into tricks of deceit to hide its
shortcomings, and hardening it into moods
of resentment against the mistaken harsh-
ness of the parent, who errs, indeed, only
through love, yet none the less thwarts
his own purpose while losing the affection
of the child. There are many things which
we must not see. The apprehension of
too sharp a vigilance drives these little
souls into a furtive reticence, like snails
into their shells. They are naturally open,
sunny, bright. We should not cloud their
skies by a perpetual frown.

On the other hand we may sin by the
other extreme: by overlooking too much,
by shirking, out of sheer disinclination to
take the trouble or through excessive affec-
tion, the enforcement of necessary disci-
pline, and by neglecting to administer, at
the required time, that chastisement which
is a tonic to the wayward soul. A child
brought up without regimen, needless to
say, is systematically spoiled and grows

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 47

into a lawless and unrnly spirit. A way-
ward child is nearly always an evidence
of negligent parents. A flower soon with-
ers with too much sunshine or too much
shade. There is a happy mean which
steers clear of the Scylla of severity and
the Charybdis of laxity. This mean it is
the part of parents to seek out according
to their own and their children's disposi-
tions; for there are always idiosyncrasies
of temperament and character to be taken
into account. One child is not as another,
and while we lay down a general principle
for all, it is not always applicable in the
same way. One child differs from an-
other in irascibility, for instance ; and our
method in dealing with this one or that
one must discreetly vary according to dis-
position and the exigencies of time and
place.

In our time the child has not escaped the
faddist. He is being botanized under the
microscope of speculating theorists until
he ceases to be recognized in the healthful
daylight. We have now a child psychology,
with writers and lecturers by the legion to

48 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

analyze, expound, and label the compart-
ments of the child's soul and the compo-
nents of his nervous system. It is notice-
able that with the increase of child study,
as evolved in our day, the propagation
of children correspondingly diminishes. It
may be observed also, that as faith decays,
children disappear; and where fifty years
ago every household rang with the happy
glee of childish voices, there now reigns a
luxurious silence, or if, perchance, there
should be one or two little souls in the
spacious emptiness of the modern mansion,
there is a hush and oppressiveness in the
atmosphere stifling the joyousness that
belongs by right Divine to the soul of child-
hood.

Thank God, we Catholics have the wis-
dom of the Church to guide us in this day
of corruption ; we still believe in children !
That saving common sense of the parental
instinct, which the Church so carefully
treasures, still flourishes amongst us, and,
fortified by the grace of the Sacraments,
we still fulfil the duties of the married
state. Though Dante mentions no specific

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 49

place in the Inferno for those who pervert
the natural end of marriage, because that
sin did not prevail in his day, there is a
logical place whither they naturally sink,
and that is where the poet saw his old in-
structor, Brunetto Latini.

Your remark that you found it hard to
establish a thorough discipline amongst
your children, especially the younger ones,
has led me somewhat off my immediate sub-
ject. I imagined from what you said, that
you have been trying to exact more than
the tender years of the little ones can well
bear, and so I have taken this occasion to
make some suggestions gathered from my
own experience. I will have to reserve for
a future letter the consideration of your
charge against the system of Catholic edu-
cation in general.

Sincerely yours,

C. B. P.

vn.

A Sweeping Chabge and a Bebtjttal.

My Dear Henry:

I have been absent from home for the
past week, and now hasten to answer your
last letter, which I found waiting for me.
Yon tell me that yon are not criticizing in
any hostile spirit, bnt that yon are simply
desirons to sift the matter thoroughly for
yonr own satisfaction and to square your
understanding with your conscience. I
appreciate your attitude, but none the less
I shall not spare your position, or modify
the vigor of my defense. Though you are
simply assuming the role of an aggressive
opponent, I shall hit as hard as if I had a
real foe in front of me, and rely on the
stanchness of your friendship to act as
a buffer against the shock of my blows.

In the first place you bring a sweeping

50

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 51

indictment against the general system of
Catholic education: that it is backward,
out-of-date, medieval. Now what do you
precisely mean by this ? If you mean that
it has not taken up every fad of the hour ;
that it has not encumbered itself with the
bag and baggage of every new theory and
speculation, and they are legion ; that it has
not " modernized " itself at the expense of
emasculating itself ; that it has not rushed
headlong into unfledged experiments at
their mere proposal; but that it is con-
servative and holds the established way of
a long and proved experience; that it re-
fuses to depart from the wisdom of the past
at the beck of present impulse and the
bidding of the folly of the hour, which ig-
nores the relation of today with yesterday
as well as the dependence of tomorrow on
all that has preceded it: if this be your
meaning, for this is your meaning when
stripped of its sophisms, why, then I agree
with you; and I not only agree with you,
but I rejoice to see that Catholic educa-
tors have not lost their heads amidst the

52 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

wild charivari that is now making babel in
the educational world.

But do not mistake my meaning. I do
not mean to say that the Catholic system
has no shortcomings ; that it is perfect and
ideal; that everything in it is good and
nothing bad. Nor do I mean that there has
been no kind of betterment or advance in
things educational in the past hundred
years ; for in the accidentals there has been
much improvement, though I fail to see any
startling advance in the essentials. All I
do is to confront your sweeping assertion
with a reasonable denial, stating my
grounds in a general way.

What I lay down is this : Catholic edu-
cation is not to be flouted and condemned
as obsolete, because it has not accepted
the fiat of irresponsible doctrinaires, and
adopted innovations which have no warrant
in experience and no foundation in reason ;
innovations, as often based as not, upon
philosophical speculations that run counter
to Catholic teaching and are rooted in false
metaphysical theories. What I further
affirm is this : that the Catholic system is

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 53

in substance and in spirit sane and sound ;
that it is the outcome of a long and varied
experience ; that it has regard to the nature
of man in his essence and in his integrity,
as a spiritual, moral, and intelligent being ;
that it holds as a cardinal principle that no
side of human nature can be neglected in
education without destroying man's integ-
rity; that its object is to educate man
wholly, fully, and symmetrically by holding
a proper balance between all his powers in
their natural hierarchy; that its aim and
accomplishment is to preserve this unity
by the harmonious development of all his
faculties; finally, that it employs those
means best adapted to this end. It follows,
therefore, that the Catholic system founded
on this principle postulates man's religious
and moral schooling as of primary impor-
tance. It furthermore follows, that it rec-
ognizes education as fundamentally a sys-
tem of training, and that the end to be at-
tained is not simply knowledge, but truth.
This last reflection leads to a vital dis-
tinction between the general character of
what in the lump I may call the modern-

54 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

izing spirit of education and the Catholic
system. The end kept in view by the
Catholic system is the acquisition of truth.
Now truth is the natural food of the in-
tellect, the nourishment of its activities,
the informing principle of its perfection.
It is in truth that the mind rests as in its
native haven. It is in truth that it finds
the supreme satisfaction which is neces-
sary for the fullest exercise of activity.
It is this possession of truth that actuates
the powers, invigorates their energies, per-
fects them in strength. To make the mind
capable of attaining and holding truth is
the object of Catholic education. In its
system, therefore, the main stress is thrown
upon training the powers and faculties by
graded processes of exercises, which will
best contribute to this end. It is to be kept
clearly in mind that the idea here is not
the mere acquirement of knowledge, but
a rounded and balanced development of
all the energies of heart and mind and soul
to the attainment of truth. Knowledge
which comes by instruction is only one of
the means to this end.

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 55

Now the modern system, or what you
please to call the up-to-date system, simply
inverts the Catholic system, although, in-
deed, it is not fully conscious of its own
method. It is founded in the sentiment
of agnosticism, long ago rooted in the
Kantian denial of the objective validity
of truth. It repudiates the certainty of
truth in the mind, and therefore the respon-
sibility of its possession. Into this at-
titude the modern system stands driven
by the necessity of its own logic, and it
makes little difference whether it be con-
scious or not of the skeptical basis upon
which it rests. Most modern educators, I
believe, are ignorant of their own founda-
tions. Skepticism is the premise of the
system they have adopted, and they drive
ahead to the conclusion wittingly or un-
wittingly. This is the metaphysical disease
that underlies the educational secularism
of the day ; this is the bane that circulates
through the blood of the modern pedagogi-
cal body. The rational postulates of faith
are denied at the very fountain-head, and
the possibility of the possession of any

56 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

ultimate truth, that truth which is the cen-
ter and circumference of all intellectual ac-
tivity, is banished from the field. Under
this vicious conception religious truth is
relegated to the lumber-room of super-
stitious inutilities. It follows in the in-
evitable wake of this premise that the end
of such a system of education is not the
attainment of truth, but of mere knowledge,
the gathering, the marshaling, and the
classification of data, facts and events ; and
to these it is limited; for the truth, which
is the soul back of them, their explanation
and their reason, is necessarily shut out
from the horizon of the mind walled in by
the narrow hypothesis of an ultimate un-
knowable. To know God is the foundation
of real knowledge. But modern secularism
has rigidly banished God from the school-
room. Its first commandment is: "Thou
shalt not know the Lord thy God ; and thou
shalt make a graven image before which
thou shalt fall down and adore.' ' That
graven image is humanity. Since the
spread of the modern system of secularism
in education the cult of humanitarianism

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 57

has grown apace. It is the positivism of
August Comte modeled into an educational
program.

I have just remarked that the end of
Catholic education was the attainment of
the truth. Let me explicate this idea a lit-
tle further. We are going down to first
principles. I take it that a really educated
man is one who has been trained to arrive
at first principles. It is because you have
received a Catholic education that I take
it for granted that you are capable of the
analytical process which reaches down to
fundamental conceptions, to that sufficient
reason of things which philosophy achieves.
I am using you as a practical illustration
of the truth of my proposition, viz., that
you exemplify the Catholic principle of
education as the matured intellectual fruit
of a system of education whose object is
so to train and instruct (build up) the mind
as to render it capable of attaining and
possessing the truth. I urge your own
trained capacity for reasoning with clear-
ness, precision and accuracy as a concrete
demonstration of the inestimable advan-

58 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

tage derived from a system of education
whose end is the possession of truth, over
a system whose end is the mere acquire-
ment of knowledge in ignorance of the
truth. But as I have gone beyond the
limits of my time, I will take up this point
in a future communication.

Yours sincerely,

C. B. P.

VIII.

Teuth versus Knowledge as the End of
Education.

M y Bear Henry:

To begin where I left off in my last: the
Church from the beginning has addressed
herself to the task in the intellectual world
of showing the harmony between reason
and faith. St. Paul charges us with giving
a reason for the faith that is in us. You
know how mightily and gloriously scholas-
tic philosophy accomplished that purpose.
You also know how utterly ignorant of
scholastic philosophy Modernism is. There
is a deeper reason for this than appears
on the surface. Modernism in the spirit
of the last three centuries has ignored, i. e.,
cultivated an ignorance of, scholastic phil-
osophy, in its studious attempt to do away
with the supernatural. It has disavowed

59

60 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

the supernatural under the dominance of
its passions, and naturally seeks to be rid
of that higher science which holds reason
in the orbit of harmony with faith.
Perhaps you imagine that I am wandering
far from the subject; what has this to do
with the question of education? Every-
thing. The Catholic system of education is
based essentially upon the scholastic prin-
ciple that there is concord between reason
and faith. Modern education, i. e., secular-
ism in education, takes its stand upon the
ground, that between reason and faith
there is no relation whatever. In the lat-
ter 's premise, man's life ends in time;
hence it is concerned with immediate and
visible things only. It has, therefore, no
ultimate principle of generalization, no
ground of a final principle, in which all is
synthesized into a higher unity; no suffi-
cient reason by which the intellectual life
is illuminated and in which it rests. It
simply gathers and classifies knowledge
under distinct and separate heads, but can-
not unify it into a whole. So it instructs in
data and facts. If you observe closely, you

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 61

will readily see how secularism in educa-
tion has resolved itself into institutions of
mere instruction, omnium gatherums of
everything under the sun without any
higher bond of coherence. Note its in-
nate tendency to analyze, to specialize ; but
it has no power of synthesis. Look at non-
Catholic colleges in this country with their
corps of innumerable professors, each in
his own independent specialty regardless
of the other; each in his own small work-
shop hammering out his heap of data ; each
burrowing in his own tunnel leading he
knows not whither, nor cares. Observe the
trend to electivism, to the freedom of choice
on the part of the student of mere frag-
ments of knowledge. See how it offers to
the untrained, unschooled, unprepared,
unsettled mind of youth a choice in a be-
wildering field of knowledge, of two or
three subjects as it wills, according to its
caprice or its ignorance. What does this
signify? Simply that secularism, having
no eyes to see further than the immediate
present, looks upon education as a mere
gathering of haphazard knowledge, and

62 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

has no idea of that further and larger end,
of which Catholic education has never lost
sight: truth.

Now turn your eyes upon our Catholic
colleges; what do you observe? Institu-
tions by no means so well-equipped in the
material order, for they are never or rare-
ly endowed to the amount of a farthing, but
institutions with their eyes ever upon the
higher intellectual life, a system with a well
graded curriculum, whose end is to train,
fashion, and develop the mind in the ful-
ness of truth, truth in the natural order,
truth in the supernatural order, and truth
in the correspondence of the two. On the
one hand, its object is to develop mental
power in the intellectual life, and on the
other, to form character in the moral life,
and so to fuse and unite the two, that one
shall ring to the other as sweet bells at-
tuned, in perfect harmony. Observe that
Catholic colleges do not run to specialism
nor to electivism. They cling tenaciously
to the old ideal, the true ideal, the classic
ideal, the ideal of the humanities, the ideal
of what is called a liberal education, the

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 63

ideal of training and broadening all the
powers and faculties of the mind and soul
by the study of a required curriculum,
graded and balanced from the rudiments to
philosophy, so that the mind may become
settled in all the components of all that
education means, not taken piecemeal, but
in a just gradation of harmonized exer-
cises, each observing its own proper place
in unity and under the government of a
clearly conceived and fixed end.

You have no doubt heard and read many
a flout at Catholic education; it was the
flout of ignorance, not of an invincible but
of a culpable ignorance. Some years
ago, € ' the-President-of-one-of-our-largest-
colleges-in-the-country ' ' took occasion,
with an insolence born as much of a latent
fear as of studied ignorance, to class Jesuit
and Moslem colleges under a common stig-
ma as types of educational stagnation. He
delivered himself of this utterance in an
address advocating the extension of the
elective system to secondary and high
schools. There was an unconsciously pro-
found connection in his thought. Under the

64 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

hypnotic influence of secularism, he was in-
stinctively striking at that system of edu-
cation which is most radically and suc-
cessfully opposed to the educational revo-
lution which he represents. Moving with
the trend of secularism to the disintegra-
tion of the solidarity of real education, he
sought to demolish the one great barrier to
modern educational decadence by contemp-
tuously yoking it with Islamic effeteness.
This was the ruse, for it cannot be digni-
fied into strategy, of a combatant, who fu-
tilely imagines that he assures an easy
victory to himself, by contemning the only
enemy who has the power to dislodge him.
Hurling this off-hand dart of opprobrium
to transfix the foe upon the barb of con-
tempt, he fondly believes the field clear
and the way of his march to triumph unim-
peded. With the one formidable opponent
thus brushed aside at the start, the struggle
would naturally be short and brutally vic-
torious over that remnant of the secularists
who still cling to the old ideal without
knowing precisely why. But the very

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 65

character of the subterfuge betrayed the
weakness of the cause, which found it nec-
essary to resort to so despicable a method ;
and the-President-of-one-of-our-largest-
colleges learned, to the irreparable loss of
his reputation for astuteness, that the
system which he with a wave of the hand
would consign to the graveyard with Islam-
ism, could produce a champion whose ac-
complishments and equipment, whose skill
and vigor showed anything but the mori-
bund conditions that he would have the
world believe enshroud, like the cerements
of death, the body of Catholic education.

A learned Jesuit took up the gauntlet
the-President-of-one -of- our - largest - col-
leges flung down but never intended
should be lifted. Was it to the surprise of
the gentleman who had pronounced the
Jesuit system of education dead and buried
under the avalanche of the last four cen-
turies of progress? Have you ever read
the pamphlet of the Jesuit professor?
You would never have written to me, my
dear friend, as you have upon the subject

66 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

of Catholic education, had you read the
answer of the Jesuit Father.

Do you remember the Emperor Saladin's
wonderful feat, as narrated in Scott's
"Talisman," of cutting in twain, with a
single movement of his skilful wrist, a
silken cushion resting on the edge of his
scimitar? It was in this delicate way
the Jesuit professor dealt with the in-
sult of the-President-of-one-of-our-largest-
colleges, only in this instance the silken
cushion was filled with sawdust. Ah, how
keen and true, trenchant and sure, how
courteous and elegant, how clear and logi-
cal, and how profound in its exposition,
was this short pamphlet of some thirty-six
pages, riddling the sneering sophism, under
whose bruhim fulmen the champion of secu-
larism thought to smash the medieval pre-
tensions of Catholic education! What a
sunny ripple of generous laughter spread
in ever-widening circles throughout the
educational world when the sawdust spilled
out from the silken rent in the dissevered
cushion! I have a copy of the Jesuit

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 67

Father's pamphlet. I will send it to you;
but you must return it, as I value it highly,
both as a piece of admirable logic and of
delightful literature.

Yours sincerely,

C. B. P.

IX.

Specialism in Education.

My Dear Henry:

Yes, I have taken ' ' a rather high stand. ' '

It is time for Catholics to let the world

know that they stand high. We stand

high because we stand upon the heights,

upon the mountain 's top, where the Church

stands. We stand high because we are

members of her body, who is the Spouse

of Christ. In this matter of education we

stand highest of all. One of our difficulties

is that there are some Catholics who, under

the delusion of the world's folly, don't

know where they stand, and fatuously

imagine that the bruit of the groundlings

is the applause of progress. They don't

see in our Catholic colleges the sensible

evidences of prosperity, big endowments,

big clusters of buildings, big corps of pro-

68

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 69

fessors, big crowds of students, a super-
abundance of various kinds of apparatus,
and therefore conclude that we are not
1 ' up-to-date. " To be up to date with them
is to be in the fashion. Now, fashion is
simply the imposition of the hour upon
human vanity. The fashion of yesterday
is ridiculous today, and the fashion of to-
day will be ludicrous tomorrow. This is
because fashion is only the incarnation of
change, the obsession of the spirit of the
times, whose visage is never twice the same.
Fashion is begot out of accidental and
ephemeral circumstances; and when these
have passed away, its folly is revealed in
all its ugliness ; it loses its relation to the
current fancy. Baggy trousers today,
tight trousers tomorrow; short coats now
reign, long coats will have their turn to-
morrow. This not only prevails in matters
of dress, but in all the regions of human
vicissitude, and not less in affairs of edu-
cation. Now, the world, that hurly-burly
of change, often measures a man by the cut
of his coat. This may be harmless enough
in the domain of costumes. But when

TO THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

there is question of higher things, this
gage of esteem is a blunder and often a
crime. When the-President-of-one-of-our-
largest-colleges undertook to confound
the Jesuit system of education with Moslem
methods, he made a blunder; we will not
call it a crime. But when a Catholic, under
the impulse of the Zeitgeist, disparages
Catholic education, he commits a crime.
He is disloyal, where he should be faithful ;
he is ignorant, where he should have knowl-
edge.

Let me put the matter in contrast : The
Catholic system of education has held to
the true ideal; the secular system has
strayed away from it. The Catholic sys-
tem has persevered in the right path, be-
cause, under the guidance of the Church, it
has ever kept in view the attainment of
truth as the end of education. The secular
system has wandered into the wilderness,
because it has lost sight of this proper end.
Secularism, ignoring truth as the object of
the intellectual life, has set up false idols,
and has started in wild pursuit of two fads
of the hour, two fashions, specialism and

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 71

electivism, upon which, it is wrecking the
cause of education. It w^as only the other
day that I came upon the following preg-
nant sentence in an essay ("The Authority
of Criticism, and Other Essays," by Wil-
liam P. Trent; Scribner's) by a non-Catho-
lic writer, who was discussing the subject
of "Literature and Morals": "It would
be hard," he says, "to estimate the harm
that has been done to the young men of this
country through the discovery they must
have been making of late, that most of their
teachers have been specialists — knowing
only one class of books and caring little for
literature and art in their widest applica-
tion. ' ' I think that if you will ponder care-
fully all this sentence implies, you will find
the essence of the distinction I have been
making between the Catholic and secular
systems of education. You have in this
passage a striking indictment of the results
of specialism in education and the affirma-
tion of its universality. Whether the young
men of this country are discovering the
harm done to them by specialism is a ques-
tion I pass over ; I doubt very much if they

72 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

are. Howbeit, the writer says that it has
harmed them, and, furthermore, affirms
that this injury, which breeds from the
teacher to the pupil, arises from the mental
limitations it has imposed upon them; it
has rendered them incapable of duly ap-
preciating "literature and art in their
widest application. ' ' In other words, it has
failed to educate them, to give them that
broad and accurate basis of mental training
and culture which is called a liberal educa-
tion, and without which a man becomes
mentally narrowed and short-sighted. The
teachers are specialists; like the Homun-
culus in Goethe's "Faust," bottled up, each
in his own little vitreous habitation,
through whose contracted neck he views a
certain prescribed patch of the universe
and concludes that his restricted field of
vision embraces the totality of God's crea-
tion;

Ye think the rustic cackle of your burg
The murmur of the world.

Now, I have heard it advanced by certain
Catholics, as an evidence of the great ad-

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 73

vantages to be found in our largest non-
Catholic colleges, that the professors in
these vast institutions are specialists, each
one in his own line the best that can be had.
The sentence I have just quoted would be
an admirable answer to that banality. But
let us consider the matter a little further.
An institution of specialists is the one place
that I would most studiously avoid in
selecting a college for the education of my
boys. To put an untrained, unformed, un-
stable mind into the hands of a specialist
is to deliver it over to intellectual bondage.
When a boy goes to college his mind is
crude and pliable. It is then most suscepti-
ble to those formative influences which
fashion and determine it for the future.
This is the critical period ; if it be warped
then, it will never get rid of its contortion.
The true idea of education is to broaden
and straighten the mind, not to narrow and
twist it. The system, therefore, under
whose dominance it should come, ought to
be graded, symmetrical, balanced, and uni-
fied; it ought to lead to a definite and in-
telligible end, whence it takes its motive

74 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

power, and in which it culminates as a per-
fected whole. A haphazard accumulation
of specialties, though they range the whole
gamut of human knowledge, without that
unity of plan which comes from a well-
defined end judiciously governing all parts,
is a mere heap of erudition. And this is
the confusion to which secularism has
brought undergraduate education.

I say undergraduate education, for you
must not suppose that I depreciate special-
ism where it properly belongs. It has its
place in post-graduate or university edu-
cation, after the broad basis of a liberal
training has been laid, and the foundations
are secure enough to bear with ease the
weight of any superstructure whatever.
After the mind has been morally and men-
tally matured, then, and then only, may it
safely and rationally commit itself to the
direction of specialism. It will then have
the power to resist the inevitably narrow-
ing tendencies of specialism, and possess
the discretion to safeguard against its
limitations.

But when specialism is introduced into

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 75

undergraduate schools, it becomes a factor
of disintegration, and reduces education to
the level of a mere apprenticeship to some
intellectual trade. When specialism goes
hand in hand with electivism, as is now the
fashion, then indeed is havoc made in the
educational world, and mental devastation
spreads like a plague. But of this more
in my next.

Sincerely,

C. B. P.

X.

Electivism in Education.

My Dear Henry:

You have a son of college age. Let us
suppose that you have determined to send
him to one of our largest non-Catholic col-
leges, where specialism reigns, and elec-
tivism, in the words of the-President-of-
one-of-our-largest-colleges, safeguards the
"sanctity of the individual's gifts and will-
powers." You call your son to you on the
eve of his departure to this institution
where he is to be given full freedom in
the lumber room of erudition, and address
him in this fashion : ' i My son, before you
leave, allow me — you must use no word con-
sistent with parental authority, for that
would be a gross violation of the sanctity
of his gifts and will-powxers — my son, allow
me, now that you are about to enter upon

76

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 77

your college career, to counsel you in the
wisdom of my experience. You are going
to one of the largest colleges in the coun-
try, magnificently endowed, splendidly
equipped, with a corps of specialist profes-
sors, the best that money can procure. You
will therefore have every advantage in the
field of education that modern energy and
large resources can gather together. You
will, I trust, duly appreciate your oppor-
tunities, and apply yourself diligently ; for
you are just at that critical period of your
life, when your mental make-up and char-
acter are determined for good or ill
throughout your life. I hope that my
words will weigh with you, for they are
very serious and profoundly concern your
highest welfare. lrou will find at this insti-
tution a freedom of choice of studies. This
is a privilege that was not accorded to me
in my day at college. I had to go through
a required curriculum, embracing a rather
wide range of studies. But I understand
that nowadays this method is considered
old fogy, out of date, and a constraint upon
the sanctity of the individual's gifts and

78 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

will-powers. Nevertheless, I trust that you
will suffer yourself to be guided by me in
this matter, though I would not think of
dictating to you in the election of your
studies, for I would not presume to intrude
upon the sacred precincts of your individ-
ual gifts or shackle your will-power by the
assertion of my obsolete parental author-
ity. Although your mind is still unformed,
and your will rather unstable, out of that
overwhelming respect I entertain for the
sanctity of your mental and moral gifts,
which modern pedagogical research has re-
cently discovered in its wonderful psycho-
logical advance, I refrain from brutally
imposing my parental fiat upon you. I
would rather suggest to you that course
which the wisdom of my own experience
and the mature judgment of my own mind
show to be most beneficial and best adapted
to achieve the end of education. I would
suggest very urgently — but mind you it is
only a suggestion, for I ever keep in mind
the sanctity of your precious individuality
— that you elect as the most important
studies, indeed I may say most essential to

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 79

a liberal education, Latin and Greek,
mathematics, literature, history, chemistry,
physics, geology, some modern language,
and, as the crown of all, metaphysics. I
know that a curriculum embracing such a
range is nowadays looked upon as some-
what antiquated and not adapted to the
practical purposes of modern life. But I
trust that I may be allowed to differ from
this view. Not that I would aggressively
assert my opinion, but it was the way I was
educated, and I must confess to a strong
bias in its favor. Still I would not insist
upon imposing it upon you, for the-Presi-
dent-of-one-of-our-largest-colleges, and he
stands high in the pedagogical world,
at least as an executive, tells us that we
must respect the sanctity of your gifts.
Go, my son, to the intellectual freedom,
which the wisdom of modern pedagogy has
prepared for you. But do, I beg of you,
remember my suggestion. Take my advice,
if it be not in conflict with the sanctity of
your individuality, and although you may
not now perceive its wisdom, I am sure that
if you follow it now, in after years, when

80 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

your mind is matured and your experience
of life ripened, you will never regret hav-
ing profited by your father's counsel.' '

0 blessed phrase under which pedagogi-
cal secularism seeks shelter against the
shafts of common sense and the wisdom of
the centuries! The sanctity of the indi-
vidual's gifts and will-powers! Mirabile
dictu! Verily folly never lacks a mask of
sobriety, and even of virtue, when occasion
demands it.

My dear friend, in this fictitious paternal
admonition, which you will pardon my put-
ting in your mouth, you have the very pic-
ture of the ridiculous soul of educational
secularism. Your son goes off with your
weighty words whistling in his heedless
ears like the summer wind, if he be the kind
of lad which the world has known from
the beginnings of human nature. Your
words, like those of old Polonius, beat
weakly fluttering against the gale, whilst
the pinnace of youth with pleasure at the
helm goes with the merry winds bounding
over the sunlit seas. Let me here quote

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 81

some pertinent words from the Jesuit
Father's pamphlet {"President Eliot and
Jesuit Colleges/' by Rev. Timothy Bros-
nahan, S. J.) which I mentioned in my last
letter :

The present writer 's experience does not cover the
period between the ages of eight and eighteen [the
period of elective choice advocated by the-President-of-
one-of-our-largest-colleges], but he does know from some
years of observation, that between the ages of fourteen
and twenty, the average boy will work, like electricity,
along the line of least resistance. And he is confident
that his experience is not peculiar. To apply to their
education, therefore, university methods applicable only
to men of intellectual and moral maturity, before they
are able to feel judiciously the relations of their studies
to their life's purpose, must necessarily put to some
extent the standard of education under their control,
and almost wholly commit to them the character of their
own formation.

Here is sanity. Here are reason and ex-
perience nttering wisdom. Contrast it with
the folly, which wraps its absurdity in a
catchy phrase, whose true application is the
reverse of its author's intention. Listen
again to the wisdom of the Jesuit Father ;
he is stripping the mask from secularism's
"cipher face of rounded foolishness":

82 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

Here I may notice the appeal that is made in behalf
of this policy to the "sanctity of the individual 's gifts
and will-powers. ' ' "The greatest reverence is due to
boys/' cries the old Eoman satirist, and who will dare
gainsay it? But an abiding sense of that very reverence
inspires Jesuit educators with the belief that it is
an unhallowed thing to make the plastic souls and hearts
and minds of those entrusted to their care the subjects
of untried, revolutionary, and wholesale experiment.
Precisely because they believe in the sanctity of the
individual they will not admit the advisability of sub-
jecting them — as though they were small quadrupeds —
to novel experiments in educational laboratories. Be-
cause they know that the boy of today will be tomorrow
the maker of his country's destiny, will fashion its fu-
ture, will shape for good or ill the forces that will give
it stability or bring it ruin, they have hesitated to an-
nounce a go-as-you-please program of studies and a hap-
hazard and chaotic system of formation. Because they
believe the soul of a boy a sacred thing, destined for
an eternal life hereafter, to be attained by a noble life
here, they have recognized the delicacy and responsibility
of their functions, and have been satisfied with a safer
and more conservative advance.

Yes, my dear friend, the soul of a boy is
a sacred tiling, a sacred trust confided to
tlie father's care and vigilance. As in the
old mythological fable, the world has been
placed upon the back of Atlas by the gods,
so has this weighty responsibility of the

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 83

child's education, the world in embryo,
been placed upon the parent's shoulders.
If Atlas were to shake off this burden, what
would become of the world? If we were
to reject this responsibility, what would be-
come of our children? what discord and
confusion would result in human society!
What discord and confusion does result
because there are parents who are blind to
the sacred character of their trust! And
that higher other responsibility in the
eternal life ! Should not this thought sober
any parent, though drunk with the seduc-
tions of secularism?

Sincerely,

C. B. P.

XL

Utilitarianism in Education and a Classi-
cal Flourish.

My Dear Henry:

I have pointed out the dangers to which
secularism is driving the ship of education,
specialism and electivism, twin monsters
of the same inglorious parent.

Amongst the yelping progeny kenneled
within the womb of secularism not the least
noisy is utilitarianism. I put the situation
under Miltonic imagery to bring it more
distinctly home to the mind, especially
when that mind would like to be both deaf
and blind. The reality of things, ugly
things as well as beautiful, often finds its
best recognition in an analogy.

You know the hue and cry against the
classics in education: Greek and Latin
have no practical value in life; why waste

84

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 85

time upon them; they don't help to make
money; they can't be used in business or
"the strenuous life"; in truth, do they not
rather impede and hamper a man in his
pursuit of this world's prizes by leading
him to believe that he is mentally superior
to every-day conditions, by "sickling o'er
the native hue of resolution with the pale
cast of thought," in short by unfitting him
for practical issues and living realities?
And then utilitarianism imagines that the
mere statement of its position is a sweep-
ing victory; and so it is, for the mind
imbued with secularism ; such a mind has a
natural affection for the offspring of its
own prejudice.

Let me at once make a frank admission :
Yes, I confess that there are many things
in which a classical education is of no prac-
tical avail. It won't make a better black-
smith, or bricklayer, or carpenter, or
grave-digger, or money changer, or what-
not in avocations of this grade. I will add,
moreover, that I have known men, by na-
ture blacksmiths, forced through a classical
course by ambitious but injudicious par-

86 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

ents, to their own great mental agony and
nobody's good. I have generally found
that these people soon fall back, by a law
of mental gravity, from the level to which
they had been artificially hoisted not with
their own but somebody else's petard. I
do not know whether it has spoiled their
genius for blacksmithing or not. I trust
that Divine Providence has a special tender
solicitude for these victims of not their
own but others ' folly. At any rate, I rest
satisfied in the assurance that the natural
weight of their own parts will in the course
of time find its proper level in the vast utili-
ties of this work-a-day world, and if they
have been imprudently led into an undue
estimate of their own talents, the rough
bruises of an ever-unfailing experience
will before long shock them into a realiza-
tion of the eternal fitness of things.

But what I do protest against is that the
misfits of these unfortunates should be
pointed out as horrible examples of the
failure of classical education, and as in-
controvertible evidence of its false valua-
tion. You remember the old Horatian

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 87

maxim of fitting the burden to the shoul-
ders? Dare I quote the lines in the face
of modern secularism? Hush, ye burly
winds of the strenuous life, just one little
moment, that we may hear the whispered
murmur of the ancient wisdom echoing
from the classic world, just one little mo-
ment, I pray, and then you may gather
again your rushing whirlwinds, and toss
the fluttering accents of that far-away
tongue, like dead leaves, in the onward
sweep of your mighty cyclone !

Sumite materiam vestris . . . aequam
Viribus: et versate diu, quid ferre recusent,
Quid valeant humeri.

I wonder if the shade of Q. Horatius
Flaccus thrilled, just a little, in its Stygian
night at the distant echo of this unusual
susurrus of his own lines from the upper
world ! And not hearing more, did it, out
of sheer force of its diurnal habit when it
breathed this Jovian atmosphere, seek
consolation in the old familiar custom al-
ways prefaced with the remark, nunc est
bibendum! Alas ! Q. Horatius Flaccus, how

88 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

badly did you build your immortality upon
the fancied endurance of Caesar's empire
and imagine a vain thing when you vaunt-
ed that you had built a monument of fame
more solid than brass to outlast the eternal
pyramids :

Exegi monumentum aere perennius,
Begalique situ pyramidum altius;
Quod non imoer edax —

But I desist. Pardon me, 0 ye mighty
Substantialities of the Strenuous Life, ye
Titans of Secularism, that I have dared to
flaunt before your Majesties the mortuary
lines of this ancient poet, whose bones, to
slightly paraphrase Sir Thomas Browne,
have rested quietly in the grave under the
drums and tramplings of nineteen cen-
turies of conquest!

Forgive this diversion, my dear friend,
this straying into old pastures. I grew
reminiscent. I was dreaming of our col-
lege days, and the glamour of old Horace
crept over my antiquated imagination; so
I yielded to the soft enchantment, unheed-
ing, for the moment, the barking of the

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 89

hound of utilitarianism and the glowering
eyes of secularism. I realize that I have
been guilty of the unpardonable crime of
lese majeste! Mea culpa, mea culpa! Le
Roi est mort; vive le Roil

Sincerely,

C. B. P.

XII.

The Object of the Classics in Education.

My Dear Henry:

In my last I quoted Horace apropos of
the point I was there considering, and then
took a short excursus into Elysian fields
forbidden to us living with the heavy din
of modern progress in our ears. You tell
me that my quotations stirred your spirit,
and that you actually took up your Horace
and read some of the "Ars Poetiea" and
the two odes from which I quoted, and some
others besides. And the breath of that far-
away time of our college days came blow-
ing, like a breeze of summer filled with the
perfume of enflowered zephyrs, across the
arid wastes of your fancy so long dried up
by the steady sirocco of business-life? My
dear fellow, that draught of Horace evi-
dently had its effect. You will be writing
me an ode, before long, singing the praises

90

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 91

of Maecenas's bibulous and poetic friend.
And you tell me that you have made the
resolution of reading a bit of old Horace
every day, just to keep the waters stirred.
Bravo! I am delighted beyond measure!
Isn't it refreshing to go back now and
again to those vernal regions of our youth,
whose fond memory keeps bubbling and
sparkling,

O Fons Bandusiae splendidior vitro,

if we will only go thither to drink! And
how much keener, and broader, and deeper
grows the appreciation of the maturer
mind when we raise these Castalian
draughts to our lips ! And then not only
to Eome, but to those original fountains,
whence Eome herself drank so copiously!
To hear once again the ancient Muse sing
the direful wrath of Achilles, son of Pe-
leus,

Wrjvtv aeiSe, ©ea, HrjXrjLaSa 'A^tX^os
Ov\ojj,evr)V

and hear the clang of Apollo 's silver bow,
as the angry god hurtles his arrows against
the offending Greeks,

92 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

keivq Se KKayyrj ytv r5 dpyvpeoto /Sioio'

or pace up and down the shores of the
loud-sounding sea with the disconsolate
Chryses,

B77 S5 d/ceW Trapa Qfiva TroAiK^AoiV/Joio daXdaarj^.

But I am off again ; I will stop. To think
of Greek in the face of utilitarianism is
like taunting a barbarian with his lack of
civilization. It was bad enough to mention
Horace, but to speak of Homer is simply
twisting the barb in the inflamed wound.

And now to return to our mutton. The
classics in education are not intended to
be an apprenticeship to a trade, to fit a man
for modern business methods, or to prepare
him specifically for a profession. Their
object in education is to broaden, cultivate,
and discipline the mind ; not with a view to
this or that, but as the liberal basis for any
avocation, barring, of course, mere manual
utilities. Their purpose is to make a man
more of a man; to widen his mental hori-
zon; to train the mind's eye to large per-
spectives and accurate proportions ; to cul-

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 93

tivate in him a juster appreciation of the
niceties, the accuracies and values of
words; to beget habits of mental discre-
tion and distinction, until he become fash-
ioned to that broader and nobler mind,
which soars above pettiness and disdains
narrowness. A man who has achieved this
broad, mental habitude is in the true sense
liberal, free from the vulgarities of the
illiterate and the prejudices of the igno-
rant. Blend this state of culture with that
severer discipline of mind which mathe-
matics and metaphysics bestow, and you
add to the graces of culture the force of
logic and the power of thought. Infuse all
this, as its practical principle, with the
habit of virtue, which is the gift of religion,
and you have your rounded man, developed
and balanced in all his faculties, har-
monized and unified in his character. This
is the ideal of Catholic education. The
object of such a process is the attainment
of truth. Here is the man with the open
mind, enfranchised and broadened. Here
is the man matured in discipline, trained to
think, reflect, reason, and act. Does such

94 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

an education unfit a man for life ? The stu-
pidity of the objection ! You might as well
say that the athlete is rendered unfit for
the arena by the process of his training.
Equally foolish the objection against the
value of the classical tongues because they
are not used in our daily intercourse with
our fellow-men ; you might as well urge the
uselessness of the athlete's apparatus, by
which he develops his strength and agility,
because he does not actually bring them
into the scene of his contests.

I affirm that a man educated along the
lines I have indicated is better fitted, better
prepared than one whose mind and char-
acter have been cabined, confined and nar-
rowed by the limitations of specialism and
electivism ; that he will enter upon any field
of life, stronger, saner, broader.

Sincerely,

C. B. P.

XIII.

Education and Taste.

My Dear Henry:

There is another phase of the subject
touched on in my last letter, which requires
emphasis, and the more so because its
relation to the question of education is
not always recognized. It is the question
of the formation of taste. You know the
chaos that now makes anarchy in the world
of esthetics. Caprice and opinion, all the
prejudices of individual likes and dislikes
collide and conflict in plentiful confusion.
No objective standard is recognized. Co-
teries and cliques, fads and fashions, rise
and fall with the gusts of fancy blowing
anon from this and anon from the other
quarter. I do not know whether you have
observed it or not, but you will find that
this confusion in the domain of taste, which

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is correlative with the region of art, is
keeping pace with the growing prejudice
against the classics in education. This
universal anarchy in esthetics goes pari
passu with the advance of secularism in
education. Now secularism in education is
essentially revolution against tradition and
authority. It is the ultimate outcome, car-
ried over into the sphere of pedagogy, of
that rebellion in religious and political life
whose delirium mistook the prostitute of
license for the goddess of liberty. It has
taken something over a hundred years to
show the world — and even now there is but
a glimmer — that the red cap may after all
be close akin to the fool's cap. It is, there-
fore, refreshing to read in a modern author
("Life in Poetry, Law in Taste." by Wil-
liam John Courthope, C.B., M.A., Oxon)
the following confession:

No right-thinking man has given up his belief in the
advantages of rational and constitutional liberty; but,
on the other hand, every sound reasoner is much more
ready than he was to acknowledge that Liberty itself is
not the solution of human ills; that much more is to
be said than was supposed for such old authoritative
methods of dealing with men and things as were not

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 97

long ago accounted relics of benighted barbarism; that
in fact, the remedy of laisser faire, of letting things go,
of leaving each man as a separate unit to think, speak,
and do as he likes, however simple and attractive it
seemed in the outset, has itself been the cause of a
thousand difficulties, which require to be dealt with on
quite another principle.

No; I am not wandering from the sub-
ject. I am only bringing you around to
another view of the elephant, that you may
see the beast from all sides. The book
from which I have just quoted is practically
throughout a protest against the spirit of
secularism in its invasion of the kingdom
of art, and especially literary art. The
author calls it the doctrine of laisser faire,
but this is simply another name for the
same falsehood. Throughout his work he
appeals to tradition and authority, in the
light of right reason, as the sources to
which we must return in order to establish
securely the law of taste, which the dragon
of laisser faire, like Fafnir in the Niebe-
lung myth, has of late been sottishly hiding
in his fetid caverns under the earth. What
is more, the very chapter from which the
above quotation is taken sets forth a spe-

98 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

cial argument, as the summing up of the
author's discourse, for the retention of
the classics in education, as the only safe-
guard of the law of taste, the only barrier
to the muddy tide of laisser faire, or secu-
larism as I have named it. Mr. Courthope,
the author, is at one with Sir Richard Jebb
in affirming "the advantage, nay, the ne-
cessity, of recognizing a definite standard
of taste for the purposes of education,"
and quotes the latter gentleman as follows
in his lecture on humanism in education:

I do not think that there is any exaggeration in what
Mr. Froude said thirteen years ago, that if we ever lose
those studies (the humanities) our- national taste and
the tone of our national intellect will suffer a serious
decline. Classical studies help to preserve sound stand-
ards of literature. It is not difficult to lose such stand-
ards, even with a nation with the highest material civili-
zation, with abounding mental activity, and with a great
literature of its own. It is peculiarly easy to do so in
days when the lighter and more ephemeral kinds of writ-
ing form for many people the staple of daily reading.
The fashions of the hour may start a movement not in
the best direction, which may go on until the path is
difficult to retrace. The humanities, if they cannot pre-
vent such a movement, can do something to temper and
counteract it; because they appeal to permanent things,
to the instinct of beauty in human nature, and to the

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 99

emotions, and in any one who is at all susceptible to
their influence, they develop a literary conscience.

Now let me quote you another passage
from Courthope. Against the argument
that the classical languages are not practi-
cal and useful as a preparatory discipline
for everyday life, he very pertinently
answers :

The fallacy underlying this reasoning is as transparent
as it is time-honored. The raison-d'etre of our universi-
ties is to promote liberal education, and the aim of lib-
eral education is not to impart knowledge for utilitarian
purposes, but so to cultivate the moral and intellectual
faculties of the scholar as to fit him, on his entrance
into life, for the duties of a citizen. Such has been the
fundamental idea of the English university from the
days of the Eenaissance; such is still the effect on the
mind of our great Oxford school of the literae hu-
maniores. To depart from this ideal, to do away with
this foundation, to attempt to build up a fabric of cul-
ture on the study of modern languages and literatures,
without reference to the art and literature of antiquity,
would be to reduce the system of liberal education to
anarchy. Men of independent minds no doubt make
their way by native force of character; but education in
itself must be organized, and how is it possible for a
man to be comprehensively instructed in the history of
human society, in the meaning of law and government,
in the various relations of thought, and in the useful

100 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

and beautiful arts of expression, unless lie begins at the
beginning?

It is upon this ground, my dear friend,
that Catholic education takes its stand.
It is to this ideal that it has tenaciously
clung in the face of contumely and despite
the growing clamor of secularism. Its
loyalty to the literae humaniores has
brought upon it the odium pedagogicum of
secularism. It has been justly deaf to the
vulgar chorus of the profane crowd. It
refuses to break with the fecund past and
tear the tree of science from those deep
roots, through which it draws its richest
sustenance. It appreciates at their just
due, tradition and authority, and in the
justice of its cause stands firm to resist
reckless and impudent innovations. The
event will manifest its triumph. Let secu-
larism keep up its present extravagant
pace, and in the second generation from
our day the only educated men in the coun-
try will be those who have been trained in
our Catholic colleges.

Sincerely,

C. B. P.

XIV.

The Wobld versus God ik Education.

My Dear Henry:

When you urge that worldly advantages
are a weighty consideration in this question
of education ; that a boy sent to one of our
largest non-Catholic colleges forms asso-
ciations and makes friendships which may
prove of the greatest service to him in his
advancement in after life, I begin to won-
der if you have yet succeeded in getting
rid of the cataract that blinds the mental
vision of so many fathers, although you
have repeatedly acknowledged the cogency
and validity of my reasoning. Is college
simply a kindergarten to fashionable so-
ciety, a mere apprenticeship to future busi-
ness advantages? If this be the proper
view, why, then away with the farce, which
you are pleased to call education. If edu-
cation is to be prostituted to purposes of

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this character, have done with the pretence
and call the affair by its true name, mere
pandering to the most ignoble traits in
human nature. Be honest enough to say
squarely that you send your boys to a non-
Catholic college not for the purpose of
educating them, but that they may profit
in after life by the worldly associations
they may have made there. Be candid and
admit that you are imperiling their faith
and sacrificing their true education to
purely material advantages, as much the
figments of your own imagination as sub-
stantial realities. Do not cajole yourself
by arrant sophisms into the belief that you
are not jeopardizing your children's faith
and morals, when you voluntarily offer
them on the altar of secularism; for they
are made of the same human stuff as every-
body else's children, and you know per-
fectly well that stubble will burn in the fire.
Be honest ; for honesty does not courtesy to
folly. Say to your God, that it does profit
a man to gain something of the things of
this world even at the peril of his immortal
soul.

THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 103

This is a question of souls. Do you
weigh the trifles of time against immortal
destiny? I am speaking as a Catholic to
a Catholic. Secularism knows nothing of
souls. Do you remember Dante's symbol-
ism when he describes the three beasts who
bar the way of man up the mountain of
Truth? The lion of pride, the wolf of
avarice, the leopard of sensuality. This
symbolism is taken from Jeremias:
"Wherefore a lion out of the wood hath
slain them, a wolf in the evening hath
spoiled them, a leopard wateheth for their
cities; everyone that shall go out thence
shall be taken. ' ' Will you send your chil-
dren out of the City of Faith into the perils
of that wilderness which Dante describes as
full of the bitterness of death! How does
the poet, in whose person man is typified,
escape the ravenous jaws of the three
beasts that beset his path? By following
reason fortified by grace and illuminated
by faith ; by giving himself up to the guid-
ance of Vergil inspired by Beatrice. See
in this the symbol of the ideal of Catholic

104 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS

education : Vergil, classicism, and reason ;
Beatrice, grace and faith.

Sifted of all its chaff, this, question of
education comes down to the plain and
simple realization of the responsibility of
the trust which God has confided to the
parent. Should it require certain sacri-
fices, make them. Parentage is in itself a
sacrifice. If the Faith is not worthy of
your sacrifice, it is of no value at all.
Worldly advantages are merest dross when
balanced against the eternal values of the
soul.

But in truth we make no sacrifice even of
the worldly interests of our children when
we confine them to the Catholic system of
education ; in the proper sense of the word
Catholic education is alone true education ;
it is the only system that rounds out and
perfects character, gives balance and unity
to intellect and will, broadens the mind,
cultivates the imagination under the re-
straints of right reason, and fulfils all that
is meant by the term liberal education.

Sincerely,

C. B. P.