SOLICITUDE OF ROME FOR YOUTH.

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the 77 per cent.-the state refuses to endow of recognize it. Thus, whilst it is regarded as no anomaly to have two universities for a small minority, it is regarded as a great anomaly to have a third for the vast majority of the population of Ireland !

It is consolatory to turn from such appalling scenes of youthful misery to the healthy condition of destitute children under the government of the Popes, where such cruelties never did, or ever could possibly occur, but where from time immemorial they were trained by the most efficient staffs of the religious orders, by the monks and nuns, to be not paupers, but were rescued from all the contaminating and debasing influences of such vicious systems, and were taught to be useful citizens, good Christians, and aspirants to the most exalted positions, and to become eminent in literature, science, and art. It is still more consolatory to reflect that all this philanthropy, this Christian solicitude and educational training, is made subservient and auxiliary to impressing their souls with the ennobling principles of religion, of their immortality, the greatness of their hopes, their eternal destinies, and to teach them to secure their everlasting inheritances, in comparison with which corporal sustenance, health, liberty, or life itself, are insignificant, and weigh as lightly as the down of a feather poised with an ingot of gold! What doth it avail a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?

The solicitude of those teachers for their pupils ceased not with the term of the school days of the child. Those religious, like the nuns and monks and Christian brothers, and pious confraternities who preside over the schools of our own country, after qualifying their scholars by imparting secular knowledge, seasoned with religious instruc

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tion, obtained for them suitable situations in professional or mercantile offices. They exercised a surveillance over their after career, inspired by more than paternal solicitude. The convent was the place to which the child ever resorted for advice; it was a beacon to guide her in the hour of darkness; if she ever unhappily erred, it was the land-mark to guide her back from her wanderings to the path she lost. When surrounded by difficulties and temptations, amidst the inundating tide of vice, the convent was the ark to which she fled for safety, and in which she mounted buoyantly over the swelling flood, and towards which the bird ever returned with the branch, till the waters again subsided, and till the dove could fly away in security, and eventually land on the mountain of God.

The modern system of our statesmen in eliminating religion from our universities and schools, and proclaiming the divorce of education from religion, has inundated Europe with the most baneful social disasters, and is plunging England into the most stupefied repose and lethargy of religious indifference, if not into the depths of total infidelity. To unchristianize education is the highest treason of a Christian realm. This is true, not merely in reference to primary and intermediate education, but even still more so in reference to university education. If religion be eliminated there can in reality be no "scholium generale", or university properly so called. If there be a Supreme Being, and that nothing is taught of that Supreme Being in that university, it cannot be called a "scholium universale", as Dr. Newman well expresses in his work on University education :-"If then, in an institution which professes all knowledge, nothing is taught, nothing is professed of the Supreme Being, it is fair to infer that every individual of all those who advocate that

INSTRUCTION NOT EDUCATION.

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in

institution-supposing him consistent-distinctly holds that nothing is known for certain about the Supreme Being; nothing so as to have any claim to be regarded as an accession to the stock of general knowledge existing in the world. In a word, strong as may appear the assertion, such an institution cannot be what it professes-if there be a God; but by the very force of the terms, it is very plain that God and such a university cannot coexist". What God and His Church have united let no man separate. There can be no divorce from the indissoluble union of Church and State-school and Church-education and priest. In proportion as the child increases in wisdom and age, he must increase grace. The Christian child has a right to be instructed in faith and morality. This instruction is a prerogative beyond the jurisdiction of the civil power. The civil power is entitled to govern in the secular concerns of the state. The jurisdiction and prerogatives of that power belong to the natural order. Education belongs to the supernatural order. The civil power may instruct, but it cannot educate; instruction is not education. Education necessarily requires that the Christian child acquire a knowlege of its eternal destinies, of all the doctrines and dogmas of Christianity, and of the means to secure his everlasting inheritances. It is the duty and the right of the pastor to aid parents by the exercise of his ministry, in communicating this education to their children. He who deprives children of this doctrinal and dogmatic instruction, robs them of their most precious inheritances. A child is not a chattel to be disposed of by the civil power, or by natural law. If parents criminally omit their duty, and neglect to provide education for their children, and that thus they become vicious, immoral, thieves, disloyal, it

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THE SCHOOL AND THE SANCTUARY.

may be asked-has the Government no right to instruct them? In that case, some say it has, but solely on the principle of self-preservation, of protecting the natural order or social condition from the effects of their baneful influence, on the same principle by which the quarantine laws prohibit a diseased person from landing, or by which firearms are taken out of the hands of dangerous characters; beyond that, the education of children belongs exclusively to their parents, aided by the direction and ministry of the Holy Church. From that assertion I must dissent. Even though the education of children be neglected by their parents-even though they become juvenile criminals, the Church does not abandon her children in their wanderings from virtue, in their sin and guilt-even still she claims the exclusive right to educate them, and never even under these circumstances, does she commit their education to the state or secular power, which is solely established for civil purposes, and not for education.

The parents of the child have not the time nor perhaps the capabilities of discharging that important obligation. They send them to school, where they expect it will be imparted. The religious education of their children in the school then is the parent's right-it is the children's inheritance. The school is a state in the Christian commonwealth where they are entitled to these privileges. The school is a porch adjoining the sanctuary. It is a court of the temple. The Church erected it to form her own children to Christ. She cannot commit their formation to seculars. To do so would be to surrender her sacred commission. She cannot surrender her right to impart united secular and religious education in her schools. A Catholic nation is entitled, by human and divine right, to Catholic education, and to be aided therein by the state from its pecuniary resources,

GUIZOT ON EDUCATION.

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and the violation of this right will involve a disruption of the social relations of the empire, embarrass conscience, and invade the domain of faith. Christian education is vital to faith, vital to the interests of God's faithful people, vital to peace, to law and order, and to all our social relations, vital to the loyalty of subjects, and to the stability of empires. Separate not secular from religious instruction. Fix no boundary lines, marking one time for secular and another for religious teaching. Religious education tolerates no such mechanical devices. The one is the salt that impregnates and seasons the other. Separate them, and what was to be saved loses its savour. Religion is the atmosphere in which, to be healthy, secular education. must breathe. In support of this, I shall quote the memorable words of even the Protestant statesman, Guizot: "In order to make popular education truly good and socially useful, it must be fundamentally religious. I do not simply mean by this that religious instruction should hold its place in popular education, and that the practices of religion should enter into it; for a nation is not religiously educated by such petty and mechanical devices. It is necessary that national education should be given and received in the midst of a religious atmosphere, and that religious impressions and religious observances should penetrate into all its parts. Religion is not a study or an exercise to be restricted to a certain place and a certain hour. It is a faith and a law which ought to be constantly felt everywhere, and which, after this manner alone, can exercise all its beneficial influence upon our minds and our lives".