p. 54Education of Children

It does not belong to the scope of this chapter to treat of secular education except as a help or hinderance to the moral training of children. It is a help to them when it is directed and controlled by religion, a hinderance when it is not so controlled. Therefore Catholic parents incur a grave responsibility when they send their children to schools or colleges where the Catholic religion is not taught. Nor does it alter their responsibility to be assured that no religion is taught: for education without religion is condemned by the Church and may be fitly compared to a branch cut from the living tree. Now it is hard to convince fathers, who have worldly prospects in view for their sons, that there can be any thing wrong in this kind of education. Comparatively few, however, in these countries, disregard the enactments of the Church concerning it, and therefore I shall only touch on two of the many reasons that have led to those enactments. The first of these reasons, is the religious indifference to which such education leads. Material prospects may be realized by it; but faith is undermined, the student suffers in his spiritual life, he gives up Mass, and Sacraments, and prayer, and he remains a Catholic only in name and in not casting off his connection with the Church. This result, brought about gradually and insensibly by influences apparently harmless, is realized in the great majority of cases in which Catholics have tried the experiment, and it surely is sufficient by itself to justify those charged with the spiritual government of men, in prohibiting parents to expose their children to so serious and proximate a danger of sin.

Another reason which also, I think, led to the condemnation of undenominational schools and colleges is the pernicious infidel error asserted by their patrons and defenders: namely, that there can be a complete system of science or of education without any reference to God or to His revelation of Himself in the world around us. True science should show man the causes of the phenomena he observes within and around him: it should analyse and arrange those causes: it should trace and point out their convergence to one great, final, central cause: it should make its investigations in the light of divine faith, although with the eyes of reason: it should be the help-mate of Religion, leading men to it and reconciling their intellects to its teaching. The education that teaches science in this manner is blessed by the Catholic Church; but how different is such education from that which we see in State schools and colleges. Nature is studied in every variety of form in which she presents herself to the senses; the operations of the mind too are analysed and classified; but secular education, having taught these studies and analyses, has reached its limit: it does not lead to God, it professes to know nothing of Him, or rather, when it throws off its mask and speaks out its mind, it teaches that there is no God. It cannot be surprising then, that the Church, watching with a mother’s jealous care over the eternal interests of her children, has cautioned them in tones of earnest warning against this latest phase of spiritual danger.

But in our day, when Catholic schools and colleges of the highest standard, thank God, exist in our midst, parents make but little sacrifice in keeping their children from non-catholic educational institutions. They therefore are wholly without excuse who disregard the prohibition of their pastors, and for some fancied or trifling material advantage, expose their sons to the loss of faith, and to the imminent risk of their eternal salvation. Such parents have generally, even before their death, occasion to regret their sinful disobedience: for they find the result of their ambition not to answer their expectations. Alas! it is Adam’s and Eve’s sin in another form: they would eat the fruit for the expected knowledge, and they would risk the consequences. The knowledge comes, and the consequences come too, but I need not say, they are not what they were expected to be.

I now come to speak of the religious and moral education that parents are bound to give their children. This consists of three parts, which may be designated as the doctrinal, the moral, and the ritual. Every soul is created to know God, to aspire to union with Him, as its last end, and to be united to Him in eternity. The knowledge of God, then, through the divine revelation which He has lovingly given of Himself, is the first step in religious education. It includes the history of man’s creation and fall, of his redemption, of the Church:—in a word of all God’s action towards men, and of men’s relations to God. This is doctrinal education. But man’s knowledge of God must not be a barren, speculative knowledge. It must lead him to love God, and to aspire to Him; and this is done by observing faithfully the laws which He has made for the guidance of human conduct. The knowledge of these laws in all their details, and of the motives that should induce us to keep them, forms the second or moral part of religious education. If we were able of ourselves, by our natural strength, to perform all that God requires of us, and if there were no necessity of professing externally by acts of divine worship our absolute dependence on Him and His absolute dominion over us, there would be no need of any further knowledge or help to aspire and attain to union with Him. But we require God’s assistance in every step we take towards Him; and we are bound by formal sacrifice, to pay Him the homage of our adoration; and hence, it is necessary to know the means He has mercifully instituted of supplying us with supernatural help, and to know also the nature of that Sacrifice by which we are enabled to offer to Him “a clean oblation,” worthy of His supreme majesty and infinitely acceptable from us. The knowledge then of the Sacrifice and Sacraments of the new law, of prayer, and of the whole economy of divine grace forms the third or ritual part of religious education.

You will perceive, dear reader, that I have given here merely a summary or brief analysis of the contents of an ordinary child’s catechism of Christian doctrine. In truth our catechism, when well learned and understood, is a treasury of spiritual knowledge; and even the old and the learned can always find something profitable in the study of its pages. The mind reads and understands in proportion to its light; and as this light increases, or ought to increase as we grow older, it follows that the reperusal of the catechism of our childhood ought not to be dreaded or avoided in after years, for its sameness and monotony. The material words are indeed the same, but their meaning and their interest for us should be ever deepening in proportion to the spiritual and intellectual development of our souls. Very few, however, look on a catechism as anything more than a child’s book; and as for taking it up and reading it after leaving school, the idea seems never to occur to any one. Among children, too, the catechism is by no means popular. There is no such eagerness displayed in accepting a present of a new one as in receiving a pictured story-book; and if any one make a gift of both, and inspect them, after some days, he will most probably find the former preserved in all its original neatness and freshness, while the latter will show unmistakable signs of frequent use. I think the reason of this unpopularity is easily found. The child does not understand the catechism; and it has to commit it to memory as a task. It looks on it, then, as a dry, uninteresting task-book with no pictures and no stories. Even the cover seems uninviting, and the uniform alternation of Q’s and A’s from beginning to end adds to the general dulness. Hence it is very natural that children manifest no enthusiastic interest in the catechism, and stow it away among their ordinary school-books, and draw it out to learn it with long solemn faces.

Now the catechism is the frame-work of a child’s religious education. It must be learned and understood to gain that three-fold knowledge of which I have already spoken. It is therefore the interest of every one engaged in bringing up children, to invest the catechism with all possible pleasant associations: to make all the hard words bright varied pictures, and all the answers, the morals of sparkling stories, or, what is better, to make them represent angel-guardians, teaching children to be good and holy. When this is done by a fond parent, it cannot fail in producing the desired effect; namely, to make the child love its catechism and learn it with interest. And this is achieving a great deal, perhaps much more than is at all foreseen: for the associations of our childhood, and the remembrance of its guileless pleasures cling to us through all our lives, and have an influence on them that sin does not wholly destroy. The child that is now listening to you, its parent, with moistening eyes and suppressed sobbing, as you tell it of what wicked men did to God when He came on earth for love of them, will never lose the association of your tender love with the history of the Passion; and the Cross will ever again have for it a special human interest that will intensify the higher spiritual interest it has for every Christian. And so will it be with every other truth of faith which you invest with interest.

But, perhaps, you will say, that you leave the catechism to be taught to your children at Sunday-school, and that you have too much to do to take the place of a teacher towards them; or you may have a governess, or a tutor in your family, and you expect this duty to be performed by the one or the other. Now, I do not think that you act prudently in thus throwing all the responsibility of your children’s religious education on others. Of course in those others I do not mean to include priests or any teaching ecclesiastical body. A child is quite safe in their hands; and where their superintendence is within reach, it may be wholly trusted in without scruple. But children will never learn the knowledge of religion, of moral duty, or of ritual observances as thoroughly or with the same interest from other lay teachers as they will from their parents. Therefore, I think, no matter what your employments are, you ought to make time once a day to bring your children around you, and tell them some child-story illustrative of one or other catechetical doctrine. If this be done systematically, by going from question to question, and from chapter to chapter, it will be all the better, and the result will be much more satisfactory than if the questions explained be taken at random.

It will probably be said, that this child-teaching is a special talent, and that all parents are not capable of it. It may be urged moreover, that it requires reading and study, for which parents have no time, and, perhaps, no inclination; and furthermore, that it is a novelty, a crochet, in all likelihood, of the writer of these pages, and therefore a matter of very little importance. As to its being a special talent, and its requiring preparation, I do not believe that it demands more of the one or of the other than is demanded by any serious business of life. There is no man or woman who cannot state a simple fact in simple language and surround it with imagery, suited to a child’s fancy. This is all that is absolutely necessary, and it has to be done every day by parents in reply to their children’s inquiries about surrounding objects. Let the same simplicity of language, the same adaptation of words to the young mind, the same anxiety to please, and interest, and enlighten it, be used in teaching a question of the catechism as is used in answering an inquiry about your watch or your spectacles, or about any other common object, and you will have done substantially all that is required, to give the child a loving interest in the acquirement of religious knowledge.

Nor do I admit that this manner of teaching catechism to children is a novelty. If I thought so I should have considerable difficulty in recommending it: for it would be rash to imply that Christian parents have had to wait nearly nineteen centuries to be told at the present day how best to educate their children in the Christian faith. On the contrary, I believe it to be, in its essential form, the manner dictated naturally by parental love, and always practised by those fathers and mothers who have entertained or entertain an adequate sense of their duties towards their children. At the present day, however, the number of such fathers and mothers is not as large as it ought to be; and hence we find so many others in every grade of society willing to catch at every excuse and every means in any way calculated to lessen their parental responsibility. Hence also, the employment of nurses, nursery-maids, governesses, tutors, &c., on whom parents have thrown all the duty of their children’s bringing up, as well in their religious and moral, as in their intellectual and physical development. They think they can discharge all their parental obligations by proxy; so they permit their children to grow up in a little inner home-circle of their own, an imperium in imperio, visited by them indeed occasionally, but managed independently of their supervision or direction. The consequence is that the children will be found in after life to have taken a leaf out of their parents’ book, and to love them by proxy, as they themselves were loved by proxy. In other words, they will have transferred their affection to those who took the place of father and mother to them; if indeed, as more generally happens, they will not have grown up without any home-affection whatsoever, selfish, soulless things, creatures of fashion, slaves to the hollow forms and ceremonials of society, without one strong religious or moral principle to relieve the barren waste of their lives.

I say, then, that parents themselves ought to be the first teachers of their children in religious matters. But perhaps it may be thought that this course interferes with the teaching authority of the Church. It interferes no more with it than does the employment of Sunday-school teachers: for, like these, parents act only under the guidance and direction of their pastors; they are their helpers and co-operators; and as they never dream of asserting an independent teaching authority, their work shares in the blessing promised to all religious teachers: “They that instruct many to salvation shall shine as stars for all eternity.” (Dan. xii. 3.)

Parents, however, are obliged to bring their children, as soon as they are old enough, under the direct teaching of the Church. They must not take it on themselves to finish their religious education at home, when there is an opportunity of receiving instruction in the Christian doctrine directly from those whose office obliges them to give it. Hence, as a rule that should not be lightly set aside, children ought to be sent punctually to Sunday-school, especially if the Priest in charge of the Parish or Mission gives a catechetical instruction at it. I know it is a custom in some places that the children of the upper classes are not sent there; and the reason generally given is, that only the poor attend it:—a very illogical reason, I must say; for it simply comes to this: “we won’t send our children to Sunday-school, because we don’t send them. The place is not respectable, because we don’t send them; and we won’t send them, because it is not respectable.” But the true reason is, because the pride of wealth, or of position, or of something else, makes it revolting to some purse-proud families to let their children meet in the house and in the presence of Jesus Christ, before whom all men are equal, those other children who wear coarse clothes and live in poverty. But if the Priest superintend the school himself, and if, notwithstanding his fatigues of the morning, he set apart some of the school time to instruct the children personally, then it seems to me positively undutiful and disrespectful to the Church and injurious to the children themselves to keep them away from the teaching of their Pastor, simply because they will have to sit with poor children whose mothers have done all their best to send them as clean and as tidy as they could. p. 59Ah, believe me, dear lady, the divine eyes that are looking out from the Tabernacle see generally, at least as much purity and innocence of soul under those cotton and corduroy garments at which your lip curls in contempt, as under the silk and velvet and fine linen in which you have decked your own dear ones. Send their governess with them, by all means, if you will; and let her see that they do not suffer from any of the physical or moral dangers so often put forward as further excuses;—ask her to help the Priest by teaching a class, if you can get her to do this really good work; but, at all events, send the children, and send them punctually; and do not unteach by your example, what you teach them by word regarding the universal charity and the Christian brotherhood in which we should live with all men. Moreover, the attendance of your children may be the means of bringing others to attend; it may make Sunday-school fashionable; and thus you will help to lighten one of the chief anxieties of your Priest, who generally finds it a matter of extreme difficulty to bring all the children of his Parish together for instruction.

But you ought to send them to your Priest especially when they are preparing for Confirmation and for their first Confession and their first Communion. The occasions on which these Sacraments are received are the most important events in the lives of children. You should not, therefore, rest contented with the religious instruction they receive at home from yourself or others;—it would denote presumption on your part to do so, no matter how thorough such preparation might be; and it would also be taking on yourself a grave responsibility for which you have no legitimate sanction.

There are a few other means of religious education about each of which I wish to say a word. The first is the Sunday sermon. Ought children be made to sit through a long formal sermon intended for adults and almost wholly unintelligible to young minds? I think not. We should not associate religion in the minds of children with that feeling of constraint and wretchedness experienced by them on such an occasion, especially as it does them no good. Perhaps you may say that it is a salutary discipline, and that it teaches them patience and self-control. It may be so; but the lesson is too dearly bought at the price paid for it, particularly as there are many other ways of teaching it to them. If, then, there be a children’s Mass at your Church, send yours to it regularly. If there be none, you must of course bring them to the ordinary Mass, and lighten for them as best you may the tedium they are sure to feel during the sermon-time.

The next means of educating children in religion is to provide them with interesting spiritual books, written specially for them. The importance of this can hardly be exaggerated. Such books fill their imaginations with bright and beautiful images of holy things; they teach them to emulate the pure and noble and self-sacrificing deeds of which they read; they are an antidote against the insidious poison of the ordinary story book or novel, and what is more, against many of the temptations of youth as well as of adult age. They also create a taste for good reading, which taste is one of the most pressing requirements of the present time. Profane, worldly, even infidel literature has a powerful ally in men’s natural craving for excitement and novelty and unreality. The habit of reading such literature is therefore easily acquired, and considering the profusion and cheapness with which it is supplied to the public, we can scarcely be surprised to find the world becoming besotted under its influence. It is, in fact, the right hand of Satan, raised against and striking at Christ’s Church with all its satanic strength; and many and fatal are the wounds it inflicts on individual souls. Parents fulfil, therefore, a double duty towards their children in supplying them with books of Christian tone and pure morality. By the same act, they shield them from a most serious spiritual danger, and they help them to acquire a taste that will have a most important salutary influence on their lives.

Thank God, we have a plentiful supply of Catholic books written expressly for the young; and Catholic parents have no excuse for ignoring them. Yet, to the shame of many of them it must be said, that they do ignore them, and that while their nurseries are well stocked with non-Catholic publications, very few that are purely Catholic can be found there. Of course, owing to our limited numbers compared to protestants, we cannot bring out our books as cheaply as they can; but I think that the price has nothing to do with the selection made by the parents of whom I speak. The fault, I imagine, has a deeper source, and I attribute it to a certain feeling once prevalent amongst us, and even at present not wholly shaken off, namely, that in our secular education, and in our literary productions we are below the standard of our protestant neighbours. We know that we have infinitely superior advantages to them in our Church and Religion; but this knowledge does not keep some of us from looking up to their current literature—not indeed as a protestant literature, but as a work of art—as something far beyond and above any thing that we ourselves are at all able to produce. This feeling is the outcome of the three centuries of social degradation to which protestantism has condemned us; it is a portion of the still unhealed soul-wound that past persecution has inflicted, the mark of the chains with which penal laws fettered our civil and religious liberties. If it were not to digress too much from the direct subject of this chapter I could point out how this same feeling is traceable in all our social and business relations with protestants. But such a digression is unnecessary for my present purpose. To confine myself then to our literature for Catholic children, I assert confidently that it compares favourably in its health and purity of tone, in its artistic finish, in attainment of its object, with the same class of literature outside our Church, whether protestant or unsectarian. I say, therefore, that Catholic parents have no reason for putting uncatholic works into the hands of their children, seeing that they have a plentiful supply of their own for the purpose; and I say also, that there is always danger in doing so. Even though we were to acquit uncatholic writers of all proselytizing intentions in their works for children, there is, nevertheless, in such works something worse than outspoken error, in their suppression of doctrinal teaching; in their exaggeration of natural moral strength, independent of grace; in their assertion, or at least their insinuation of man’s self-sufficiency for attaining the end of his creation. These are faults that are not the less dangerous, because they are hidden beneath the surface, or can only be detected by careful readers.

I shall now sum up the recommendations contained in this chapter. First of all, parents should commence the religious and moral education of their children, by making the catechism interesting to them, and by teaching them religious and moral truths by means of stories, anecdotes, parables, &c. Secondly, they should bring them as soon as they can under the direct teaching of the Church, by sending them to Sunday-school and to catechetical instructions intended for children. Thirdly, they should provide them with attractive books on religious and moral subjects, suited to their intelligence and calculated to create in them a taste for solid and useful reading. I will add too, that they ought to keep from them, not only non-catholic books, but also that poison of young minds, the penny literature of our day.