p. 1Introductory

I Have been for a long time convinced that most of the evils of our social life are traceable to the disorganized state of our homes, and to the almost universal neglect of home duties among us. The end for which divine Providence has grouped individuals in families is generally lost sight of or disregarded; and the means by which those families are to attain that end are perverted to other uses. The child is divinely constituted as the central object of the love and solicitude of its parents, that it may be trained and fitted by them for a place in God’s own family in Heaven. Its first thoughts must be directed thither by the light of Faith, its hope must be fixed there as its last end and resting-place, and its love must be taught to find there the only object to satisfy its longings. From the first unfolding of its faculties, until its home-noviciate is completely finished, the parents must carefully watch over it, and direct and safeguard it among the many dangers which it has to encounter. They must train it by instruction and by example in the knowledge and practice of Religion and of virtue; they must shield it from every evil or dangerous influence; they must teach it to restrain its passions; they must inspire it with a love of duty and with a willing submission to the laws of order and discipline. In a word, their attention and care must be unceasing, until “Christ is formed” in it, and it is prepared to go out into the world and take its place and act its part there as a good Christian man or woman.

The strain of this unceasing attention and care being more than human nature could bear unaided, the sacrament of Christian marriage was instituted to give spiritual strength to parents in the discharge of their home duties, and perhaps chiefly, in the training of their children. But we all know what a mere, hollow, ceremonial form marriage is regarded generally in the world. We know that outside the Church it is little more than a joint-stock partnership, depending mainly for its continuance on mutual interest or expediency, and having little or no binding power on the conscience. Even with ourselves, its sacramental character is frequently ignored or made, at best, in most cases a secondary consideration. The grace it confers is put aside like the bridal dress, and is remembered much less in the after-life of the married parties. Who can wonder then, that disunion and unhappiness follow so many Catholic marriages, notwithstanding the spiritual helps conferred by them? or who can wonder that so many Catholic children are brought up without any solid religious training, when the grace that would help their parents to bring them up properly is ignored or left unheeded?

This neglect accounts to a great extent for the many evils that attend the married state, and combine to develop so many children into pests of society. But there are other causes that help materially to produce these same results, as far as they relate to the education of children. One is the false, narrow, worldly object which parents have generally in view in making provisions for their future. They think that they have fully discharged their duties to them, if they have provided their sons with a respectable profession or a suitable situation, and if they have amassed a large dowry for their daughters; and they deem it only of secondary importance, that these same sons and daughters should be trained in habits of solid virtue and piety. “How is my son getting on in his studies? Will he be likely to pass his examination successfully? Does he seem ambitious of making his way in the world?” Or again: “Is my daughter progressing in her music? Does she develop a taste for drawing and painting? What about her French, her Italian, her German? Is she becoming more refined in her accent, more lady-like in her manner, more graceful in her deportment?” These are some of the usual questions put to teachers and principals of schools; and they show clearly the view that parents take of the kind of education they wish for their children. And very naturally the tone of our public schools is modified by this view. The forty or fifty guineas’ pension is paid chiefly and primarily for a certain kind of intellectual and æsthetic as well as material food, and that kind must be supplied, whatever else is kept back.

I do not mean of course that Religion is ignored in our public education. On the contrary, it has its fixed times liberally appointed for it in all our Catholic schools. But I venture to say, that in complying with the demands of parents for a worldly education, we sometimes put into the background that solid religious training that ought to hold the first place in every Catholic institution. Catechism, Bible and Church history, everything, in a word, necessary or useful to be known about religion or morality is dinned into the young scholar’s ear, until he is as familiar with it as with the first page of his geography or his first exercise in music, and is strongly tempted to hate it as much. It is taken for granted, that he has a natural love for religion; so there is but little effort made to instil such love into his soul. The consequence is, that when he gets away from school supervision and influences, he very often throws off the yoke of practical religion, and does not resume it until he has learned in the world to form that estimate of it, and to conceive that love for it which should have been taught him at school.

Let our children by all means be thoroughly grounded in every branch of secular knowledge; let them be fitted to hold their own in the world around them, and to compete successfully for the highest prizes of life; but let them be given to understand, at the same time, that they will not have attained the supreme end of their being when they will have won those prizes, and that something further will remain for them to do than to sit down and enjoy the fruits of their hard study. When the medical student has become a doctor, or the law student a barrister, or the ecclesiastical student a priest, the prize of life is not yet nearly won: the training for the contest is only finished, and the brunt of the fight is still to be encountered. This is a truth of primary importance which is not always worked, as much as it might be, into the minds of young people at school; and hence we so often see them coming out into the world with crude ideas of religious duty, that are not always adapted to the wear and tear of daily life, and not always staunch enough to resist the strain of temptation. As long, however, as parents continue to form narrow, worldly views for their children, and insist on those views being carried out in our schools, so long will the most zealous efforts of teachers in grounding those under their charge in solid and abiding religious principles be practically frustrated.

Another cause of the evils prevalent in our home life is the relaxed authority of parents over their children. Young people in our day seem not to require nor indeed to brook any parental supervision or control whatsoever. Boys are men, and girls women, before they have entered far into their teens; and when they are twenty-one, old age seems to be already fast coming upon them. This premature and unnatural growth, if indeed it may not rather be called decay, is manifested most of all in their disobedience and contemptuous treatment of their parents. The father’s ways and his views of things are antiquated and behind the age to the developed mind of the boy of thirteen; and the girl of the same age, called away from her penny journal or her dog-eared novel, pouts and frowns at the homely duties in which she is asked to assist. Now, if the first symptoms of impertinence or disobedience were checked with firmness and due severity in the child, there would be little danger of any serious after-outbreak. But parents often look on such symptoms as so many marks of spirit and independence; and some fathers and mothers are foolish enough to be proud of them and to encourage them. They learn, however, the folly of their indulgence when the child becomes older, and its disobedience has grown into a confirmed habit. And, oh! what bitter fruits that confirmed habit bears! bitter for the parents in their helpless old age; bitter for the young man’s or the young woman’s self in an undisciplined life; and bitter also for society on which that life preys like a cancer.

I shall not anticipate here the enumeration of the other evils that require to be corrected in our home life, as they will be pointed out in detail in the course of the following pages. What I have written, however, will, I think, show sufficiently how necessary it is to attend more carefully than we are used to do, to the duties that our position in the home circle entails upon us. It is my purpose in the present work to explain those duties, their importance, their difficulty, and their bearing on the end of our being. The subject is one in which we are all interested; for we are all in one way or another mixed up in the discharge of home duties, and each of us forms an unit in some family group on which we can, if we will, exercise a beneficial influence. I think it will be admitted, that such influence is not now generally exercised, and that the want of it to the world is making itself painfully felt.

The Church recognizes this want also with that divine instinct which comes from the Holy Spirit within her, and hence, we see her manifesting in these latter times a special and marked interest in the sanctification of home life. She not only sanctions and promotes, by her exhortations and indulgences, many particular devotions that have for their central object the hidden family life of our divine Lord at Nazareth; but she has also established confraternities and congregations to commemorate and honour His Infancy and Childhood. “The Holy Family,” too, has given its name, within our own time, to one of our most popular and wide-spreading special devotions. But perhaps this interest of the Church is best shown by the extraordinary development of devotion to Saint Joseph, which has taken place within the present generation. All the beauty and sanctity of his life came from his fidelity to home duties. He is therefore in a particular manner the patron of home life, and as such he has been appointed the guardian and protector of the universal Church, and placed with special prominence before the minds of the faithful for their study and imitation. These and many other circumstances in modern ecclesiastical history point to this one conclusion, that the Church, seeing the gradual disorganization of home life, would recall the attention of her children to its proper, Christian regulation, by holding up before them the home and family at Nazareth, as the purest and highest and most perfect type on earth of what our present home life ought to be. She would thus train them for that future life in store for them in their Father’s home in heaven.