p. 202Paternal Authority and Public Education

These Teachers were known to maintain that double commerce which Muratori styles sweet and useful—with the wise living and the wise dead.¹1Dulce est eruditionis sectatoribus quotidie cum mortuis versari; dulcius profecto futurum, cum vivis, a quibus brevi facilique compendio eruditior in dies discedas. “It is sweet to the votaries of knowledge to hold daily converse with the dead; but far sweeter will it be to converse with the living, from whose intercourse, by a short and easy method, one may daily become more learned.” The guides of the Catholic School, as the learned men of the Church from primitive times, are still what they once were—clear but mystical—devoted to serve men with an intense affection, but separate from the crowd. Remote from all egotism, it is clear to their disciples that they only obey a high influence, and that their awful task is imposed. This character of retirement and solemnity adds a great interest to their lessons, as to their books. Youth will not turn from them to hear a teacher, who, like the generality of writers now, is one of the public—a man of noise, a man of news, a man of money.

Kenelm Henry Digby.

An unerring instinct in the heart of a Catholic parent will direct him, in seeking for his boy the guides who can lead the latter safely through the walks of classic antiquity, and the bewildering mazes of modern science—like the ill-arranged departments of some Centennial Exhibition—to select the men who have sought eminence in learning through a holy ambition, and who impart it for His love who “is a God of all knowledge.” It is a great attraction too for men who have had themselves, very often, to fight a hard battle with fortune, and whose ancestors had to endure all but the loss of life in fostering Catholic education,—to be able to give their sons, their money, and their heartfelt sympathy to institutions of higher learning struggling against the most adverse circumstances.

If parents could only understand, that, much as the parish school deserves of their unflinching support, the College and the University are even more deserving of their enthusiastic advocacy and utmost generosity. For the parish school is destined to serve as a feeder to the college, just as colleges are, in the mind of the Church, to serve as fruitful nurseries to the University. And if the body of our people only knew,—what the author can speak of from the most certain knowledge,—how little the noble men who devote their entire existence to the arduous functions of classical instruction, receive of active, cheering sympathy and sadly needed support from the community they serve so well! No—there is no class of toilers for the public welfare, who should be more cordially helped on in the divine life-work they are doing, than those who rear our priests, our statesmen, our enlightened merchants and professional men.

The Divine Work done by our Colleges

The sole aim and sole care of these devoted guides of youth,—the very flower of our aristocracy of learning and piety,—is to prepare for the Church and the country public men whose example shall be a living lesson to all beneath and around them, and whose salutary influence shall counterbalance that of the unprincipled, the irreligious, the selfish, and the sensual. Farther on in this book, we shall speak of schools of science,—whether theoretical or applied. We only wish at present to direct the parent in the choice of a proper establishment of higher education, and to offer to the educators themselves some practical suggestions that may aid them not a little in their labors.

That in our establishments of higher Education we should have men whose sole interest and sole avocation lie in their doing thoroughly the work of rearing youth to the practice of true piety as well as to solid learning, must be a subject of congratulation to Christian parents. There is so much heart-satisfaction for a father and a mother in the thought that the men and women to whom they intrust their dear ones, will make of their advancement in virtue a matter of even greater importance than their progress in knowledge!

The Catholic Ideal of Religious Teachers of Youth

The ideal followed by such teachers of youth all through the middle ages is thus described by Digby:

“The care of religious men to educate the young was not confined to supplying them with oral or written instruction. It was for them especially that religion loved, under the form of the fine arts, to impress on the material elements around, the stamp of ideal humanity, that, as Fichte says, ‘at their very awakening into life, they might be environed by noble objects, such as by a certain sympathetic power, would educate the outward senses, whereby the education of the inner man might be greatly facilitated.’ It was the object of education not so much to impart a variety of knowledge, as to cultivate that mind which would be able either to reap the benefit of knowledge subsequently obtained, where an extraordinary degree of knowledge was required, or to discharge the ordinary duties of life with honesty and perseverance to the end, where there was no occasion for acquiring such a distinction.”

“Agreeable to this plan, the young were to be thoroughly imbued with a delicate and profound sense of everything noble and gracious, which would be alike useful to all; that, to borrow a simile from Plato, as the young who inhabit a healthy spot are benefited by everything around them, so whatever was thrown before them from beautiful deeds, whether in the way of seeing or of hearing, like an air from pure places bearing health, might lead them to a resemblance, and friendship, and harmony, with what is good and fair.”²2“Mores Catholici; or, Ages of Faith,” b. i., chap. vii.

To his ideal of education in ages that must ever be dear to the Christian soul, let us only bring the living, practical spirit, the thorough intelligence of the needs of modern society, and the hearty earnestness, which endeared to all who knew him the great educator of our own times mentioned in the following passage. We submit it to the consideration of all our great teaching bodies.

Earnest Workers doing Noble Work

“The most remarkable thing which struck me at once on joining the Laleham circle, was the wonderful healthiness of tone and feeling which prevailed in it. Everything about me I immediately found to be most real; it was a place where a new-comer at once felt that a great and earnest work was going forward. Dr. Arnold’s³3Thomas Arnold, D. D., born in 1795, died in 1842. He was, successively, head master of the Classical Schools of Laleham and Rugby,—preeminently successful in each. great power as a private tutor resided in this, that he gave such an intense earnestness to life. Every pupil was made to feel that there was a work for him to do—that his happiness as well as his duty lay in doing that work well. Hence an indescribable zest was communicated to a young man’s feelings about life; a strange joy came over him on discovering that he had the means of being useful, and thus of being happy; and a deep respect and ardent attachment sprang up towards him who had taught him thus to value life and his own self, and his work and mission in this world.”

“All this was founded on the breadth and comprehensiveness of Arnold’s character, as well as its striking truth and reality; on the unfeigned regard he had for work of all kinds, and the sense he had of its value both for the complex aggregate of society and the growth and perfection of the individual.”

“Thus pupils of the most different natures were keenly stimulated; none felt that he was left out, or that, because he was not endowed with large powers of mind, there was no sphere open to him in the honorable pursuits of usefulness. This wonderful power of making all the pupils respect themselves, and in awakening in them a consciousness of the duties that God has assigned to them personally, and of the consequent reward each should have for his labors, was one of Arnold’s most characteristic features as a trainer of youth. He possessed it eminently at Rugby; but, if I may trust my own vivid recollection, he had it quite as remarkably at Laleham.”

“His hold over all his pupils I know perfectly astonished me. It was not so much an enthusiastic admiration for his genius, or learning, or eloquence, which stirred within them; it was a sympathetic thrill, caught from a spirit that was earnestly at work in the world—whose work was healthy, sustained, and constantly carried forward in the fear of God—a work which was founded on a deep sense of its duty and its value; and was coupled with such a true humility, such an unaffected simplicity, that others could not help being invigorated by the same feeling, and with the belief that they too in their measure could go and do likewise.”

“In all this there was no excitement, no predilection for one class of work above another; no enthusiasm for any one-sided object; but a humble, profound, and most religious consciousness that work is the appointed calling of man on earth, the end for which his various faculties were given, the element in which his nature is ordained to develop itself, and in which his progressive advance toward heaven is to lie. Hence, each pupil felt assured of Arnold’s sympathy in his own particular growth and character of talent; in striving to cultivate his own gifts, in whatever direction they might lead him, he infallibly found Arnold not only approving, but positively and sincerely valuing for themselves the results he had arrived at; and that approbation and esteem gave a dignity and a worth both to himself and to his labor.”⁴4Quoted from Knight, “Half Hours with the Best Authors.” The italics are our own.

The Presiding Spirit makes the School

There is no doubt of it—the entire and most perfect success of the work of education, carried on at any one moment by a great school or public establishment, depends on the master spirit who presides over it, and who knows how to infuse his own earnestness into his subordinates, to communicate to every one of his pupils something of the sacred fire which burns within his own bosom. Where every pupil is “made to feel that there is work for him to do,—that his happiness as well as his duty lies in doing that work well,” there will of a necessity be earnestness, not to say enthusiasm, in the daily and hourly efforts of each student.

There is a way of making boys at college know and feel, that the study of Greek and Latin is only an introduction to the whole of that ancient world and its civilization, with which the world and civilization of to-day are so intimately connected. We know,—and many among our readers, we doubt not, have known, very young people, girls even of tender age, who make it a delight to master the languages of Greek and Rome, that they may thus be enabled to read and appreciate the masterpieces of their great writers.

Let the men to whose lot it falls to teach boys the first elements of the rich and beautiful tongues of Virgil and Horace and Cicero,—of Xenophon, Plato, Demosthenes, and Homer,—be the men they ought to be, full of the Christian spirit,—thoroughly acquainted with the languages they undertake to teach, thoroughly in love with their work, and deeply interested in the advancement of each of their pupils; knowing how to throw around their lessons and explanations a little of that light of fancy which is so lovely and attractive to young minds;—and they will find little difficulty in communicating to these a love for their studies.

It is because the men who are charged with the task of teaching Greek and Latin, are themselves but most imperfectly acquainted with the simplest elements of these languages (and we have known many such), that the labor of learning, for boys full of life and naturally impatient of dullness, becomes one of intolerable hardship.

A Bad Teacher is a cruel injustice to his Scholars

We remember, in an institution for the highest and most important of all human sciences,—to have seen a man intrusted with the duty of teaching a class of Hebrew to young men who had been themselves, every one of them, for years occupied in teaching the higher classes,—and this Hebrew scholar had to spell most painfully every word and syllable of the text (the Book of Psalms) he had undertaken to explain. Of course he blundered even in the spelling, confounding long vowels with short, and mixing up in inextricable confusion the various consonants. Of prosody, or harmony, or all the innate beauty and grace of the language of the Royal Prophet,—there was not, could not, be found a trace in these absurd readings. And yet for a whole year this preposterous system of teaching Hebrew was allowed to disgrace the institution and insult the intelligence of the men on whom it was afflicted, and who could not help themselves!

Not so had we been taught in our own dear Alma Mater, where the most accomplished Rabbi to be had in the land was called in and well paid to initiate us into the first elements of the inspired tongue. The very phrase as it flowed from his lips impressed itself on our memory; its very harmony made us desirous of possessing the language and resolved to master all its difficulties.

Superiors of colleges, then, who are thoroughly in earnest about having their work done and well done, will see to it that those who cooperate with them in their most important labors, shall be not only thoroughly in earnest, like themselves, but thoroughly competent, as well, to do the work they take in hand.

They are aware that the mental education of every boy intrusted to them, is like the planning and rearing of an edifice destined to last forever: they know, therefore, that the foundations must be carefully and solidly laid, if they would have the superstructure stand. For, in the name of common sense, what can you build on foundations which are themselves, without substance, solidity or cohesion?

Irreparable wrong of employing Incompetent Teachers for Beginners

Hence, the absurdity, the crying injustice to both parents and pupils, of giving the charge of grammar schools or elementary schools in any educational establishment, to men who are not perfectly masters of the branches to be taught therein. An uncommonly clever boy will always manage, if he be at all intent on learning, to pick up from his own reading and reflections, enough to make up the deficiency in his master’s knowledge or method. Indeed, such boys learn but little from any but the best masters; for they are pretty sure to be in advance of his lessons and of the majority of their fellow-students.

Here, however, our plea is in favor of the majority, or of the large minority in every large class of ordinary intellects. Their intellectual food has to be prepared for them with great skill and presented in form and quantity suited to their mental capacity and appetite.

This large minority is made up, most frequently, of the very men who will one day be the solid, influential men of every profession. They are not, while at school, the quick, the brilliant, or the clever men; they are, as experience shows, the men who are slow, serious, studious, and sure to succeed in the end. We have seen so many of these brilliant and dazzling college geniuses, come to nought in mature age, like these marvelous plants of Java and Sumatra which grow up to their full perfection in a single night, expand their bright flowers to the morning sun, and droop and wither before it has set. Their slower and less shining companions of the forest, are more timid in putting forth their early shoots, and less ambitious to display their rapid growth and flowering pride. The palms which furnish food to man, the oaks and other forest trees which go to build his home and his fleets, are the growth of years. All nature’s most perfect and durable works are the slow and gradual produce of time.

Do not neglect the Slow Many for the Clever Few

It would, then, be both want of wisdom and want of justice in any teacher to proportion his pains to the uncommon capacity of the few, while neglecting the need and claims of the many. And, surely, it can be neither wise, nor just, nor prudent in the faculty of any great institution to provide the more advanced pupils with skilled and experienced talent, while leaving the beginners to the mercy of mere tyros or blockheads.

It is, then, the interest and duty of the father to be most solicitous about the progress of his boy during this early stage of college study, and to inquire conscientiously into the quality of the instruction given him in every branch. Just as he would be most careful to watch over the moral purity of the young student and to inquire into his progress in self-restraint and self-denial, even so must he make sure that he is taught what is promised, that he learns thoroughly what he is taught, and that he does not acquire at the very beginning of his intellectual life, these habits of mental indolence and inaccuracy, which are scarcely less fatal to professional success, than the kindred moral habits are to solid virtue.

We repeat it, therefore: this thoroughness, earnestness, heartiness, are necessary in the men who take upon themselves the all-important task of guiding boys in the very first stages of classical education. The “indescribable zest” mentioned in the last extract, and the “strange joy” felt by children and youths who climb a high mountain for the first time, and look down from the summit on some glorious and untrodden region beyond, can never be the feeling of such as follow the guidance of those who cannot climb, and to whom the most modest literary eminence is as formidable a height as Mont Blanc or the Matterhorn.

Who of us, in boyhood and in early youth, had not experienced that same “indescribable zest” for facing impossible difficulties, as we ran along beside a loved master or parent over the broad sunny fields or up some wooded hillside? Did not the spirit which gave buoyancy and strength to every limb come from the companionship and cheering words of the man we loved dearest on earth? And was not “the strange joy” of difficulty overcome and success accomplished begotten by his smile and his happiness in our efforts?

The Teacher’s Enthusiasm, how Contagious!

Our readers will pardon us one reminiscence, all the more readily that no personal vanity mingles with the memories it calls up. In the ever-dear and venerable institution which opened its arms to us, a stranger and an orphan, nearly half a century ago, we found men the exact counterparts of Dr. Arnold, his equals, assuredly, if not his superiors, in disinterestedness and self-sacrificing devotion to their holy calling, and not his inferiors in secular or sacred knowledge:—men, belonging by their birth to the first families in the land, and deeming it more than royal honor to serve God in their lowly and obscure labor of teaching youth, without other stipend than the roof above them and their humble garb of priestly poverty; men whose heart and soul were in their work, and who knew how to kindle in our young hearts an ardent zeal for our own advancement, as well as a deep respect and lasting attachment toward themselves.

If, looking back now and comparing our own experiences and observations, we are forced to give to the great school to which we owe everything under God, the tribute of an admiration which only increases with each succeeding year,—it is because we recall how our dear masters labored to infuse into every student among their five hundred the hearty love of study and the no less hearty love of piety. That there should be, in a school over which such men presided, whose whole life was the “Imitation of Christ” in practice, an atmosphere of genuine purity and piety, was natural; but there was, at the same time, an atmosphere of earnest emulation for study. In one other house—in France and beneath the very shadow of the ancient castle of the Laval-Montmorencys, did we see an equal zest for study, and, as should be expected, an incomparable fervor of piety,—as if the name of the great bishop who had founded the time-honored institution far away on the banks of the St. Lawrence, drew down a special and an equal blessing on it and on the great seminary that flourished beneath the shadow of his ancestral halls.

We cannot help, in reading the life of Dr. Arnold, and remembering the man who above all others crowned the work of Francis De Laval-Montmorency,⁵5The late Very Reverend Louis Jacques Casault, D. D., who obtained the erection of Laval University, Quebec. seeing in our own admired master every excellence set forth by the biographer in the renowned head-master of Laleham and Rugby. He was our companion in our studies, laboring continually with us, making the labor light not only by that high intelligence which could explain, simplify, and illumine what was most difficult and abstruse, but by making the labor joyous by his bright wit and sunny spirit.

Classical Studies a Training for the Public Man

College or university education is, of course, specially designed to train men for every walk of professional and public life. It is not only churchmen, statesmen, and military men, but lawyers, physicians, great architects and engineers, great manufacturers and merchants, and men of independent wealth and position, who find in such schools the varied knowledge and ripe science they need,—but men of the most varied avocations, and of every social rank are fitted by such training,—when it really is what it professes to be,—to work successfully and attain eminence in any useful pursuit.

A young man who has gone through a complete and serious college or university course, under masters who were, not shams, but thoroughly able to teach whatever they professed, is ready, on returning to his family, to enter upon any career that his talents, his inclination, may suit him for, or the will of his parents may open to him.

The Parents to blame for the Failure of their Sons

That many do not bring from several years spent in college, the accomplishments and business aptitudes for which their parents were so anxious,—is due to a variety of causes, one of which, and not unfrequently the chief cause, is the parents’ own want of consistency.

Let us explain this. As we have said above, the work of education is and ever should be,—in order to be successful,—the joint work of teachers and parents. This holds true of college training fully as much as of grammar-school learning. Indeed, we should rather say, that to make a college course perfectly successful there is need of a more watchful, more cordial, and more constant cooperation on the part of the father.

When you send your boy to the parish or the public school in order that he may get a thorough knowledge of what will fit him for a trade or for commercial business, both you and he, as well as his teachers, perfectly understand what the boy wants in the way of learning and what he is to do with it. He gets it within the expected time, and is forthwith apprenticed to his proper business.

This cannot be done with boys sent to college. You cannot determine beforehand, no more than the boy can himself, what profession he will embrace once his college course is completed. For a college course is by its nature intended to prepare young men for the learned professions, the priesthood, the law, and medicine.⁶6Hence the anomaly,—a most calamitous one,—of having a “Commercial course” in some of our colleges. Necessity alone,—the necessity of affording to children coming from Central and South America a school where they can be given a business education while having their faith protected,—can excuse the temporary existence of such a strange and baneful division of studies. If our trained professional educators of the highest grade thus take on themselves to teach “book-keeping,” etc., can they be justly surprised or offended, if men destined professedly, to give nothing but commercial or business training, should usurp the higher functions of classical and university education? It will not do to say Ne sutor ultra crepidam. In truth the essentially important is that as in skilled mechanical labor, so in skilled intellectual labor and professional training, every one should qualify himself to do thoroughly what he promises, and not undertake what he is not qualified to perform. Very, very rarely does it happen that any one can predict of a boy who enters upon the long and important course of college education, that he will to a certainty become a priest,—and so of any of the other professions.

Besides, the Church, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the experience of eighteen centuries to enlighten her on the ways of men,—has ever had a most prudent care of college youth,—the flower of her children. She knows that, as it is for the sacred ministry,—so is it for each of the secular professions,—God must call to its duties those who are to fulfill them without deadly peril to themselves and with all usefulness to others. She has well-approved rules for the guidance of her ministers in determining who is called and who is not, as well as for the direction of the young men, who, at the close of their college studies, must elect what path they are to pursue in order to serve God in conformity with His will and their own intellectual and moral capacity.

When your Son can choose understandingly

And it is only at the termination of these studies that such an election can be made with any degree of wisdom. Most unwise,—to say the least of it,—is the conduct of parents, who, having set their hearts upon having their son a priest, leave him no freedom in his own choice, and thus do him moral violence to impel him into a career for which he has neither vocation nor aptitude. What can they expect but misery to him and bitterness of heart for themselves, from a course so opposed to conscience and right reason?

We are not, of course, denying that it is a most laudable desire in parents to have their sons advanced to the priestly office. Too many and too touching traditions connected with our native country and race, have cast a halo around fathers and mothers who sacrificed everything and endured the utmost of privation to see their child ministering at the dear altars of their faith. But we are only pleading here,—and in the interest of both the parents and their sons,—the necessity of not considering their becoming priests a foregone conclusion. The circumstances which made the desire of such parents not only heroic, but almost a sure sign of the divine will, have passed away with the secular persecution that begat them. In the English-speaking world, there is now perfect freedom. Hence it is, that the will of God must have precedence of the desire of parents in a matter where the divine honor, and the dearest interests of religion are so nearly concerned.

How sacredly College Students should be Shielded from Evil

What is most important for parents, who entertain such a praiseworthy ambition,—and what is to our immediate purpose at present,—is, that every father who sends his son to college with such a hope, should take especial care not to foster in his child’s soul inclinations or habits that would render him unfit not only for the sacred ministry, but for any profession or public trust.

We must be pardoned, if we speak more plainly and say here how very little care certain parents take, during vacations from college studies, to preserve their sons from amusements and associations that are utterly irreconcilable with their avowed purpose. How often have not the heads of colleges to mourn over the total ruin of piety and innocence effected during a single vacation by the blind indifference or criminal indulgence of parents! The habits of self-denial and self-control contracted during ten months of severe discipline and courageous efforts at self-improvement, are lost in a single month, or a single week, and superseded by habits which we do not dare to describe. And yet, these very parents will be the first to cast on the college the blame which belongs solely to the parental home and its utter want of discipline!

Parents who have themselves had the benefit of a thorough university training understand all this well, and are careful to sustain the college authorities, even when everything does not please them in the way their boys are getting on. They are also most careful to encourage and direct the praiseworthy love of self-improvement in the latter,—feeling sure the while, that where a boy has talent and application, his college course will make a man of him, in spite of his professor’s shortcomings.

Another cause of the baneful impatience of parents is the necessity which compels our colleges to admit, side by side with the undergraduates, very young boys, and, therefore, to have in a house professedly devoted to the higher classical and university studies,—not only grammar schools for teaching Greek and Latin, as preparatory to Humanities, Rhetoric, and Philosophy,—but an English elementary course preparatory to the grammar schools themselves. This gives the college a false position in the eyes of the parents, especially when these send their children very young, and when they are themselves uneducated, or, at any rate, unacquainted with the ancient classics.

Too much Demanded of our Colleges

They see their next-door neighbor’s boys, who are trained in the town school, not seldom more advanced in English, arithmetic, geography, reading, writing, etc., than their own boys of the same age at college; and then, at a time when the neighbor’s boy has completed his course at the public school, and is entering on business, their boy is painfully toiling through elementary Latin, and later plodding still more laboriously through elementary Greek. They, judging things from their own standard, do not see and cannot appreciate the progress their son has made in all these years. They hear their illiterate acquaintance say—they, perhaps, hear their boy himself saying, “What is the use of Greek and Latin? Why spend so much time and spend so much money in learning, or trying to learn, dead languages, while the living English mother-tongue is (apparently) neglected?”...

Reasoning thus,—they are tempted to take their boy away in the very middle of his studies, and then blame the college for their own fatal blundering. Now let us look at this in the light of common sense.

Folly of Interrupting College Studies

There is no tradesman, no skilled mechanic knowing from his own experience how much time and labor it costs to become a first-rate worker in any craft, but would condemn such trifling with the work of a thorough education. A craftsman knows that a boy has to undergo his apprenticeship to the end in order to be thoroughly master of what he intends to learn. Nay,—you will find very few first-rate tradesmen who would not lengthen the term of apprenticeship rather than shorten it, so convinced are they of the necessity of long study and long practice to acquire consummate skill. They would think a man a fool who, having bound his son for seven years to a most important trade, would take him away at the end of three or five years under the pretext that, if the boy does not know his business by this time, he must be a blockhead or an idler, and his master not much better. The common sense of the average laboring man would condemn any parent for thus trifling with his boy’s future.

Shall we set up a standard utterly opposed to this unerring common sense, when we have to judge of studies and training that are, in reality, an apprenticeship to the most important of all arts, the highest of all professions?

Let us go a step farther in this most practical subject.

The course of nature is, that, under ordinary circumstances, boys until their twelfth or thirteenth year should be prepared for college at home, under the eye of exemplary parents, enjoying all the blessed influences of the family circle. Nothing,—so God has ordained it,—can, in the ordinary course of life, take the place of a true Christian mother’s love in forming within her home the mind and heart of her boys at this early age. The discipline established by her, supported by the father’s whole authority, and perfected by his companionship with his sons,—is the most priceless of blessings for the future collegian,—the future public man.

It is, therefore,—speaking always with the same reservations,—an irreparable calamity for the boy, when he is taken prematurely from beneath his mother’s wing to receive elsewhere the nurture which her love can alone bestow;—or when, deprived of a mother, or, again, when unblessed by a true Christian mother,—a boy is cast almost from childhood into the midst of a hundred or more other boys, like a blind puppy into a pond, to swim and scramble ever afterward for salvation and the life of heart and spirit.

Not all the supernatural devotedness of the best of masters can make up for this privation of maternal love and fostering tenderness.

When, however, a sad necessity imposes on our Catholic institutions these parental functions, it should not be forgotten that an immense debt of gratitude is contracted by the parents, and that abuse of our institutions is but an ungraceful way of discharging it.

If, therefore, you deem it imperative,—because you cannot obtain at home for your young boys the religious training which you desire,—to intrust them thus early to priestly hands, make up your mind at the same time to let the young tree grow through the remaining months of winter, through the slow spring and the stormy summer, watching and waiting patiently while the autumn of college-life is ripening and perfecting the fruits which are to reward your trustfulness, and your generous cooperation in this long husbandry.

It is important to Begin Well; it is infinitely so to End Well

It would be folly to place them in a college at so young an age, if you did not intend to keep them there to the end. It would be worse folly to take them out in the middle of their studies, in order to put them to business, or under the pretense that they have learned enough. The worst folly of all would be to interrupt the work of their thorough culture, just as the college course was near its close. You would thereby resemble the man who had watched his peach tree blossoming, and the fruit growing after the blossom; and who, becoming weary of long waiting, would pluck the fruit while still green, and before the golden sun of autumn had matured and mellowed it. If you have but bitter and unsavory fruit on your table, after all your labor and waiting, who is to blame but yourself?

Think well, then, before you determine fully to give your child the benefit, the priceless benefit, of a college education; think ten times more seriously before you determine to take him away in the middle of his course; but let no consideration induce you to withdraw him when he is in the last crowning years of his intellectual and moral training.

The Distinction between a College Course and a University Course of Studies

This is the proper place for pointing out the essential but little-understood difference between a complete college course and a university course proper. The former aims at giving such complete and thorough instruction in ancient and modern letters, in history, philosophy, and the sciences, as to enable the student at its close, to begin forthwith the special study of any of the great professions of theology, law, or medicine. This was formerly and is still characteristic of the colleges or college-schools founded and patronized by the Church,—the parent of university education.

The university, as distinguished from the college, gave instruction in these learned professions, enabling their respective students to become, successively and at determined stages of their course, bachelors, masters or licentiates, and doctors, in theology, ecclesiastical and civil law, or in medicine.

Thus, to borrow an illustration from the great Catholic Laval University, in Quebec;—the Seminary of Quebec, out of which the Laval University has grown, as the crown of ripe dates from the palm tree,—has its collegiate school which, at the end of the full course of literary and scientific instruction, qualifies the students by a searching oral and written examination to become bachelors of arts, or bachelors of letters, or bachelors of sciences, according to their proficiency in all the branches taught, or to their relative superiority in letters or in the sciences, while falling below the necessary degree of excellence in the other cognate branches.

The bachelor’s degree confers on the graduate the right to have his name registered forthwith for any of the three university courses of theology, law, and medicine, which he elects to follow. Over each of these courses presides a board of professors called, collectively, the faculty; each faculty confers degrees in its respective branch; and each has a special register on which is solemnly inscribed the name of each student duly qualified, this ceremony being called matriculation.

We should add, that the collegiate school (Petit Seminaire) is charged with the Department of Arts or that which, besides preparing, as above stated, all students for the university courses proper, perfects them in ancient and modern literature, and the mathematical and physical sciences, enabling them not only to acquire the degree of proficiency therein necessary for the bachelor’s degree, but further perfecting them so as to become themselves masters in the great art of teaching and forming others in the professor’s chair.

Parents, as well as all intelligent readers, will appreciate the exceeding care taken by the Church in past ages and at present, to prepare for their high and holy duties not only the priest who has to be the religious guide and teacher of others, but the lawyer and the magistrate who have to discuss and administer the laws of the State, and the physician in whose hands are placed the health, the life, the honor of families. We need not say that the legislator, the statesman and the publicist find also in the law school the science which can alone surely guide them in laboring by voice and pen for the dearest interests of their own nationality, and of the entire brotherhood of nations.

Fathers who think of all this in putting their sons to college, should, therefore, know that the college is itself in its most conscientious completeness, but a preparation for what is or must be, under one name or another, the university proper or its equivalent.

A Thorough Education fits one for Thorough Work

You wish to see your son a priest; but you would not have him other than a priest fit to teach all sacred science, and fit, as well, to appreciate the truth of all secular science. Do not say that the perspective of all these long years of study, and of preparation after preparation, is only fit to discourage both parents and students. After having gone through the ordeal ourselves, and having had a long subsequent experience in the ministry,—we are forced to say most earnestly,—that our fear is not that the student of theology will become a priest too late or enter at too ripe an age on the awful duties of his new office; our fear could only be to see him become too soon the teacher and guide of others, without having gathered the fruit of knowledge in its delicious maturity, when he could himself appreciate its qualities and commend them to the taste of his hearers.

A high-minded Christian father, who is guided in his desires and his judgments by such lofty views as these, will feel himself richly rewarded at seeing his son enter public life armed with that sure scientific knowledge, which is a mighty power to sway other men. This very knowledge will enable the priest, the lawyer, the physician, the scientist, the publicist, or the artist,—to make his mark at once. For, the amount of good done is not measured by time, but by the perfection with which it is accomplished.

It is not necessary that a priest should labor many years, but that he should labor well and to good purpose. Our Great High Priest lived thirty years in the obscurity, toil, and subjection of Nazareth; He labored in public only three years; and His praise in the Gospel is: “He hath done all things well; He hath made both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak.”⁷7St. Mark, vii. 37.

For every son of yours, whether priest or layman, may your sweetest reward be to hear such praise from the lips of the good and the great!

The outcry against Greek and Latin

If we have not wearied you outright, dear reader, we would fain add a few words in this place, and before concluding this chapter, on the opposition to the teaching of Greek and Latin in our modern colleges. Parents who hear the senseless outcry made on this subject, ought to know precisely both the motives of those who make it and the solid reasons on which is founded the universal practice of Christian schools for so many centuries.

When the opponents of classical education have asserted noisily, that Greek and Latin are “dead languages,” and that the youth of the nineteenth century should not waste on studying the literary remains of dead nations so many precious years, which were more usefully bestowed in mastering living literatures,—they fancy that to this implied argument there is no possible answer.

It is, however, a manifest fallacy. The Greek and the Latin are not, and never have been, dead languages in the sense in which our opponents would have it understood. Till the downfall of the Greek Empire in 1453, both the classic language of Demosthenes and Plato, and the local popular dialects, had never ceased to be in use,—the former in the numerous schools of the East, the latter among all classes in ordinary conversation. Even now, after more than four centuries of forced intellectual sterility much more than of religious intolerance, the vernacular Greek of Athens is nearer to the exquisite dialect of the Attic masters, than the vernacular Italian is to the tongue of Cicero. And yet, the very best modern scholars have good reason for affirming that the Italian spoken throughout the Peninsula is not a corruption of the Latin, but a living popular language coeval with the dialect of Latium, and ever spoken side by side with the latter, when it had become the polished and perfected idiom of the masters of Rome and of Italy. Wherefore it can be said, as a thing historically probable, if not certain, that, although since the downfall of Constantinople and of living Greek literature, the pure idiom of Attica ceased to be heard in the schools of oppressed Greece, still it continued to be spoken in its popular form everywhere, and to be understood by every educated person. Nor did all the learned men of Greece migrate to Western Europe after May the 29th, 1453.

How much more certain and undeniable is it that the Latin tongue, the official dialect of Rome and its government, the cherished idiom of its poets, its orators and its historians, never, for one year or one day, ceased,—even after the downfall of the Western Roman Empire,—to be the language of the schools, the law courts, the government, and, especially, of the Church in her liturgy and her official teachings and administration. Rome,—and the great intellectual centers created by Christian Rome throughout her vast empire,—have never at any time till now ceased to speak as a living language the tongue of Cicero, Livy, and Horace.

Thus, it is no exaggeration to say, that wide-spread as was the use of the Latin tongue in the days of Cicero, and apart from the mere perfection or elegance of form,—its use was even more general in Italy and throughout Western Europe in the days of Leo X.

Disuse of the Latin in Protestant Countries

Since the religious disruption caused, at that epoch, by Luther and his associates,—the Latin as the language of the schools and universities, as that of the great learned professions, and as the medium of official and epistolary intercourse, has been abandoned by Protestants, precisely because it was the language of Christian Rome. In our own day, moreover, rationalists and revolutionists have been unanimous in raising an outcry against the culture of the ancient literatures.

But the sounder public opinion of both Europe and America does not favor this sacrifice of the Greek and Latin to modern theories of progress and civilization. And we trust the day is far distant when the study of the classic masterpieces of Italian and Grecian genius shall cease to form the chief basis of high literary studies.

Indeed, in European countries that we need not name, one of the features of the recent wholesale persecutions against the Catholic Church, was the substitution of living languages for Latin and Greek, the compulsory education of clerical students in the State schools, and the consequent abolition of all special seminaries for the training of Catholic youth.

Efforts to destroy Priestly Vocations and Education

Thereby the enemy showed that he understood the teaching of the Classics and the use of Latin and Greek to be one of the great instruments of the Church not only in her own special work of teaching and enlightening, but in the more general labor of promoting the true civilization of the race. We mean, of course, that in all Christian schools due prominence should be given to the Christian classics,—to the writings of the early Greek and Latin Fathers, whose beauties of thought and diction are all the more thoroughly enjoyed, when a thorough Christian and a thorough scholar fills the professor’s chair, and guides the young minds he is training so as to see and admire only what is truly beautiful and admirable.

Let Catholic parents remember, that from the day which would see Latin and Greek banished from our colleges would date the ruin of all Christian education, the ruin of the priesthood, and the beginning for the Christian Church of a darker era than that of Julian the Apostate. For the intellectual darkness would not be measured by one man’s life, nor limited to one generation.

What we need in our Colleges is,—not that the study of modern languages shall supersede that of the ancient Classics, and that the cultivation of mathematical and physical science shall take the place given hitherto to the teaching of ancient and ecclesiastical history,—but that extraordinary and united efforts shall be made to teach the Classics thoroughly, to throw such interest into the study of the ancient literatures and histories, that young men shall be able to master them, to get enamored of them, and to cherish the love of them ever afterward.

True Catholic Education combines the Ancient and the Modern

Do we mean that thereby they shall neglect their own mother-tongue, or modern languages, or the mathematic and physical sciences, without which a scholar is only half a scholar? Most certainly not. We cannot forget that the training given in our own dear Alma Mater combined a thorough knowledge of both classical and scientific lore. And we are proud to see, that with the new responsibilities assumed by her in organizing a university course complete in every department, the old equal love for the culture of antiquity and that of the ripest science of our times still continues to burn with undiminished fervor.

It ought also to be well understood, that neither a thorough mastery of the ancient classics, nor the slight acquaintance with the Latin tongue required for the study of theology and the discharge of the priestly functions, has ever been, in the judgment of the Church, a sufficient intellectual education. The extraordinary sacrifices which she makes yearly in lands, where the revolution has stripped her of everything, to create or to sustain universities worthy of being in the foremost rank of true science, are a most eloquent proof of the desire she has that her priests shall be as superior in learning as she wills them to be superior in moral excellence.

The Clerical Standard of Science

Surely a clergyman, mixing in daily intercourse with men of the world, with scholars and gentlemen in every walk of life, where all the living questions about society, religion, and science, about history and art in all its branches, come up for discussion,—must not feel that he is, in all these matters, treading upon unknown or uncertain ground. He must have already studied and discussed and mastered all these mighty problems. He must stand, in every company where the serious-minded and the cultivated meet, like one who is naturally looked up to for light, not as one who is compelled to be dumb through sheer ignorance, and therefore looked down upon. He will everywhere meet with conscientious and anxious inquirers after truth,—after the truth on these momentous issues between science and religion,—and must he perforce be silent? Has he no light in his lamp wherewith to guide the soul who is seeking the right road amid the surrounding darkness?

We need to have our clergymen leading the advance of intellect on every path of solid science. We need to have our young professional men in the world, after they come forth from our colleges, armed cap-à-pie with such armor that no assault shall pierce it, and with such victorious weapons, that no enemy shall stand before them.

The Classics are only Models of Literary Excellence

The knowledge of Greek and Latin is only a small portion of the varied culture that fills a college course; the study of the classical authors in these languages,—is for the intellect and the taste, a training and a molding similar to that, which the selected art-students from every country in Christendom have to undergo in Rome, while contemplating, studying, copying, and imitating the immortal works of pagan and Christian art collected there. Just as the painter or the architect in examining and analyzing the masterpieces left behind by the artists of Italy and Greece, finds daily new worlds of ideal perfection and beauty opened before him,—ideal forms and conceptions which he can make his own by study and imitation,—even so is it with the glorious forms of literary perfection bequeathed to us by antiquity. We can make them our own, copy them, endeavor to surpass them.

It is universally conceded, that to be a superior painter or sculptor, long years of study in Rome are an indispensable discipline. It ought to be,—indeed it is just as generally granted,—that to attain the first rank in literary excellence, the study of classical literature is a discipline none the less necessary.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was almost as enthusiastic a student of Greek antiquity, as William Ewart Gladstone, or Guizot, or Wiseman. The writers, poets, orators, who might be mentioned as forming exceptions to this rule, are, in reality, no exceptions. The contemporary models on whom they formed their method and their diction, were, every one of them, the living copies of ancient excellence.

In one word, if you send your son to college, only keep him there when you find that he has both the talent and the love of study that will insure success. Then spare no encouragement to your boy, no help to his masters that can further and increase this success. Wait patiently for the end, and you will be surely rewarded.

If, on the contrary, you find, after necessary trial, that your boy has neither aptitude nor inclination for such studies,—you will do a prudent parent’s part in withdrawing him and putting him elsewhere to studies proportioned to his talent and his bent, and under such discipline as may secure both his learning well what he is put to, and his cultivating his own heart by self-discipline.