p. 222The Second Education

Man am I grown, a man’s work must I do.

Tennyson.

We are not here to promote incalculable quantities of law, physic, or manufactured goods, But to Become Men: not narrow pedants, but wide-seeing, mind-traveled men. Who are the men of history to be admired most? Those whom most things became: who could be weighty in debate, of much device in council, considerate in a sick-room, genial at a feast, joyous at a festival, capable of discourse with many minds, large-souled, not to be shriveled up into any one form, fashion, or temperament.

HELPS.¹1“Friends in Council,” i., p. 64; New York, 1861.

The public school, the college, and the university only prepare youth for the great school of the world. Academic training of every kind fit young men to educate themselves for the serious business of life. This second and decisive education should be kept in mind both by parents and by teachers, while a boy is undergoing in school the intellectual and moral discipline that is to form his character and to exercise on his future career so great an influence.

He must be told, while still amid the quiet shades of his Alma Mater, that he will have hard and noble work to do, and a long battle to fight. His educators only train him to familiarity with his workman’s tools, and accustom him to bear and use his armor and weapons. On entering on his chosen professional sphere, he must prove that he is an “Active doer, noble liver, Strong to labor, sure to conquer.”

We are anxious—in the first place—that the youth who turns his back on school and his face toward the serious and stern work before him, should show himself “a noble liver,” by the principles and virtues displayed in private life, while proving himself, besides, in his professional dealings, the “active doer, strong to labor, sure to conquer.”

The “nobility of life,” that all have a right to expect from the long and carefully trained student, must manifest itself in his duteous conduct toward his own family. Young people returning home at the end of their academical education, are, all too frequently, apt to fancy, that their “good behavior” and their “accomplishments” are things to be put by with their class-books and their diplomas, and only to be brought forth from the closet for the admiration and delight of strangers.

Be the Delight of your Home-Circle

Have we not known young ladies, who charmed the large audience assembled on the “graduating day” with their musical and oratorical performances, and who could not be induced to play, or sing, or recite one poetical passage in order to gratify their home-circle, precisely because it was but the home-circle? What perversity of temper, taste, and judgment! Ah, young ladies, we were taught in our young days—long ago—that every accomplishment brought from school by the sons and daughters of any good family, were to be chiefly and before all else, displayed for the pleasure of father and mother and brothers and sisters. It was then the rule and the fashion to delight the family circle each evening with music and song and charade, brothers and sisters all joining hand and heart and voice rapturously, precisely because father and mother were delighted lookers-on, and all the more rapturously because they alone were there to drink their fill of the deep delight. Has this rule become “old fashioned”?

But our words are more for your brothers than for you. Young men,—we happen to know it,—often toil heroically to deserve their degree of bachelor or of master of arts. It is most praiseworthy toil, assuredly; and it should ever be an earnest to all who witness it of the still nobler qualities that are to mark the after-college life.

Do not forget, however, young laureates, that there are other arts, often harder to master, and not less necessary to you, which you are to study, to court, to possess, and to practice, if you would be the true men the world expects you to be. There is a science, more needful even than those which enable one to read all the mysteries of earth and ocean and the starry heavens,—the science of living with others so as to contribute our utmost to their happiness.

Claim of Parents on their Educated Sons

Before and above all others your parents have the first claim on you,—now that you are once more the inmates of their home. Shall we consider together one or two points which are of most especial importance to you and to them at this critical period of life?

Though you may be the most generous and devoted of sons, and most desirous of showing your parents how deeply you prize the self-sacrificing love that has been so long waiting for your return to the home, yet we venture to affirm that you are far from estimating that love at its real value. Even where parents are so blessed with the goods of fortune, that the cost of the longest and most expensive education is to them a matter of no account, there are other sacrifices which a noble-hearted youth will consider to be infinitely greater. There is the generosity of a mother’s love, consenting to the long years of separation from her dear ones,—perhaps her only one. This unsatisfied craving of a motherly heart is not one that dies out with time: it rather increases with each succeeding year. For the love and pride of a true mother’s heart look forward to the beautiful bloom of early manhood in her boy, with a yearning to which nothing can be compared in depth and intensity.

The father’s patient waiting is often scarcely less deserving of filial gratitude and admiration. For, after all, it is to his sons that a father looks forward not only for the dear companionship which is a need of fatherly natures, but for the realization of the hope deposited in every father’s heart by God’s own hand,—of seeing himself living again and prospering in his sons. And how often does it not happen that a father’s hopes and affections center in the son whose education and progress he watches with ever-increasing anxiety?

The Debt of Gratitude due to Poor Parents

When the parents who thus “watch and wait” for the long-expected return of the absent one, are anything but favorites of fortune; when they have both toiled and suffered through the tedious college years, denying themselves everything, that the absent one should want for nothing; when they had set their hearts on seeing him combine in his own person, at the end of his studies, all literary accomplishment and moral excellence,—with what an unspeakable intensity of expectant love, do not these two fond, hungry hearts stretch forth to meet him on his coming home! Who can describe the mother’s joy and triumph, when the boy she has parted with long ago returns a man, or almost a man,—every accomplishment and youthful grace exaggerated in the light of her motherly admiration?

Who can say, on the other hand, how much a son thus returning to the home of his childhood, has it in his power to do for the contentment, the perfect happiness of his parents? Sweet above all the rewards that mind could plan, or wealth purchase, sweet above all thought and beyond our power of expression, is the grateful devotion of such a son to such parents....

A son blessed with such parents as are here described, must have brought away from their home—how lowly soever we may picture it—the undying memories of a love incomparable in sweetness and blissfulness. Whatever may have been his experiences at college, as boyhood slowly grew into youth and early manhood,—it is not likely that the spectacle of others’ wealth and home luxuries, could have blotted away from his true heart the image of his father’s hearthstone and of her who kept ever burning upon it the bright fire of her own womanly charities.

Yes—we have seen not only the young man, with all his blushing honors thick upon him, find no repose, enjoy no satisfaction, and apparently close his ears to the concert of admiration and praise that greeted him inside and outside the academic halls,—till he was fast clasped in his mother’s arms, and heard one word of simple congratulation from her or from his father’s lips. The added brightness and warmth which his presence seemed to bring to the dear hearth of his childhood, was more grateful to his inward and outward sense than the rapturous applause of multitudes. And, oh, how we have seen a happy mother’s face transformed by the sight of her returning boy, as if the light of another world shone upon it, and her whole soul beaming forth in the look of unutterable gratitude with which she heard her darling’s words and received his caresses!

Loving to come back to the Old Nest

We have seen sons, later in life, when they had homes of their own,—homes, too, blessed with all a man’s heart can desire,—yet loving to fly back to the old nest where their infancy had been sheltered, and coveting the sweet warmth of their mother’s wing, as eagerly as if the whole outside world had not one other restful spot for them! Ah, true men! to them shall be given, in their turn, sons and daughters who will love to make their father’s home a paradise, and to crown his old age with the priceless love that he had lavished on his parents.

Do not be ashamed of being ever a little child when you seek the dear and holy atmosphere of a father’s home and a mother’s tenderness. It must be your praise in the eyes of all true men, ever to feel and to say of the roof beneath which you were reared—

You will say,—and most justly,—that a soul incapable of prizing the purest and dearest of all this world’s joys,—a mother’s proud affection and a father’s manly love,—must be a soul afflicted with some moral deformity. Yet is it most true that there are many such.

If, in our long acquaintance with parents and their sons, we have been gladdened by seeing the former made happy by their children, by witnessing the fondest, proudest realization of a father and a mother’s dreams,—we have also known of more than one instance of bitter deception. Of the latter we only permit ourselves to speak here, in the hope that this page may attract the eye of advanced students, and warn them in time to prevent their incurring the guilt of the blackest human ingratitude and one of the most dreadful of possible misfortunes.

There have been sons, tenderly loved and cared for, educated at the cost of sacrifices known in their full extent to God alone, on whose future goodness and greatness both parents had built the dearest hope of their life,—and who, at the end of their college or university course, were ashamed to return to their paternal roof, as if to acknowledge poor father and mother were to them a degradation! Ah, thrice unhappy parents who had conceived and nursed so long the fond, foolish, fatal ambition of devoting their substance and their lives to “making their son a gentleman”! As if anything but the gentle heart and the generous spirit could make the gentleman!

We glance rapidly at such moral monsters, both because we would be most unwilling to have our readers believe that they are anything else than rare monsters of ingratitude and baseness, and because we must hasten to say how common are the opposite examples of manly affection, and true nobleness of spirit.

To those who know the numbers of high-souled men sprung from the laborer’s cabin, reared and educated at the expense of a whole life’s toil and privation, and filling the most honorable stations in every rank of the community,—we need not say that such perversity as we here hold up as a warning, can only be exceptional. Were the writing of this book to have no other effect than to spare, by prevention, a single motherly or fatherly heart such agony as we have beheld,—we should have good cause not to regret our labor.

Home-Treasures of Affection

And so this much to remind young men, that their first duty, on their return home, is to their parents and their family. Within their home they should exert themselves not only to repay father and mother with unceasing love and reverence and devotion, but they should find especial delight in making up to their brothers and sisters for the manifold regrets of the long absence from home.

Friendships formed in college, we know it well, are often the purest and the most lasting; still a friend’s constant affection and support is rarely comparable to the treasure of a brother or a sister’s love. Those only whose souls are guided in all things by principle and conscience, can appreciate what a noble brother’s friendship is, or what is the treasure of a sister’s undying fidelity.

Cultivate these home charities, these family affections, first of all and before everything else. And then persuade yourself that the first, and most frequently the best, school for studying the social virtues and social refinement,—is in the bosom of your own household.

As we are laying down a few practical rules to help young men in acquiring, together with the true graces of social manners, the true esteem of all who know them, let us begin by saying, that the solid foundation of all interior sweetness, outward gracefulness, and all real lovableness,—is God’s grace in the soul’s center, and the serenity which its presence produces.

You need a higher motive than ever not only for preserving undiminished the manly and unaffected piety of which you acquired the habit at school, but of increasing its vigorous growth in the sunlight of public life. You must not look for approval to those above, around, or beneath you: look to God alone! Though but a layman and a young man,—you are now “God’s man,” bound to represent Him in the eyes of the world, bound to be His son in Godlike action, and destined to gain for Him many victories in the battle of Truth against Error, of goodness against triumphant depravity. You are God’s soldier and servant. Look to Him alone for strength, approval, and reward!

You are God’s organ, in more ways than one; you are appointed by Him as a teacher to those “who sit in darkness,” who know your ancestral faith only through the misrepresentations they have heard of it, who, perhaps, know your God Himself only through the distorting haze of a bad education and a false philosophy.

Mission of Educated Young Men

You are to teach them. This is so true, that henceforward, wherever you go and are known as a child of the Great Mother, brought up in one of her privileged schools, your life will be taken as a sample of her godliness, your words will be repeated as the echo of her doctrines, and your person, your manners, your very bearing in public and in private, will be pointed out as the result of Catholic culture.

Yes,—you are so truly a teacher, that your whole life will be watched, scrutinized, recorded, and commented on,—as a living lesson of Catholic enlightenment and morality. In the schools which sprung up in the Spain of the sixteenth century as well as in newly discovered America, the young teachers—the saintly sons of the great St. Teresa—were wont each morning to say, before beginning their lessons, the following most beautiful prayer. Do not fear to read it, to make it your own. A lovely flower is none the less lovely or fragrant because it happens to bloom in a cathedral close, and beneath the shadow of God’s holy house. So fear not to cull it and wear it near your heart. Here it is:

“O most lowly-minded King of hearts Christ Jesus, by the very heart of that merciful condescension which led Thee, our Orient from on high, to visit us in our need, I beseech Thee to create within me through the Spirit who is Thy Gift, an humble and pure heart, all athirst for Thine own secret teaching: in order that in this school of Thy lowly followers, I may learn to guide, without leading astray, the tender souls committed to me by Thy sweet Mother.”³3Humillime Rex cordium Jesu Christe, per viscera misericordiæ tuæ, in quibus visitasti nos oriens ex alto, obsecro te, creare digneris in me cor humile et purum, cupidissimum secretæ eruditionis tuæ: ut in schola humilium discipulorum tuorum fiam dono tuo sapiens ad regendam sine deceptione novellam prolem dulcissimæ Genetricis tuæ.

Wear near your heart, in an especial manner, the desire to be Christ-like in your soul, and Christ-like in your life, and the resolve to win to Him by the sweet fragrance of your gentleness, your refinement, your modesty, your unblemished purity and honor,—the souls who know neither Him nor your Great Mother!

You need only be true to the divine light and voice within, in order to appear before others, in all the relations of life, as God and men would have you. The conscious possession of His grace, who is the deep ocean of peace, sweetness, and love, will enable you, force you even, to look with contentment and love on all persons and things throughout His creation.

The spirit of true piety is not the sad, melancholy, brooding, and bitter thing that a gloomy fanaticism would make it. It is lightsome, joyous, loving, compassionate, and all-embracing in its kindness. The Spirit of God in a youthful soul, just beginning to run its race of usefulness in the world, sheds abroad over earth and sky and ocean, over the whole moral as well as the material world, the light of deep and joyous contentment with which their Divine Author uttered, in the beginning, the judgment, that “they were very good.”

It is sad enough to see old men, who have tasted of life’s bitterness and disappointments, without being chastened by them or impelled to draw nearer to God,—who have sate at the banquet of life without appreciating or enjoying a single one of the delights spread out for them there by the most bountiful hand of our God,—to go darkly and gloomily down to their grave abusing and cursing their fellow-men, and asserting that all is bad in this beautiful world of ours. They pass through life, like beasts of ill odor by night through the loveliest of gardens, without perceiving or having the capacity to perceive the varied wealth and beauty and magnificence of nature and art around them.

To the Pure of Heart the World is ever Beautiful

Not so do the eyes of pure-hearted, noble-minded youth look out upon God’s universe. They behold it overspread with the heavenly tints that clothed it at its prime, when God walked forth in visible form to enjoy the works of His own hands, “When the morning stars praised [Him] together, and all the sons of God made a joyful melody.”⁴4Job, xxxviii. 7. The divinely enlightened heart of the young and the pure is drawn instinctively toward what is good and lovely, not only in the society of men, but throughout every other walk of creation. And this lightsomeness and freshness of heart dies not away with youth, but lasts, in the true man, increased and intensified, through manhood and old age. The springtide of the pure heart is eternal. The lamp of God which illuminates the soul-sanctuary never ceases to shed its golden splendors on the outside world. Its light only grows more vivid as the day of eternity draws near.

Oh, may that freshness of heart, that unfading youth of soul be ever yours, through all the vicissitudes of age, health, fortune, enjoyment, and suffering!

Let this interior peace, this deep contentment, this disposition to see in man and in nature the bright side only, save you, within your family circle, from the fatal faults of censoriousness and fault-finding. Have always words of praise for your dear ones.

Carry with you the same rule into the outside world. Be prompt to see the good qualities of those with whom you have to associate; be slow to acknowledge their faults even to yourself; and be careful not to show one man in ten thousand that you have discovered in others or in himself anything you deem blameworthy.

Be, on the contrary, both prompt and generous in praising the good you see in others. Do not believe that all men are prone to evil and ever ready to do you a mischief. The longer you live, the greater and wider your experience of mankind, and the more will you have reason to bless God that there are so many noble and beautiful souls left on earth to prove the presence on it of good angels and of the God of angels.

Purity is always full of Reverence

Never,—so long as He spares your mother’s life,—fail to show her daily and hourly a love full of infinite reverence and tenderness. Let your love for your sisters be also most respectful and deferential. And should God send you, in His own good time, a woman who can be all in all to you, let your love for her be distinguished by the same reverential feeling, and your life-long service to her be one of respectful and heartfelt devotion.

Reverence is to love, what a casing of purest gold and crystal, adorned with precious stones, is to the portrait of the one dearest to our heart: it preserves the loved image from soil and decay, while permitting us to gaze on the cherished features, and to wear it continually near our heart.

Think and speak of all women with something, at least, of the respect and the deference you are wont to show to your mother and your sisters; and never permit yourself anything approaching to disrespect toward the poorest, the lowliest, the most unworthy of their sex. If you would have a sure, an infallible sign marking out to you, in the intercourse of life, the man who should never be your friend, your companion, or your business associate, let it be disrespect to women. The man who forgets what is due to his mother’s sex is neither a true gentleman, nor a true man: and he who habitually thinks and speaks evil of women, is one who has long ago forfeited self-respect and is unworthy of the esteem of virtuous men. He is a moral leper to be shunned carefully and mercilessly.

Truth and Honor

Be truthful,—truthful in thought, in intention, in word, and deed,—in the whole tenor of your life, as if He who made your soul were visibly present to you in your studies, your conversations, your every daily act, standing—revealed to your eyes—by the side of every person you spoke to, and dealt with.

Be honorable.

He who has ever passed in Eastern lands for the wisest, if not the greatest, of men, said long, long ago: “A good name is better than great riches.”⁶6Proverbs of Solomon, xxii. 1. We must, however, hasten to warn you not to mistake false honor for the true, the shadow for the substance, the vain praise of men for the just judgment of God on the solid merits of His children; the road of pride and self-worship, leading aloft and ending at an inevitable precipice, for the safe path in which the “noble liver” walks, while he seeks and sings praise to the Most High God.

The son, well-born and high-souled, has only one aim in doing, daring, and bearing great things,—to glorify his father, to reflect honor on the mother who bore him. The crown he wins he only values because he can lay it at their feet, the songs sung in his praise are only sweet to his ears in so far as their music can reach and thrill the souls of his parents.

This most true and lofty sentiment dictates also the care to be had of one’s name and reputation. For the name one bears is the father’s name, the family name; and its honor belongs not to one’s self exclusively, but rather to one’s parents and kindred.

We know,—you, flower of our Christian youth, know it far better than the multitude,—that our dearest honor is that of the God who created and redeemed us, that of the Church, who, under Him, is the dear Mother of our souls. For them we stand or we fall; on them is reflected alike our honor or our dishonor.

“The Pious and Just Honoring of Ourselves”

“The Catholic Church nourishes that ‘ingenious and noble shame,’ which Milton so extols, adding, ‘or call it, if you will, that esteem, whereby men bear an inward reverence toward their own persons.’ And if, as he continues, ‘the love of God, as a fire sent from heaven ever to be kept alive upon the altars of our hearts, be the first principle of all godly and virtuous actions in men, and this pious and just honoring of ourselves the second, serving as the radical moisture and fountain-head, whence every laudable and worthy enterprise issues forth,’—where, except in the Catholic Church, can we find any security for its perpetual transmission? Where else can honor hope to find an inexhaustible source of that self-respect which makes man fear not so much the offense and reproach of others, as he dreads and would blush at the reflection of his own severe and modest eye upon himself, if it should see him doing or imagining, though in the deepest secrecy, that which is base.’”⁷7Digby, “Compitum,” b. i., ch. ix.

There lies the distinction between false honor,—the worship of self, accepted from the world for the sole sake of self, by the proud or vain man,—and true honor, the self-respect, the pious and just honoring of ourselves, for His sake and His love, who is our Father in Heaven, and next for her sake, who is the Mother of His children here below.

We have a striking and memorable illustration of this in the conduct of St. Ignatius of Loyola. The once chivalrous and sensitive soldier, who shrank from the thought of worldly dishonor as from something a thousand times worse than death in its most appalling form, became, after his conversion, filled with an insatiable thirst for humiliations. So long as these only fell upon himself without involving his good name as connected with others, or with the honor of God and His Church, he would drink in and savor insult and scorn with more avidity, than the fainting traveler from across the burning wilderness, would drink of the first cool spring on his path. Thus, while pursuing under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, his first long course of moral discipline in the cavern near Manresa, Ignatius would sally forth occasionally from his retreat, dressed like the poorest of beggars, with matted hair, unshaven beard, sallow and sunken cheeks, and go limping slowly and painfully through the streets of the town to beg from door to door the bread needful to his sustenance. Little did the inhabitants, who gave or refused alms to the stranger, imagine that the sickly, emaciated, infirm young man, was one of their own proudest nobles, a soldier who had gloriously defended the honor of Spain. And as they watched him limping along the street on his shattered limb, the little boys, thinking him demented, would take pleasure in following him with jeer and scoff, as ill-bred children are apt to do. But whenever they did so, Ignatius would stand still, and with downcast eyes listen to their crys and abuse, as if their words of scorn and mockery were to him the most ravishing of earthly harmonies.

Where our Good Name involves God’s Interests

Many are the anecdotes told of this great-souled man, attesting his supernatural love of contempt and humiliation. When, however, he had begun to bind to himself, in the University of Paris, the chosen souls who, like Francis Xavier and Peter Favre, were to be with himself the founders of the apostolic Society of Jesus, he was not willing that any stain of dishonor should fall on his own name or that of his companions,—because he knew that such disgrace would prevent the mighty good his associates were destined of God to do in both hemispheres.

Thus having been once accused of some infraction of the University rules, he was unjustly sentenced by the faculty, to undergo the shame of a public flagellation before the assembled students and professors. He allowed the proceedings against him to go on till the very moment came when the punishment was to be inflicted, and then produced such overwhelming proofs of his innocence, that he received the compliments and congratulations of the very judges who had so hastily condemned him.

This same zeal for the good name of his infant Society he again and again displayed in Italy, and with such success that the slanderers were silenced forever.

Thus is it with you, young men, who stand before the world not only as the representatives of the families whose names you bear, but also as the children of a Father and a Mother, whose honor is in your keeping, and to whom your honor, your good name and spotless reputation, are treasures that you cannot compromise or barter away without deepest guilt and undying infamy.