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Show Conversations of ur Club . . By Orestes A. Brownsott "Therefore," interposed Father John, "where we have not and cannot have good school of our own, I think the best thing we can do is to send our children to the public schools. To mere secular education itself I do not attach the importance attached to it by our age and country; but still I do attach to it some value. Catholics, m uur umes, are deprived of it, labor under a serious disadvantage, and are crushed down by a sense of their inferiority. in-feriority. We do not live in the middle mid-dle ages, when the people were simple sim-ple believers and docile to authority, when cholars wrote and published only for scholars, and the people left the thinking to their chiefs. The author au-thor now addresses the public at large, and has the multitude for his judges. The people are no longer unquestioning unquestion-ing believers; they have ceased to be docile, are puffed up with a vain sense of their own wisdom and importance, and can no longer be taught or governed gov-erned as children. The change may regretted, may be for the worse, but it has taken place, and whether we like it or dislike it, we must adapt ourselves our-selves to the new state of things it has introduced. We cannnt nmv roi- on the simple faith and docility of the people. We can govern or direct them even in the way of salvation onlv through their convictions, and therefore there-fore it becomes all-important to cultivate cul-tivate their intelligence, and to enable ena-ble them to have enlightened convictions. convic-tions. Our appeal must now be made to intelligence, and to the intelligence not of the few, but of the many. Our greatest obstacle is in the ignorance of the people. We find even Catholics who are so ignorant, so utterly destitute des-titute of mental culture and discipline, that the priest is almost unable to make them understand the simplest duties to their state; who are too little lit-tle cultivated, we may almost say, to be taught the simplest rudiments of natural morality, to say nothing of the principles and dogmas of revealed religion. These too are not infrequently infre-quently parents, whose duty it is to bring up their children in the faith and piety of the church. Others there ! are, less ignorant than these indeed, and having all the tducation and culture cul-ture they would need in an old Catholic Cath-olic community, who yet are too ignorant, igno-rant, too little cultivated to perceive the dangers to which they and their children are exposed, or to understand under-stand even the refutation of the errors er-rors and heresSes which surroirfnd tnem. this ignorance may not be fatal to the salvation of the soul, but it is incompatible with the public interests in-terests of Catholicity in. a country like ours, and the greatest hindrance and discouragement to the pastor. Where we have and are able to have no other means than the public schools, I see not why the public schools should not be" used." "But these schools," repeated O'Flanagan. "are corrupt and corrupting." corrupt-ing." "So say some Catholics who have no acquaintance wtih them, and judge them from a preconceived theory, or from the testimony of incompetent and untrustworthy witnesses, not from actual act-ual observation. The public schools nro tinf oil T nnnl .1 nrinY. 1 . xi l uu'u niou lucui, uiey are not always" all they might and should be. The teachers are but too often incompetent, in-competent, immoral, indolent, bigoted and disposed to make the school an eDgine for the perversion of the faith of the Catholic child. But all Catholic schoolmasters are not immaculate, and instances have been known of the scholars chasing their drunken master through the streets of a populous city. No system is to be judged by its occasional oc-casional abuses, and no system of schools is to be condemned because there happens to be now and then an incompetent or immoral schoolmaster. Where the law organizing our public schools is fairly complied with, it is wrong to denounce them as corrupt and corrupting. They surely are not all that Catholics want, but no child, Catholic or non-Catholic, is likely to De corrupted by attending them," replied re-plied Father John. "But," insisted O'Flanagan, "they are wrong in principle. They are state schools, and the state has no more right to be an educator than It has to be a director of conscience. The child belongs to the parent, not to the state, and education is a spiritual, not a secular sec-ular function." "That," answered Father John, "opens a question which Mr. Diefen-bach Diefen-bach has already settled. The early Christians availed themselves of the imperial schools, supported from the imperial treasury, and they counted the closing of those schools to them by Julian the Apostate, as the crudest crud-est persecution they had undergone. St. Basil, St. Gregory Nazianzen, and others the sons of saints, went to study their philosophy in the pagan school of Athens. The state has no competency in spirituals, and must leave what concerns religion and morality mo-rality to the parent or the spiritual authority; au-thority; but It is its right and its duty jjiuuue me ixico.ua ul a. suim secular education for all its children, because the public safety, the public good, which it is bound to consult, demands it. and there is no other power in society so-ciety that can do it. If the means are not, in some form, provided by the state, they will not and cannot be provided at all. The rich may provide for the education of their children at their own expense, but the poor can not. As a fact, where education is left to the voluntary principle, the majority ma-jority of children remain uneducated, and are left to fester, generation after generation, in deplorable ignorance." "All education," said Winslow, "should be moral and religious, and as the church is the only competent authority au-thority in reliigon and morality, the church is the only rightful educator." "All tailoring, shoemaking, hatting, blacksmithing," replied Father John, "should be moral and religious, and therefore the church must make our coats, our shoes, our hats, our shoes and axes; hay, must take the management manage-ment of every department of secular life; and we must have priests and religious orders and confraternities to do our sowing and reaping, our wasting wast-ing and cooking, to be our housekeepers house-keepers and chambermaids, and our wet and ury nurses. Education, in the respect that it is purely secular, is no more the business of the church than I any other secular matter. The church teaches religion, and has plenary authority au-thority from God in education as in everything else over all that touches the spiritual order, the rights, duties, or interests of religon. The simple teaching of reading, writing, arithmetic, arithme-tic, geography, history, book-keeping by double or single entry, is purely a secular affair, and as much within the province of the secular authority as the construction of roads and birdges, or providng for the national defense. The church has no more to do with the one than the other. She has never acknowledged herself bound to establish estab-lish a system of secular education for seculars, and in no age or country has she founded a system of secular education for all the children of the land. She establishes, according to her means, schools and seminaries to meet the wants of the spirtual society, for trainng up and properly preparing candidates for her own offices, in which she teaches all the branches of secular learning and science which she judges under the circumstances to be necessary or useful; but there her obligation stops. If she finds the children chil-dren taught to read, she puts into their hands the catechism and a manual man-ual of prayers; if she finds them unable un-able to read, she does not begin by first teachnig them reading, but she instructs them orally, and requires them from oral repetition to get by heart their prayers and catechism. To assume that the secular education of seculars is her business, which she and she alone is authorized to impart, is only assuming in other words that in every age and nation she has failed in her duty, and therefore cannot be the church of God." (To Be Continued.) The horrible barbarites practiced by so-called American soldiers in the Philippine islands recall the awful carnage car-nage ordered and directed by Cromwell Crom-well in Ireland. In his fury the Puritan Puri-tan fiend did not spare even the little children, justifying his butchery of the Irish innocents with the elegant phrase that "nits become lice." Catholic Union and Times. Russia talks of peace and massacres massa-cres the Jews. France emblazons liberty lib-erty on its banners and persecutes the Catholic church. England prates of civilization and wipes out the Boers. America boasts of freedom, and "assimilates" "as-similates" the Filipinos, says the Sacred Sac-red Heart Review. |