Every student on entering was required to make a spiritual retreat under the director of the seminary, and a general retreat was made yearly by all before the opening of the classes. The great object aimed at in every regulation was to train the subjects in the spiritual life, and to supply them with both the learning and the habits proper to their state. The care and personal supervision which the archbishop bestowed on his seminarists, whom he used to call “the restorers of his diocese,” were rather such as might have been expected from a father than a superior, and one whose time was never at his own command. There were few days that he did not visit the seminary, which occupied one side of his cathedral quadrangle; it was his wish to receive all new-comers in person, that he might examine their vocation himself; and when once he had seen and conversed with them, each one had a peculiar place in his memory, and became a separate object of his paternal care. Twice a year he made a visitation of his seminaries, and held an examination of all the classes. On such occasions he determined those who were to be promoted to higher classes, and when the course of study was finished, assigned them offices and benefices, according to the ability of each. These visitations lasted a fortnight, besides other shorter ones which he made in the course of the year. One result of the extreme solicitude he bestowed on the spiritual training of his disciples was not altogether such as he had anticipated: so many of his priests evinced an inclination to embrace the religious life, that he had to solicit from Pope Clement XIII. that some means might be adopted for keeping them for the service of the diocese;[374] for every religious order and every bishop were eager to obtain subjects who had been educated in a seminary of St. Charles. On the other hand, detractors were not wanting who busied themselves in representing these colleges as prisons, in which the unhappy students were worn to death by prayers, watchings, and austerities, by which means they succeeded in frightening away some who were about to enter. But the seminarists had but to show themselves in the streets of Milan to dispel these malicious rumours; their countenances and their whole deportment being marked with a certain character of peace and joy, that was recognised as the effect of that holy discipline under which the whole interior and exterior man was being formed anew.
St. Charles had now provided for the education of his clergy and seculars of the upper ranks, but he did not stop there; he had thought also for the children of the poor; and his plans on this point were formed when he was still at the Court of Rome, presiding over the brilliant academy of learned men which he had formed in the palace of the Pope, and taking part in the erudite conference of the Noctes Vaticanæ. Among the instructions which he gave to his Vicar-General, Ormanetti, the establishment of poor schools for teaching the Christian doctrine held a prominent place, and in his first Provincial Synod he made a special decree obliging his curates to assemble the children of each parish for catechism on Sundays and other festivals. By his exhortations he moved a greater number of pious persons, of both sexes, to interest themselves in the good work, so that at the appointed hour the churches of Milan were crowded with catechists and their classes, and it was the good archbishop’s recreation, to go from one church to another, encouraging teachers and learners with his presence and his gracious words. Before he died there was not a parish in his diocese, however remote, which had not its school; and whereas before his time it was common enough to meet with persons of advanced age who scarcely knew the Our Father and the Hail Mary correctly, it was now as common to find children of ten or twelve perfectly instructed in their religion. The schools of the diocese were at last entirely placed under the care of the Oblates of St. Ambrose, that congregation which had been created by St. Charles, and which he employed as a kind of spiritual militia for carrying out all his charitable designs. The discipline established in the poor schools of Milan by their means was the admiration of every stranger, and the extent of their labours may be estimated from the fact, that at the death of the archbishop there existed in his diocese seven hundred and forty poor schools, two hundred and seventy-three superintending officers, and seventeen hundred and twenty-six others acting under their orders, having under their care no fewer than 40,098 scholars.
Here, then, we may fitly close our studies of the Christian schools. We have watched them in their infancy springing up under the shadow of the cloister, and having traced them through their varied fortunes of good and ill, we leave them at the moment when the episcopacy was recovering its ancient jurisdiction over the ecclesiastical seminaries, and when a vast majority of the secular schools of Catholic Christendom were passing into the hands of a great religious order, raised up, as it would seem, with the special design of consolidating anew a system of Christian education. Did we need a token that the reforms of the sixteenth century were truly the work of God, we should find it in that deadly hostility which the enemies of religion, and the rulers of the world, have never ceased to exhibit against the seminaries of the Church and the colleges of her religious orders. And this, not in Protestant countries alone, but under nominally Catholic Governments, where heretical impieties have been excluded, only, as it would seem, that there might be set up the odious idol of the State.
For two centuries at least, education has been the battle-ground of the Church, and the battle is not yet fought out and finished. In France, in Belgium, in Germany, and in Switzerland, infidelity has triumphed exactly in proportion as it has succeeded in substituting an Anti-Christian State system of education for the system of the Church, and has never done its work more surely than when its agents have been philosophic universities, and ministers of public instruction.
For us in England, who, by a strange anomaly enjoy a freedom denied to many a Catholic land, and who are called on in one way or other to take part in the reconstruction of so many of our shattered institutions, the educational annals of the past have imperative claims on our attention. It is not for a writer to point the moral of his own tale; we can but hope, therefore, that our story, however rambling and diffuse, may yet have been told with sufficient clearness for our readers to draw that moral for themselves, and to resolve that, in so far as they may be called on to lend their aid in the great work of education, they will take no lower models for their guidance than those that have been bequeathed them by the saints.
And what a calendar is that which belongs to the Christian schools! The profession of the teacher, which in our day falls, by choice or duty, on so vast a number, is irradiated by the light which streams from ten thousand saintly aureoles. If the work be often wearisome and seem to promise little hope; if the spirit flag, and, ignorant of those sweet secrets by which the saints kept fresh their springs of devotion in a thirsty soil, the teacher too often finds his heart grow dry with incessant labour of the head; if pressed on by a busy age, be he ever tempted to shorten prayer that he may double toil, forgetful of the example of those who with one hand only did the work, while with the other they held the sword;[375] if, in short, the spirit of the world steal in upon him and assault him with its manifold vexations, what can he do better than turn to those who have gone before him, and learn from their examples, and invoke their aid?
And what can we do better than commend these pages to the saints, under whose patronage they were first undertaken; but chiefly and above all to those,—too seldom venerated by us, too little loved,—the saints and martyrs of England? To St. Bede and St. Aldhelm, therefore, to St. Boniface, and St. Dunstan and St. Ethelwold; to St. Edmund and St. Richard, and all who with them have sanctified our cloisters with their prayers and studies,—for were not the studies of the saints themselves a prayer?—to them in whose ears the names of our own homes were once sweet household words, and who, as they listen to the eternal chimes, do not, as we fondly trust, forget those scenes where, in the days of their sojourning, they learnt at the springs of heavenly wisdom “the true knowledge of the things that are;” whose memory has been to us, wandering in the wilderness, “as the flower of roses in the days of spring, and as the lilies that grow upon the brink of the waters,”[376]—to our glorious English Saints we offer these pages as an act of homage due to them on a thousand grounds, and which, if unworthy of their greatness, may by its own littleness the better move them to shelter it with their aid, and may at least bear witness to the grateful love of the least and humblest of their clients!