"It is your duty to see that your daughter loves study and work, securing this by the promise of rewards or some other means of emulation. Above all you must take care not to give her disgust for study for fear that this may continue as she grows older. Let her not learn in her childhood what she should unlearn later in life." --Letter of St. Jerome to Leta, the wife of Toxolus, the son of St. Paula.
"The sum of education is right training in the nursery. The soul of the child in his play should be trained to that sort of excellence in which, when he grows up to manhood, he will have to be perfected." --Plato, Laws (Jowett), Vol. IV, p. 174. Scribner, 1902.
"The minds of children are most of all influenced by the training they receive at home." --Pope Leo XIII.
THE CHURCH AND FEMININE EDUCATION [Footnote 18]
[Footnote 18: The material for this address was gathered originally for the normal courses on the History of Education for many of the teaching sisterhoods in this country. In its present form it was the address to the graduates of St. Elizabeth's College, Convent Station, N. J., on the occasion of the celebration of the jubilee of the foundation of its teaching work.]
Lady Bachelors: I have had frequent occasions to address all sorts of bachelors on their graduation, of science and arts and letters and pedagogy, but this is my first opportunity to address ladies crowned, at least symbolically, with the laurel berries of the bachelorhood in art. We are apt to think of young ladies rather as masters of arts innumerable, and as needing no degree to attest their abilities. While I am glad, indeed, to address you as lady bachelors I do so with the fondest hope that you will all proceed to further degrees either academic or domestic and not remain in that nondescript class of bachelor-maids.
I should like to be able to tell you how much pleasure it gives me to have the privilege of addressing you on this Fiftieth Anniversary of the Foundation of St. Elizabeth's. There is an apt illustration of the Communion of Saints in your title as a college. Founded in honor of that noble, saintly American woman, Elizabeth Seton, [{274}] and yet called particularly after that Saint Elizabeth whom the Mother of the Lord set out to visit as the first act of her Motherhood of the Church, there always rises in my mind besides, the thought of that other Saint Elizabeth whom the Germans delight to call the dear Saint Elizabeth, who, though she died when she was scarcely twenty-four, has left a name undying in the annals of helpfulness for others.
This St. Elizabeth, whose name I recall with special willingness now that I see you ready to go out to do your world's work, lived in the midst of what has been until quite recent years the despised Middle Ages, out of which as little good might be expected as out of Nazareth in the olden time, yet she so stamped her personality on the world of her day that now the after-time, neglectful, as a rule, of the individual, so careless even of the world's (supposed) great ones, will not willingly let her name die. She is still with us as a great living force. They read a sketch of her life, I have heard, at the meeting of the Neighborhood House in New York within the last few months, as an incentive to that devotion to the needy that characterized her. She was a woman who thought not at all of herself, but all of others. As a consequence, mankind in its better moods has never ceased to turn to her. Evidently the formula for being remembered is to forget yourself. I am sure, however, that that has been brought home to you so well during your [{275}] years at St. Elizabeth's that it would, indeed, be bringing coals to Newcastle for me to say anything about it in the few minutes I have to talk to you.
What I have chosen to say to you refers to that higher Catholic education for women of which you are now going out as the representatives. I do it all the more readily because, through the kindness of your beloved teachers, I have had the privilege of co-operating a little in that education, for I appreciate that privilege very much.
Apparently a good many people cherish the idea that the Catholic Church is opposed to feminine education, or at least to the higher education of women as we know it now, and that in the past her influence has been constantly and consistently exerted against any development of this phase of human accomplishment. In the liturgy of the Church women are usually spoken of as the devout female sex, and it is supposed that the one effort of the Church itself, the unerring purpose of ecclesiastical authorities, was to prevent women from becoming learned lest they should lose something of their devoutness. Apparently it is forgotten that some of the greatest devotees in the Church, the saintly women who were held up to the admiration and emulation of their sisters in the after-time, women like St. Catherine of Sienna, St. Angela Merici, St. Jane Frances De Chantal and, above all, St. Teresa, [{276}] were eminently intellectual women as well as models of devotion.