The Education of Catholic Girls

by Janet Erskine Stuart

The gentler qualities which are to adorn the harder virtues may be more explicitly taught. It is always more easy to tone down than to brace up; there must fist be something to moderate, before moderation can be a virtue; there must be strength before gentleness can be taught, as there must be some hardness in material things to make them capable of polish. And these are qualities which are specially needed in our unsteady times, when rapid emancipation of unknown forces makes each one more personally responsible than in the past. It is an impatient age: we must learn patience; it is an age of sudden social changes: we have to make ready for adversity; it is an age of lawlessness: each one must stand upon his own guard and be his own defence; it is a selfish age, and never was unselfishness more urgently needed; love of home and love of country seem to be cooling, one as rapidly as the other: never was it more necessary to learn the spirit of self-sacrifice both for family life and the love and honour due to one's country which is also "piety" in its true sense.

All these things come with our Catholic faith and practice if it is rightly understood. Catholic family life, Catholic citizenship, Catholic patriotism are the truest, the only really true, because the only types of these virtues that are founded on truth. But they do not come of themselves. Many will let themselves be carried to heaven, as they hope, in the long-suffering arms of the Church without either defending or adorning her by their virtues, and we shall but add to their number if we do not kindle in the minds of children the ambition to do something more, to devote themselves to the great Cause, by self-sacrifice to be in some sort initiated into its spirit, and identified with it, and thus to make it worth while for others as well as for themselves that they have lived their life on earth. There is a price to be paid for this, and they must face it; a good life cannot be a soft life, and a great deal, even of innocent pleasure, has to be given up, voluntarily, to make life worth living, if it were only as a training in doing without.

Independence is a primary need for character, and independence can only be learnt by doing without pleasant things, even unnecessarily. Simplicity of life is an essential for greatness of life, and the very meaning of the simple life is the laying aside of many things which tend to grow by habit into necessities. The habit of work is another necessity in any life worth living, and this is only learnt by refraining again and again from what is pleasant for the sake of what is precious. Patience and thoroughness are requirements whose worth and value never come home to the average mind until they are seen in startling excellence, and it is apparent what a price must have been paid to acquire their adamant perfection, a lesson which might be the study of a lifetime. The value of time is another necessary lesson of the better life, a hard lesson, but one that makes an incalculable difference between the expert and the untried. We are apt to be always in a hurry now, for obvious reasons which hasten the movement of life, but not many really know how to use time to the full. Our tendency is to alternate periods of extreme activity with intervals of complete prostration for recovery. Perhaps our grandparents knew better in a slower age the use of time. The old Marquise de Gramont, aged 93, after receiving Extreme Unction, asked for her knitting, for the poor. "Mais Madame la Marquise a ete administree, elle va mourir!" said the maid, who thought the occupation of dying sufficient for a lady of her age. "Ma chere, ce n'est pas une raison pour perdre son temps," answered the indomitable Marquise. It is told of her also that when one of her children asked for some water in summer, between meals, she replied: "Mon enfant, vous ne serez jamais qu'un etre manque, une pygmee, si vous prenez ces habitudes-la, pensez, mon petit coeur, au fiel de Notre Seigneur Jesus Christ, et vous aurez le courage d'attendre le diner." She had learned for herself the strength of going without.

One more lesson must be mentioned, the hardest of all to be learnt—perfect sincerity. It is so hard not to pose, for all but the very truest and simplest natures—to pose as independent, being eaten up with human respect; to pose as indifferent though aching with the wish to be understood; to pose as flippant while longing to be in earnest; to hide an attraction to higher things under a little air of something like irreverence. It is strange that this kind of pose is considered as less insincere than the opposite class, which is rather out of fashion for this very reason, yet to be untrue to one's better self is surely an unworthier insincerity than to be ashamed of the worst. Perhaps the best evidence of this is the costliness of the effort to overcome it, and the more observation and reflection we spend on this point the more shall we be convinced that it is very hard to learn to be quite true, and that it entails more personal self-sacrifice than almost any other virtue.

In conclusion, the means for training character may be grouped under the following headings:—

1. Contact with those who have themselves attained to higher levels, either parent, or teacher, or friend. Perhaps at present the influence of a friend is greater than that of any power officially set over us, so jealous are we of control. So much the better chance for those who have the gift even in mature age of winning the friendship of children, and those who have just outgrown childhood. In these friendships the great power of influence is hopefulness, to believe in possibilities of good, and to expect the best.

2. Vigilance, not the nervous vigilance, unquiet and anxious, which rouses to mischief the sporting instinct of children and stings the rebellious to revolt, but the vigilance which, open and confident itself, gives confidence, nurtures fearlessness, and brings a steady pressure to be at one's best. Vigilance over children is no insult to their honour, it is rather the right of their royalty, for they are of the blood royal of Christianity, and deserve the guard of honour which for the sake of their royalty does not lose sight of them.

3. Criticism and correction. To be used with infinite care, but never to be neglected without grave injustice. It is not an easy thing to reprove in the right time, in the right tone, without exasperation, without impatience, without leaving a sting behind; to dare to give pain for the sake of greater good; to love the truth and have courage to tell it; to change reproof as time goes on to the frank criticism of friendship that is ambitious for its friend. To accept criticism is one of the greatest lessons to be learnt in life. To give it well is an art which requires more study and more self-denial than either the habit of being easily satisfied and requiring little, or the querulous habit of "scolding" which is admirably described by Bishop Hedley as "the resonance of the empty intelligence and of the hollow heart of the man who has nothing to give, nothing to propose, nothing to impart."

4. Discipline and obedience. If these are to be means of training they must be living and not dead powers, and they must lead up to gradual self-government, not to sudden emancipation. Obedience must be first of all to persons, prompt and unquestioning, then to laws, a "reasonable service," then to the wider law which each one must enforce from within—the law of love which is the law of liberty of the kingdom of God.

These are the means which in her own way, and through various channels of authority, the Church makes use of, and the Church is the great Mother who educates us all. She takes us into her confidence, as we make ourselves worthy of it, and shows us out of her treasures things new and old. She sets the better things always before us, prays for us, prays with us, teaches us to pray, and so "lifts up our minds to heavenly desires." She watches over us with un anxious, but untiring vigilance, setting her Bishops and pastors to keep watch over the flock, collectively and individually, "with that most perfect care" that St. Francis of Sales describes as "that which approaches the nearest to the care God has of us, which is a care full of tranquillity and quietness, and which, in its highest activity, has still no emotion, and being only one, yet condescends to make itself all to all things."