Activity V Amusements
One of the most important problems facing the young priest of to-day is:—How to organise healthy and sinless amusements for the people. Our skies are gloomy, our climate depressing, and the very dreariness of country life causes thousands to fly. Look at the groups of young men at the village corners, where is the hope or contentment in their looks?
Goldsmith's Days
I think you may challenge the world's literature for more wholesome pictures of rural pleasures than those mirrored in the "Deserted Village." They are not creations of the poet's fancy, but chronicles of facts that lived before his eyes. In them, you have the image of Ireland as she lived before the black shadow of '47 fell upon her. All went on in the open daylight, under the eyes of parents and friends.
"The young contended while the old surveyed."
Virtue was safe, tired hearts were cheered, and, whilst these sports flourished, few Irish boys or girls wanted to know the road to the emigrant ship.
Would it be possible to re-create the Ireland of Goldsmith's days?
The Winter's Night
One thing, however, is not outside the range of possibility—to persuade parents in rural districts to make some effort to brighten the lives of their children; to have all household work done two hours before bedtime, to have a bright fire on the hearth and a bright lamp on the table, and a plentiful supply of the Catholic Truth Society books, Catholic papers and periodicals always at hand. Many a poor boy and girl, whose thoughts to-day are turning to Sydney or New York as an escape from cheerless drudgery, would then read a new meaning into the word "home." No matter how toil presses during the day, the prospective two hours of brightness and pleasure cheers them.
"Give a man a taste for reading and the means of gratifying it," says Sir John Herschel,[a]1] "and you can hardly fail to make him a happy man, you place him in contact with the best society of every period of history—the wisest, the wittiest, the tenderest, the bravest and the purest characters that adorn humanity." A parent who cannot line his child's pocket with gold has in this simple plan a means of enriching his head with knowledge, and so sending him on the world armed. Self-respect would grow; the gross pleasures of the card-table or the public-house would lose their charm. Your own words would fall on ears steadily becoming more intelligent. The parish after five years would wear a new face.