[a]1] Eton Address
Activity VI The country Schoolhouse
Could not the young men be gathered once a week during the winter months, and the school house be converted into a literary, debating or lecture room?
If the young priest prepared one lecture a month, he might revolutionize the district by teaching the people how to organize and foster small industries or technical branches suited to the localities. There is wealth in the mushrooms on the field, the blackberries on the hedge, and the cresses by the stream. In other countries thousands are made by these unnoticed products. Why not here?
Our Ruins
When the summer comes, the curate could easily organize occasional bicycle excursions with the young men to some memorable Catholic ruin, in whose history he should be well made up. The saints and scholars who have glorified our annals are lying around our churches; we stumble over their graves for forty years sometimes, without enquiring who they were or what they did. I am aware there are laudable exceptions: they are, however, isolated. When the public wants to know anything about our monasteries, they often have to turn to the layman and even to the parson.
The small number of priests in the Archaeological Society is a striking reproach. One would think that our saints and their works were something to be ashamed of, since the natural guardians of their memories have practically abandoned them. This country is filled with catacombs. Every child should be made acquainted with the life of the leading saint, and the history of the most memorable ruin in the locality; those hoary prophets, now so mute, would then speak with tongues of fire out of the dim past, telling the story of our fathers' Faith and heroic achievements.
Let us now rise to a higher plane of the young priest's activities.
Activity VII Literature
It is a stupendous and a humiliating fact that, while this country is deluged with the writings of the sensualist and the infidel, there are over three thousand brainy priests upon the land, and the world of thought knows nothing of them.