Those who undertake to serve the church in the nineteenth century have one especially profound and threatening question to encounter: I mean the Labor Question.
This question is one which transcends all fixed limits, but I will limit my treatment of it to one especial point of view—the education of the laboring classes. The hope of the harvest is in the seed, and Leibnitz was right in saying, "Give me the instruction of the youth during one century and I will change the face of the globe." This transformation cannot be accomplished until the working classes shall be educated under the conditions designed by the nature of man and the general harmony of the divine plan.
There are three degrees in this education—the primary education by the family, the professional education by the workshop, the religious education of the Sunday.
I.
Family Education.
I place the family in the first rank. It occupies it in the order of time; it ought to occupy it in the order of influences.
Among the many elevated minds occupied with the fate of the working classes, I am astonished that there are so few who comprehend their real wants. The remedy for the evils which they suffer, the means of the progress that they wish to realize, are vainly sought for in new inventions and combinations, in specious theories, or even in private or public charitable institutions. They are in the family; that institution which is as ancient and universal as the world, and which has its roots in the inmost depths of the strength and tenderness of humanity; that institution which came from the hands of God himself, a vestige of the primal order of Eden, which Christ has empurpled with his blood, and raised to the dignity of a sacrament, making it one of the seven pillars destined to uphold for ever the edifice of regenerated human society. (Applause.)
It is, then, the family that embodies the strength to sustain or to restore in all classes of society; but above all in the working class of our cities. It is especially to the family that the first education of the child must be entrusted.
In primary education, there are two things which need especial consideration—the place and the agent. The place is the domestic hearth; the agent is the mother.
The domestic hearth! There it is that the cradle of the child ought to be, there that its first years ought to be passed. Has not Providence implanted this instinct in the heart of all his creation, even in the species inferior to ours? Does not the bird build its nest in the soft moss, under the shelter of the hedge and among the branches of the tree? Is there not in all the orders of nature a special place, a sacred spot, where the first hopes, the first joys, and the first sufferings of life should be experienced? Ah, well! among all these other cradles, the human race has a right to a sacred cradle, too; it has a right to a domestic hearth which shall be free from the infection of filth and disease, and whose atmosphere shall not be fatal to the life either of the body or of the soul of the child.
It is at this fireside that must first begin the education of this young soul, of its imagination and budding perceptions. These walls are not merely walls, this roof is not alone a collection of shingles and slate, this furniture is not merely collection of common objects: I say that all this speaks a deep language, that all this exercises a powerful influence in the moral order. Have not we Catholics, in our divine religion, sensible signs that are called sacraments, water, wine, bread, oil; in short, matter—but matter which reveals and communicates in different degrees invisible things! In the order of nature, and in what I will call the religion of the fireside, there is also a mysterious influence of places and of things—a secret communication of the habits, of the virtues, of the soul of the family by these material objects themselves. The child will see what its parents have seen; it will mingle its life with objects filled with recollections of them, and, so to speak, penetrated by their souls; he will receive some impress from it, and as an indelible character that he will carry through the errors of youth and even under the white hairs of the old man. If there be poetry in this, gentlemen, it is practical poetry; it germinates in facts; it has its roots in the nature of things. It makes us feel, besides, of what importance it is for the child to be reared with its father and mother, and not under a strange roof.