The workshop is, then, after the family, the second centre, the second home, for the education of the people. But what is a well-planned and well-organized workshop? It is one where the dignity and rights of personal being are recognized in the workmen, and especially in the child. A personal being is always an end, never a means; it cannot be used as an animal without reason, nor as an instrument without consciousness. If one expect services of it, and receive profit from it, it is necessary to dispose of it, as God does of us, with a great respect; cum magna reverentia disponis nos. What is a well-appointed workshop? It is one which has at its head a patron who is an honorable man, a patron truly worthy of the name he bears. Some have seen something ridiculous and disagreeable in this name; but, for my part, I find it very grand, very elevated, and, above all, very Christian. I see in it the idea of paternity, and in this very idea the practical solution of our problem, by the relations of mutual affection in a free but, nevertheless, close and durable association between the masters and the workmen. In such a workshop, under this father of the laborer, an immediate gain will be sacrificed, however great it may be, to the formation of intelligent and virtuous apprentices. It is not proposed to produce only much and quickly; it is desired that trade may be grand by its workmen as well as by its works; from its moral as well as its material side. The kingdom of God and his righteousness is sought first; and all the rest is added, for righteousness and utility have more bonds between them than we think, and science has recently stated that in the products of labor not only the degree of intelligence, but also the degree of morality of the workmen, may be recognized.
Aided by devoted and qualified foremen, such a patron will make the workshop he directs the best of professional schools. The good workman is made, like the good soldier, less by precept than by example, less by general and theoretical knowledge than by a practical struggle with the realities of his trade.
Come, then, young conscript of labor! I would have many more of this kind and many fewer of the other. (Applause.) Yes, the conscripts of agriculture, in these vast open workshops that we call the fields, and the conscripts of trade, in the more confined but not less fruitful workshops of our cities—the great, peaceful army which forms the true power and superior influence of a nation. (Renewed applause.) Come, conscript of labor! Enter upon the field of battle of the workshop! Fight those combats which are not always without dangers, never without courage and glory! And you, inured foreman, captain of this noble militia, follow it, guide it, exercise it by look, and word, and gesture! See how it avenges its first defeats by valiant exploits; how it puts its victorious hand upon this wild beast, this matter, revolted against man. It seizes it, it twists its mane, and finally curbs it, subdued, pliant, and docile, to carry on the inventions of science and the creations of genius. (Applause.)
Gentlemen, yet a word with regard to the workshop. It is a place which ought to complete the formation of the moral and religious character, at the same time that it perfects the intelligent and qualified workman. It is not alone the school of excellence in the profession; it is also the school of life. The family, with its auxiliaries, the school and the catechism, has provided the theory of life more than it has given the practice. The good precepts have fallen upon the consciousness of the child in the form of a mysterious revelation, of which he has felt the power and the beauty, but of which he has not been able to seize all the significance. Every theory, so far as it remains abstract, differs more or less from the reality; it is essential that it descend into the region of facts, and that it enter into a contact with them which, far from destroying, confirms, but at the same time modifies and fructifies, it. This is the true tendency of practical life.
When, then, the mother and the priest have grounded this sublime, true, and eternal theory of religion and of virtue, it belongs to the workshop to submit it to its necessary and decisive proof, to give or refuse it citizenship in practical existence. If, finally, everything in this new school says to the young apprentice, Your teachers have deceived you or are themselves deceived; the great movement of men and things is not, and cannot be, what they have told you; if this contradiction of the faith of his childhood penetrate his mind and heart through the constant teachings of word and example, by all the influences of these moral mediums, which act upon us with far greater force than physical mediums, it will come to pass that he will abandon the principles of his parents and instructors as a weak support, and will allow himself to glide down the seductive declivities of doubt and pleasure. But if, on the contrary, he find one of these workshops too rare to-day, which are the continuation of the school and fireside experience; if he hear and see the practical commentary on all he has believed and loved; if he breathe the pure air of healthful souls which refreshes and fortifies the conscience and the heart; you will soon see developed to manly stature those virtues of childhood instilled in him by the sacred influence of home and of religion, warmed by the contact of those two hearts which are equal—I dare not say that one surpasses the other; God has clothed them with so nearly the same tenderness and the same piety, for the cradle of mankind—the heart of the mother and the heart of the priest. (Applause.)
III.
Education By Means Of The Sunday.
I have just compared the priest and the mother. And indeed, gentlemen, if I have spoken separately of the family and the workshop, I have not intended by that to separate them from religion. With these two primordial laws of love and of labor of which I have indicated the double home—the family and the workshop—is connected, and, as it were, interlaced, a third still grander law, which forms with them the divine net-work of human existence—prayer.
We cannot be the disciples of an independent morality, because we are not participators in an impersonal deity. We have a morality which comes from the living God and which returns to him, and in this golden chain which binds the earth to heaven all the links are not the duties of man in respect to man; and when one desires to be an honorable man in the fulness and holiness of this term, so often profaned, he must not disregard in his practical respect the most living and sacred of all personalities. Now, this intercourse of the living and personal soul with the living and personal God is what we call prayer, in the fullest and most comprehensive sense of the word. It is not sufficient to think of God; it is necessary to pray to him. When one habituates himself to reach him only by thought, he finishes by no longer believing in God; he vanishes, or at least he transforms himself into a mass of confused and icy clouds—evanuerunt in cogitationibus suis—and of the Being of beings there remains only a sublime but chimerical ideality. It is necessary to have a heart, to have the arts and movements of a soul which looks up with respect and tenderness to the God who makes it to live upon the earth, to the Father who awaits it in the heavens. Not even individual prayer suffices; collective prayer is necessary—the meeting and communion of souls in the same illumination and fervidness of love. This prayer has a sacred day and place—the Sunday and the temple. It is of this day and this place, gentlemen, that it remains to say to you that they are, after as before the first communion, the highest school of the child, of the youth, and of the man.
This is why the first and most essential of all popular liberties is the liberty of keeping the Sunday. There are men who do not comprehend this need of repose for the soul and for the body. They are usually those who direct work, but who do not perform it; who receive the profit without knowing the fatigue. They are those who have not pricked their hands on the hard asperities of labor, with the thorns and briers of the workshop, and who have not been bowed down during six days over the earth with their brows bathed in sweat and their souls exhausted with suffering. As for such, I can conceive of their objections to the law of repose. I can comprehend their repugnance to the liberty of the Sunday. But the laborer, whenever he is not under the pressure of material or moral violence, whenever he is left to his own instincts; he claims as his most dear and sacred right the enjoyment of this day which makes him truly free, truly husband and father, truly a child of God. The sentiment of human dignity requires it; it is the exigency of family life; it is the religious need of souls; it is the cry of all that is most noble and imperious in our nature.