We come now to a more directly practical part of our assumed task, and shall consider it our duty to speak plainly, and perhaps in a way to be censured by some; but we do it in what seems to us the interest of our people and country. The Rev. Father. T. Burke, O.S.D., while in this country some years ago, addressing a society of young men, told them that Americans could not expect to take their position among the civilized nations of the world unless they studied, and studied not superficially but well. For our part, we thank him for this word. It is time to put out of our heads that we are the most cultivated, civilized, well-informed people of the world. We are not. Alongside the generality of the educated men of Europe the generality of the educated men of America do not appear to advantage. Who and what is to blame for this?
In the first place, we blame parents. They ought to know better; they have had experience of the world. They are the natural guardians of their offspring, and should provide by their experience a remedy for the inexperience of youth. Yet they, and especially Catholic parents, are those who put the greatest obstacles in the way of those engaged in teaching. They want their boys hurried through school; they can’t see the use of Latin, much less of Greek. As for philosophy, a man can make a fortune without philosophy; as if a fortune were the only thing worth living for! If that were the case, your California stage-driver who has struck a “bonanza” is the type of what a man should be intellectually. Heaven save the mark! We have had such men say to us: “I assure you, sir, it is a very great misfortune my education was neglected; I have wealth and don’t know how to enjoy it.” There are numbers of unhappy wealthy Americans travelling in Europe whose children are looking forward to brilliant futures, but who themselves rush from one place to another, tortured by the necessity of having to come in contact with educated people and learn daily their own inferiority. We have met such people, and, out of sheer pity for their unhappy lot, have done what was in our power to make them forget for a while their troubles.
The fact is, no greater boon can a wealthy parent bestow upon his child than a thorough, careful education, and every effort should be made to secure such education. And one of the first steps to be taken is that parents second the efforts of zealous educators in our Catholic institutions. These institutions have their defects, but those defects can hardly be remedied without the co-operation of parents. What that co-operation should be will be seen further on.
There are defects in our institutions of education. This is our next point. These defects are in the manner of teaching and in what is taught.
We acknowledge that there have been great improvements in the manner of teaching since we were boys; but with all this the want of uniformity, scarcely attainable in this country, will always leave the door open to defects in teaching. As a rule, the mind of a boy is too much taxed with speculative matter, and his memory comparatively neglected. The memory is one of the first faculties to show itself active, and it is also capable of wonderful development. In the earlier education of the child the exercise of the memory should predominate; as little strain as possible should be put on the mind yet tender. As the education progresses the exercise of the memory should be kept up; choice extracts from the best poets and writers should alternate with the useful storing in the mind of facts and definitions. The preliminary education should consist in the learning of languages, which are means of acquiring further knowledge by intercourse and reading, not by any means the sum total of education. We wish our Catholic parents would understand this; for when a boy succeeds in knowing a little French and German they seem to think everything done. These languages are only the keys to the treasures locked up in the writings of other nations. They are principally to be acquired by memory; and, in fact, this is the way the most successful and generally used method—that of Ollendorf—adopts. There is no reason why the boy should not be put at a very early age to learning foreign languages. There is, too, one great advantage in this: that his work at such languages will be lighter and less absorbing when he comes to be engaged in scientific study. Again, care should be taken not to put into the hands of a child books of an abstruse or relatively difficult character; for excessive caution against straining the mind of such a scholar can scarcely be taken. A great deal of harm is sometimes done from the too high standard exacted by school-boards of the various categories of boys. We have never ceased to praise the judicious interference of our father, who, finding us with an analytical arithmetic put into our hands at seven years of age, took it away and placed it on the highest shelf of his closet.
When a boy is well under weigh in the languages—we do not speak of religious education, which we take for granted—he may very properly be introduced to the study of experimental science and the more difficult problems of analytical arithmetic and mathematics. But these branches should not be arranged in such a way as to compete, as it were, with that much-neglected study, so lightly thought of—mental philosophy. If one visits our different Catholic institutions of learning, and examines their system, still more looks into the practical working of it, he will find that the year of philosophy, much talked of, is employed in a most perfunctory manner. We would not be understood as attributing any culpa theologica to the instructors. We consider this state of things owing first to parents, and consequently to their children, and in part to the want of appreciation of the need of such philosophical training on the part of the teachers; though also, sometimes, to want of competency in the teachers themselves, whose previous education has been on the old plan. We conceive that too great attention and zeal cannot be expended in the correction of these defects. Corrected they can be, and they must be, if we wish to take and keep our proper standing. We cannot have a university for the present, and therefore it is all important that the one essential thing a university can give—a higher mental training—should be given to our young Catholic men. They must receive this in our colleges; they will not have it elsewhere. Of the need of it there can be no question. The great number of able, educated Europeans who, from political causes, have had to leave their native country and come to us, and the large number of Americans who nowadays study in European universities, all of whom, in conversation and through the press, retail to us the wildest phases of infidel, metaphysical, and social doctrine, is a sufficient argument to decide the matter, should any one hesitate. The church, to be sure, is our infallible guide, but there are many questions she does not treat, or, if she has treated them, her decisions can be understood only by careful study and explanation in the language of philosophy. So far from discouraging the study of philosophy, of metaphysics, and of ethics—possibly the more important of the two—she encourages us to make a good use of this handmaid of theology. It is therefore a duty incumbent on those in whose hands is placed the education of our young men to pay more attention than ever to this kind of instruction. We know of efforts in some instances that have been made in this direction, but which have failed. We are afraid they were not very numerous. In some instances a tincture of metaphysics was deemed enough; ethics were wholly neglected. How this could be has always been a puzzle to us. But it should not be any longer. A careful course of metaphysics that would embrace particularly the refutation of pantheism and materialism, besides establishing thoroughly the existence of God and the spirituality and immortality of the soul; and an equally careful course of ethics that would refute the utilitarians and socialists of the day, while making clear the claims of authority, the nature of law, the origin of right in the eternal fitness of things as seen in the divine Mind, and such kindred questions, should be the object of the most earnest solicitude of the superiors of our Catholic colleges. The young students should be made to apply their knowledge thus received either by short compositions in addition to the repetition of the lessons taught; or, far better still, by academic exercises in which one student defends in the school-room before his teacher and fellow-students a thesis or proposition already explained, while one or two others object against it all they can think of or learn, and this, too, in strict syllogistic form. Exercises such as these would be of the greatest advantage in training the mind to the ready use of logic, and to refuting the arguments possible to be urged against sound doctrine. Nothing better than this would tend to take away the reproach so often, and perhaps in some cases most unjustly, made against our educational institutions, of incompetency for thorough education. Did it depend on us to have the recasting of the system of education, we should be inclined to add on a year of further study as a requisite for graduation, and during the last two years of a young man’s course we would employ him entirely in the study of metaphysics and ethics, including the principles of political economy, of the philosophy of history—in which the great questions of history, as far as possible, might be reviewed—and in the further polish of his literary English training. The philosophy of history is most important, for it is a powerful teacher. History is not to be studied as a bare narrative of facts; the facts have a language of their own which needs an interpreter. The polish of literary education is of great necessity, as it is the one thing those educated in the non-Catholic colleges may be said to excel us in. We do not dwell much on scientific education, because that is really of secondary importance, and it is impossible to give boys more than an elementary training in this branch, which may serve as a ground-work for further pursuit of it, if one is destined to turn his attention in that direction. To enable the superiors of our colleges to carry out such a plan would depend upon the parents of young students having the fortitude to oblige their sons to remain the requisite time and make a diligent use of their opportunities. Herein lies their co-operation in the great work of the future education of the young Catholic men of America; and our word for it, if they follow this counsel, they will never have cause to repent. They will give us, too, far abler champions of truth than our young men have shown themselves to be in the past.
THE DANCING PROCESSION OF ECHTERNACH.
FROM THE REVUE GENERALE.
In the year of our Lord 690 a vessel from the island of Britain left upon the coast of Catwyk, in Holland, twelve young Anglo-Saxons who had abandoned their newly-converted country to carry the blessing of the Gospel to their brethren of the Continent. Chief among these young men, several of whom were of noble birth, was Willibrord, predestined from his mother’s womb to be a glory to the church and famous in the estimation of men. The young strangers separated, to work, each in his own way, in the vineyard of the Father. Willibrord began that very day the long and heroic apostolate of fifty years which ceased only with the pulsations of his heart. If we except his two journeys to Rome, where the great servant of the Papacy twice received the blessing and encouragement of the Sovereign Pontiff, he did not relax for a single day his labors in the vast region which stretches from the mouths of the Elbe and the Rhine to the banks of the Moselle. At his voice nations sitting in darkness rose up to behold the light, idols crumbled before the amazed eyes of their worshippers, churches arose from the soil and gathered about their altars multitudes of Christians, lay society organized itself little by little after the model of spiritual society.[[165]]
Tradition and history show us by turns the great Anglo-Saxon apostle in Friesland as the master of St. Boniface; in Denmark, preceding by more than a century the famous St. Anscarius; in the island of Helgoland, destroying the idol of Fosite and braving King Radbod’s wrath; in the Isle of Walcheren, where he nearly fell a victim to his heroism and apostolic zeal; in Campine as the friend of St. Lambert, another untiring athlete of Christ; and, finally, in Luxembourg, where even more than elsewhere his name is glorified and revered. For half a century he stood with Lambert and Boniface in the breach, the father of civilization in Western Germany and one of the most signal benefactors of mankind.
The common people, though they forget great poets and great generals, preserve the memory of saints. Seventeen churches in Belgium and fifty-eight in Holland are under his patronage, without counting those in the valleys of the Moselle and the Rhine, where his fame is equally wide-spread. Sixty-three leagues apart, a small section of St. Willibrord’s vast itinerary, two villages to-day preserve in their own names the undying memory of his works: Wilwerwiltz on the sterile moors of the German Ardennes, and Kleemskerk on the low, fertile plains of maritime Flanders.[[166]] Drawn, as it were, from nothingness by this great man, these two localities, were other witnesses wanting, would tell to later ages the glory of their sublime founder. Answering one to the other across the whole extent of Belgium, they testify to his vast labors and his devotion to the Roman Church, which we unworthily defend to-day against the barbarism conquered by him twelve centuries ago.