The Education of Catholic Girls | Page 3

teach, when the right has been secured. It is
not the controversy but the fruits of it that are here in question, the
echoes of battle and rumours of wars serve to enhance the importance
of the matter, the duty of making it all worth while, and using to the
best advantage the opportunities which are secured at the price of so
many conflicts.
The duty is twofold, to God and to His children. God, who entrusts to
us their religious education, has a right to be set before them as truly, as
nobly, as worthily as our capacity allows, as beautifully as human
language can convey the mysteries of faith, with the quietness and
confidence of those who know and are not afraid, and filial pride in the
Christian inheritance which is ours. The child has a right to learn the
best that it can know of God, since the happiness of its life, not only in
eternity but even in time, is bound up in that knowledge. Most grievous
wrong has been done, and is still done, to children by well-meaning but
misguided efforts to "make them good" by dwelling on the vengeance
taken by God upon the wicked, on the possibilities of wickedness in the
youngest child. Their impressionable minds are quite ready to take
alarm, they are so small, and every experience is so new; there are so
many great forces at work which can be dimly guessed at, and to their
vivid imaginations who can say what may happen next? If the first
impressions of God conveyed to them are gloomy and terrible, a
shadow may be cast over the mind so far-reaching that perhaps a whole
lifetime may not carry them beyond it. They hear of a sleepless Bye
that ever watches, to see them doing wrong, an Bye from which they
cannot escape. There is the Judge of awful severity who admits no
excuse, who pursues with relentless perseverance to the very end and
whose resources for punishment are inexhaustible. What wonder if a
daring and defiant spirit turns at last and stands at bay against the
resistless Avenger, and if in later years the practical result is--"if we
may not escape, let us try to forget," or the drifting of a whole life into
indifference, languor of will, and pessimism that border on despair.
Parents could not bear to be so misrepresented to their children, and
what condemnation would be sufficient for teachers who would turn

the hearts of children against their father, poisoning the very springs of
life. Yet this wrong is done to God. In general, children taught by their
own parents do not suffer so much from these misrepresentations of
God, as those who have been left with servants and ignorant teachers,
themselves warped by a wrong early training. Fathers and mothers
must have within themselves too much intuition of the Fatherhood of
God not to give another tone to their teaching, and probably it is from
fathers and mothers, as they are in themselves symbols of God's
almighty power and unmeasured love, that the first ideas of Him can
best reach the minds of little children.
But it is rare that circumstances admit the continuance of this best
instruction. For one reason or another children pass on to other teachers
and, except for what can be given directly by the clergy, must depend
on them for further religious instruction. This further teaching,
covering, say, eight years of school life, ten to eighteen, falls more or
less into two periods, one in which the essentials of Christian life and
doctrine have to be learned, the other in which more direct preparation
may be made for the warfare of faith which must be encountered when
the years of school life are over. It is a great stewardship to be entrusted
with the training of God's royal family of children, during these years
on which their after life almost entirely depends, and "it is required
among stewards that a man may be found faithful." For other branches
of teaching it is more easy to ascertain that the necessary qualifications
are not wanting, but in this the qualifications lie so deeply hidden
between God and the conscience that they must often be taken for
granted, and the responsibility lies all the more directly with the teacher
who has to live the life, as well as to know the truth, and love both truth
and life in order to make them loved. These are qualifications that are
never attained, because they must always be in process of attainment,
only one who is constantly growing in grace and love and knowledge
can give the true appreciation of what that grace and love and
knowledge are in their bearing on human life: to be rather than