HOME EDUCATION.

HOME EDUCATION.Asthe family is the type and basis of society, so does it contain, as in a microcosm, all the questions, problems, and difficulties that agitate the larger world. Marriage is first in importance within the family and in society, as representing the principle of creation; education comes next, as representing the principle of development. Given a new and perfect society, made up of individual couples whose union should be absolutely satisfactory, and whose motives, thoughts, and actions absolutely irreproachable, how is it to be perpetuated in this desirable state? If to the perfection of marriage were not added the consequent perfection of education, the new society, for a moment raised up above former standards of approximative goodness, would, in the course of half a generation, be reduced lower than any standard of Christian times. This is so well understood that education has come to be the one cry of all parties, representing with some the conscientious result of their religious belief, with others merely their ambition to make a stir in the political world. Christians look to it as fitting men for heaven; statesmen turn to it as fashioning the law-abiding citizen; atheists see in it the means whereby successfully to blind mankind, and make them swallow the poison hidden under the appearance of superficial cleverness; the devil grasps it as a tool, or recoils from it as from a thunderbolt; but to no thinking being can it be a matter of indifference.We do not propose to go into that broader question of public education which, once within the scope of the law, and face to face with established national systems, immediately sets both hemispheres in a ferment; but to discuss that preliminary and more vital training whose silent power shows itself every day in the homes of thousands, neutralizing on the one hand good examples and wholesome teaching, and on the other often redeeming from utter badness its half-corrupted subject. And first taking the literal meaning of the word education,i.e.tolead up, orout of(e-duco), we must remark that as education is coeval with the dawn of reason, so it is also continuous. It begins in the cradle, and goes on hand in hand with life to the grave. All experience, good or bad, is education, not only the lessons taught in school-hours, the lectures given in classes, halls, and colleges, not alone the books we read and the examinations we undergo, but, more emphatically, the places we frequent, the people we meet, the misfortunes we go through, the work we perform. Even prosperity is education, though seldom in the highest sense, but it is chiefly in the lower walks of fortune that the more important part of this daily and hourly education is imparted. For this reason specially, and in view of the future in which a chance word heard in the street or a stray visit to some place or person may become of such subtle and paramount gravity, should home education in the Christian sense of the word be encouraged to the utmost. More particularly should this be the case in non-Catholic countries. We haveno outward atmosphere of religion to trust to; no wayside crosses to remind us of the sufferings which our sins caused our Blessed Saviour; no simple shrines to bid us remember to pray for our invisible brethren in purgatory; no street processions to bring vividly before our minds that our King is more than an earthly lord, and our Mother more than an earthly parent.We do not breathe Catholicity in our daily life, and there is therefore the greater need of our drinking it in with our mother’s milk. This insensible and gradual instilling of religion into our infant minds is the essence of Christian “home education.” First among all the influences that go towards it is example. This extends over every detail of the household, and can be and should be kept in view in the poorest as well as the most comfortable home. In the latter, certainly, the duty is more stringent, the incentives to its performance lying so near at hand that it requires an absolutely guilty carelessness to neglect them. In the former, though a thousand excuses might be made for the neglect of this paramount duty, it should still be remembered that God’s grace is all-powerful, and never fails those who seek to do his will. Parents sorely tried during a day of toil and anxiety are often found more loving and forbearing towards their helpless children than others who, with no trouble on their minds, yet delegate the “tiresome” office of nurse to a hired attendant; and although it is certainly to be deplored that in so many cases the children of the poor should be nothing but little men and women already weighed down by cares that ought to belong only to a later age, still it may be questioned whether even this is not a lesser evil in the long run than that other sort of neglect which makes the children of the rich, for the most part, only the playthings of their parents.The poor, on the contrary, though necessity may make their children drudges, yet have in them early friends, while too often among their more fortunate neighbors children count only as the ornaments of the house. So that even out of evil comes good, and God has planted consolations in the path of his poor which go far to soften the miseries of their inevitable lot. We say inevitable, not as denying the immense, unexplored possibilities of alleviating this lot which remain in the power of future philanthropists, but as believing in our Lord’s prophecy, “The poor you havealwayswith you,” which blessed promise we count as a staff vouchsafed in mercy to help us on our way to heaven.We have said that the duty of good example is incumbent upon every parent, rich or poor. But not only those broad examples which could hardly fail to strike even an idiot, such as abstaining from unseemly brawls, from excesses of language and of self-indulgence—in plain words, from swearing and drinking—or from manifest dishonesty; there are subtler things than these, and which produce indeed greater effect on the child spectator. Gross vice has often that redeeming phase of being its own antidote by disgusting those who come in daily contact with it. The principle on which the Spartans educated their children in temperance by exhibiting before them the drunken helots was (however cruel its application on the persons of their unhappy prisoners) a consummate proof of practical wisdom. That which does not carry such an antidote with it is more to be feared in the education of a child. A spirit of irritability between husband andwife; a carelessness on the part of either in entering cordially into the other’s little interests; an exhibition of temper over absurd trifles or of unamiability in small questions of self-denial—these tell gravely upon a child’s character. Observation and criticism are childhood’s natural characteristics, and very logical and very pitiless are childhood’s judgments. The old-fashioned code of a “well-behaved” child used to be never to ask questions; we are not so sure that this code was faultlessly wise. We suffer perhaps under a somewhat aggravated form of a very dissimilar one just now, and may be tempted—not unpardonably—to wish for the peace of the good old times back again. As usual, the middle course is the most rational as well as beneficial, and if it were in our power to stop the violent swayings of the social pendulum from one extreme to the other, we would gladly do our part in the work.It is therefore in the more unheeded and less abnormal occurrences of every day that the greatest force of example lies, and that harm or good may be done beyond recall. Christian gentleness, that daily unobtrusive charity which in rough homes amply makes up for what outward refinement may be lacking, and in more prosperous households alone sets the seal of true worth upon such exterior polish as there is, is the golden secret of a perfect example. And this spirit should extend to every domestic relation, covering the whole field of contingencies which may assume such grave proportions in a child’s memory. Your deportment to the poor, if you are rich yourself, has an invaluable force of example; the patience with which you listen to a tale of distress, the delicate courtesy implied in an attentive attitude, the gracefulness of your alms, and the wise but gentle discrimination of your questioning, all have an untold effect upon the little trotter by your side, hardly old enough to reason however dimly, but old enough to bear away a nameless impression of the scene. On the other hand, think of the responsibility incurred by a rude or callous reception; a sneering or lofty air of caution against what you think may be an imposture; above all, perhaps, a careless alms given to be rid of a disagreeable importunity, and a half-expression of relief when the interruption is happily over! The child at your side bears away this impression quite as surely, and in after-years uses its imitative powers quite as skilfully, as if the impression had been one of mercy and kindness; and a very few scenes of this sort are enough to mould for a child a certain standard of behavior.Among the domestic relations, none is more likely to strike a child’s eye than that between master and servant. Here also dangerous seeds of future heartlessness may be easily sown by the example of a careless or haughty parent. Considerate thought for the proper comforts of those whose toil ensures your leisure is one of the foremost Christian duties. A child is naturally tyrannical, and this disposition, if fostered by an injudicious mother, may lead to a shameless persecution of the very persons to whose care children are most often left. This, in turn, will encourage tyranny on the nurse’s part, and engender a system of mutual deceit; the child and the servant trying to circumvent each other in carrying tales, and then sheltering themselves by lies from the consequences of having carried them. Now, all this is to the last degree injurious to the future character of the child; it withers the principle of honor;it kills all manliness and straightforward dealing, and sows the seeds of those two inseparable vices, cruelty and cowardice. In after-life, when the despairing mother sees her darling sink below himself, and earn the unenviable names of bully and sneak, can she blame him for shattering the ideal she blindly worshipped in his person? Not so, for with justice can she look back on her own folly, and with bitterness cry out, “It was my fault.”Very different is the other and the good example shown by so many holy and conscientious women in their relations with their households. Considerateness and forbearance in all things are not incompatible with firmness in some. A sense of your own dignity, were it nothing higher, will dictate a kind bearing towards those in humbler station; for to those who never obtrude their superiority a double homage will ever be accorded. A child can exercise on its attendants some of the noblest virtues of manhood; the household is a little world, a preparatory stage on which to rehearse in miniature the opportunities of after-life. Pleasure given to some, a little gift or a gracious speech vouchsafed to others; consolation afforded to one in grief, attention shown to one in sickness; and, above all, a mindfulness of not making the yoke of servitude too galling by restricting the natural and proper diversions of those whom God has destined to bear it—such are a few of the lessons a child should learn, not in words alone, but in the manner of its parents and the unconscious radiating of an habitual example.Another class of influences under which a child will necessarily come is that of social relations. For the most part, children are made too much of a show. They are taught—or allowed—certain little mannerisms which, at their age, are called charming, but, if looked at by the light of common sense, are simply as absurd as they are forward. Later on, when they begin to use their reason, they are often listeners to frivolous or scandalous conversations, in which they pick up, if not a half-knowledge of vice, certainly a whole love of gossip. Now, all this is deplorable from a Christian point of view. In a really Christian home—a home such as we aspire to see at least in every Catholic family—the case would be very different. Entertainments and fêtes would be judiciously “few and far between,” and in its mother’s visitors the child would see only fresh objects of its mother’s charitable tact. If anything against charity were said, the hostess would gently check the conversation, either by palliating the fault alluded to, suggesting a better motive than the apparent one concerning any person implicated, or turning the conversation skilfully to some less dangerous topic. Those formal visits, made to kill time or otherwise uselessly, would have no part in her day’s programme, and with ever charitable but firm demeanor would she effectually check the frequent demands thus made upon her time by others. The child, quick of perception, as almost all children are, would be unconsciously moulded to habits of orderly and discriminating hospitality, and would soon learn to do something for God in every social pastime which it legitimately enjoyed.This brings us to the subject of order, an important virtue in the Christian home. Education itself, if given in a desultory fashion, would be next to useless, and some of that strict apportioning of time which gives to our study hours their wholesome monotony is essential also forthe home training of youth. This may seem at first sight a very arbitrary decision, but, when we come to look deeper into it, we find that it has the same relation to the future moral life as the study of the classics or of mathematics to the intellectual life. A knowledge of the Greek and Latin poets, orators, and historians has perhaps very little influence on the practical and ultimate result of a college education; but the effect of refinement it has on the mind, and the polished tone it imperceptibly gives to thought, manners, and conversation, are benefits simply incalculable. So with mathematics. A boy may not have any aptitude for that science, and may never hope to become proficient in it; still, the habit of application, the facility of concentrating and commanding his thoughts, which is the natural result of the close study demanded by the exact sciences, are things whose influence on his future career cannot be rated too high. They may not unlikely ensure temporal success, and, in these days of feverish competition, this argument should not be overlooked. Still, it is from a higher motive that we say the same of habits of order in the home. This regularity, which, no doubt, may be tedious, just as mathematics may be dry, is not lost on the general impressions of childhood, and, were it only for its own sake, should be looked upon as a seal of likeness to the works of God, which cannot fail to hallow the family circle. We have said that the family is the world in miniature, and as the principle of order was the presiding attribute in creation, so ought we in our daily lives to take it as a means of creating more and more time, more and more opportunities, for the service of God. “Be perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect.”In the education given by the constant example of the parents, nothing is more important than family prayer, or, at least, prayer said at the mother’s knee. In the most solemn of duties, it is not fitting that parent and child should be separated. If Jesus has said that his Father can refuse nothing to “two or threegatheredtogether in his name,” how much more invincible must be the joint prayer of those who are linked by such close and sacred ties, those who present to him a faint shadow of his own humble home at Nazareth! Think you that Jesus in his kingdom forgets the simple hearth where his Mother taught him, according to the development of his human nature, those formulæ of prayer and thanksgiving which he himself, in his divine nature, had taught to the Jewish lawgivers? Does he forget the rites of circumcision and presentation, the offerings and ransom paid for him according to the law, the visit to the temple at Jerusalem? He has shown us in his obedience to these religious observances his wish that we should imitate his outward devotion and submission to the church. Family worship is dear to him in remembrance of his own childhood, and as it is one of the most solemn, so it is also one of the sweetest duties of the Christian parent. It tends to give the child a proper spirit of faith and simple reliance, in that it sees its earthly parent, to whom it looks up for everything and considers as the final arbiter of its small world, prostrate before a higher Fatherhood, and taking towards the divine Omnipotence the very attitude of a submissive and expectant child.Next to prayer itself, pious reading cannot fail to demand our attention as the second great spiritual help in the routine of home education. Thisshould be simple and well suited to the understanding of young children, and, above all, should not be a dry and barren formality, but should be explained and amplified by the mother’s comments. How, unless questions are freely allowed—nay, encouraged—can the extent of the impression made by spiritual reading be measured? Then, what an inexhaustible resource does not this reading or its equivalent—descriptions by word of mouth—afford to a thoughtful parent! The beautiful narratives of the Old Testament, the stories of the four gospels, the many striking incidents in the lives of the saints, the legends of the faithful middle ages, the histories of the contemporaneous manifestations of God’s mercy, all offer mines of wealth to a skilful narrator. If, instead of goblin tales more fit for the entertainment of rational people than for the staple of a child’s too credulous meditations, these holy histories became the nursery rhymes of the future generation, it would be well indeed for the spiritual advance of our age. If among the romances of mediæval times more of those were chosen in which religion figures than of those where fairy and elf appear, it would be a better promise for the future health, moral and physical, of our people. Who knows how much of that nervousness which is the characteristic disease of our day is due to those unwholesome terrors of infancy, those threats of bogy and ogre, with which children are frightened into silence or lulled into uneasy sleep! The child who would be, in a manner, the companion of the boy Jesus, of the child Precursor, the infant Samuel, the Holy Innocents, the children of whom our Lord said, “Suffer them to come unto me, and forbid them not,” and of the many boy and girl saints—S. Rose of Viterbo, S. Aloysius Gonzaga, S. Stanislaus Kostka—would be a far healthier and more manly subject than the mental companion of deformed sprites and forest goblins. The young mind is so impressionable that it is the greatest possible mistake to let its first exercise of reason spend itself on unrealities; they are apt to take on an influence not readily shaken off, and to cumber the ground long after room is needed for more serious growths of thought. This may seem an exceptional mode of proceeding, perhaps an eccentric one, the contrary having for so many ages held sway, but we take leave to think that it has reason, expediency, and religion on its side.To this great duty of example, which ramifies itself as often as there are distinct classes of influence, is added the duty of vigilance. Parents need not only the knowledge of what to impart, but the instinct of what to shun. As watchers over a citadel, they have to guard against the masked inroads of the enemy, and carefully to sift their children’s surroundings, whether social or domestic, lest any taint should lurk in the association. We have read somewhere in a book of devotion that those who carry great treasures in a frail vessel naturally take the greater care as to their gait and speed; they look well to see if the road is level, or to avoid its irregularities if it is not; they take heed to keep their eyes and mind intent on what they bear, so as to bring it safe to its destination. Even so does the mother carry in her hands the priceless treasure of a human soul, and her solicitude for its perfect preservation from all taint or attack should be little less than that of the child’s Guardian Angel himself. If, as we have just hinted, she should choose with such scrupulous care even the companions of his fancy, somuch the more should this judicious censorship be extended to the real companions of his studies or recreations. Perhaps the influence of childish association is even greater than the mother’s own, and what the latter may have laboriously sown will be uprooted in a moment by the former. Children’s minds, in indiscriminate contact with each other, are as powder and spark brought together; if each had been kept until the right moment, and applied in the right way, we might have had an illumination; as it is, we have a conflagration. As childhood merges into youth, the choice of a school brings this question of companionship into prominence. In a public institution, it is not possible to admit only children who come, well-taught and docile-minded, from irreproachable homes; the very aim and end of the institution would thus be frustrated. Nor is it possible for its parents, once a child is admitted, to choose absolutely who, among its many school-fellows, shall be its special friends. Much may be done in that way by advice, tact, and prayer; still, guidance falls far short of absolute choice. It is therefore evident that the greater care should be taken to choose the school which in itself shall have the greatest influence in moulding the character of its scholars, and thereby in transforming into fitter companions for the new-comer those very children who,nolens volens, must needs be his everyday acquaintances. But the influence of home does not cease with the first day at school. Letters from home, breathing the old atmosphere, will carry the child back, week by week, to his old associations, be they good or bad; the holidays will bring him again within the fascination of the old circle, and occasional visits from the companions of his early childhood will complete the charm. Thus an infinite amount of good, or a corresponding amount of harm, may yet be done after the home education period has, strictly speaking, passed away.And here is, perhaps, the best place to touch upon the holy influence which an elder brother or sister may exercise on a younger one. This, one of the most powerful means of good, is only second to that of the parents themselves, and may furnish a very beautiful illustration of true and discerning brotherly love. It is spiritual friendship engrafted upon the stock of natural affection, itself a noble virtue and most sweet tie, which has often, even in heathen times, produced great effects. Under this figure of brotherhood God has typified his union with creatures; he made himself our Brother through the incarnation; and everywhere brotherhood is synonymous with the dearest and purest fellowship. Our brothers and sisters in the flesh, especially if they are younger than ourselves, are as much our care and charge as they are of our parents; and of this we have a striking instance in the very first book of the Pentateuch, and only a few years after the sinless creation of Adam. Cain’s defiant plea, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” failed to meet with God’s endorsement, but brought instead the terrible answer that he should be “a fugitive and a vagabond upon the earth.” In the daily companionship of brotherhood, this scene is often re-enacted; souls are slain by their own kindred, and the world smiles and passes blindly on. But God has set a mark upon the murderer by which the devils know him and kill him not, because they know too well whose road he is even now treading, and that in the last day his mark shall be revealed to all. Here is the dark side of that continuous education which is as potently at work in dens of shame andplaces of pleasant danger as it is in Christian homes and schools. Here is that nefarious education which neutralizes or obliterates the happy past, and leads our young men by tortuous paths of gradual vice to the end of many such deceptive panoramas—the gallows or suicide.False example, insidious promptings, rash indulgences, intoxicating freedom, wily friendship—through these and many kindred forms, subtle may be and proportionately dangerous, the devil, in the person of your brother or your seeming friend, leads you on till the murder of Abel is repeated, and the insolent excuse flung back to heaven: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”The system of rewards and punishments has much to do with the moral training of youth. With regard to this, we may startle our readers by broaching views so different from those time-honored ones that pretend to find their sanction in the Biblical rule, “Spare the rod, and spoil the child,” as to seem heretical to good old-fashioned, jog-trot parents.[36]But what if the Scripture itself were to fail them? What authority have they for understanding “the rod” in its literal instead of its figurative sense? The rod was, with the Hebrews, an emblem of power: witness the miracles of Aaron in Egypt, and the blossoming of his rod when his supreme authority was called in question by the rebellion of Core. “The rod” may therefore very plausibly be taken as meaning parental authority, and the text would thus imply nothing more than a declaration that thecarelessnessof the parent will be responsible for the wrong-headedness of the child. In this sense we prefer to read this passage, and for this reason: physical punishments and rewards will be indissolubly associated in a young child’s mind with his good or bad actions, just as they are coupled in the memory and instinct of a dog with the various desirable or undesirable things it has been taught or forbidden to do. This produces a low and degrading standard by which moral actions are henceforward measured by the child, and later on will lead to the impression that the absence of such tangible consequences argues the right to do as he pleases, irrespective of merely moral restraints; whereas, if the rewards and punishments meted out to him are of the moral and intellectual order, his conception of the principle of duty will be abstract and independent. Childhood has a natural leaning towards deception; therefore truth should be made not only prominent, but attractive. To own a fault, and even to confess it unasked, should be an understood palliation of the fault itself; whereas any attempt at concealment should be treated as a far graver offence than the action concealed. In a word, the principle of Christian honor should be the keynote of home education, and any meanness should be condemned as the most contemptible of all faults. Sensitive as children are to the slightest alteration of manner in their regard, they would feel keenly the silence and avoidance which this plan presupposes in their parents’ conduct towards them when guilty of a dishonorable action, and, by associating the idea ofwrongwith that ofdisgrace, would very soon be brought to a truer estimate of morals than if wrong with them was only the synonyme ofpain. Again, the system of physical punishment invariably leads to defiance; it stirs up a spirit of contradiction and sullennesswhich gradually encrusts the young mind with the deplorable proof-armor of ultimate indifference. We need give but one example—a personal one—of the immense superiority of moral over physical punishment. As a child, we were stubborn and self-willed, and were frequently treated, not exactly to corporal indignities, but to threadbare schoolroom devices for overcoming temper. Two or three times it happened that, these worn-out means proving as inefficient as “water on a duck’s back,” fatherly authority had to be invoked. It always took one form—silence. For a week there would be none of the happy familiarities between father and child, but, instead, a cessation of the usual pleasant and indulgent intercourse, and now and then a grave look of displeasure as the culprit would make some spasmodic and despairing advance. This was the only punishment which made the slightest impression, and the keen remembrance of it lasts to this day. Sometimes, when we were older, another variety was tried. Instead of being, according to the old code, starved on bread and water in a dark closet, we were seated alone at a table, while the rest of the family ate together as usual; every dish was ceremoniously brought up and served at our solitary meal, and every servant in the house was perfectly aware of the cause; no one spoke or offered us the least attention beyond the ordinary formalities, and we were treated half like a distinguished prisoner, half like an excommunicated person. The result was admirable, prompt in the extreme, and certain to ensure an unusually long term of subsequent docility.Rewards are no less important than punishments. Of these, knowledge and religious opportunities should, in our idea, form the staple. They are thus invested with a personal interest to the child; they come before him as things specially concerning his own good behavior and his parents’ appreciation of it. For instance, the mother reads him Scripture stories and the legends of the saints; he listens with absorption, and longs to read the book himself, but the road through the alphabet and spelling-book is uninviting. Why not teach him through the book itself? The illuminated capitals will strike him by their beauty, the pictures will lend force to the difficult words, and help his memory to connect them with the illustrated subject. Instead of finding church services an irksome interruption to his games, he might be made to look upon them as the highest rewards he can obtain. For a well-learnt lesson in catechism, he might be taught to chant one of those immortal poems, the Psalms; for proficiency in Bible history, he might be taken to some of the most picturesque of our solemn ceremonies, and hear, on the way, of the typical manner in which it is connected with that history; for an act of childish self-denial, he might be allowed to serve as acolyte at Mass. Even these rewards, however, should not be injudiciously multiplied, for familiarity would beget irreverence,—the worst stumbling-block that could be laid in a child’s spiritual path. We think that a Christian education in the early days of childhood could go no further in perfection than this—the thorough identification of all happiness with religion.We have yet to speak of a detail in household economy, which, in point of interest, is one of the foremost. Personal attention to a child is a part of the mother’s duty of vigilance, and the fashionable custom of leaving such attention to domesticscannot be reprobated too strongly. This personal care is, first of all, an instinct of nature which it must require a very thick coating of frivolity entirely to supersede; and it is, secondly, a duty of religion from which even great physical sickness cannot conscientiously release the parent. Numberless evils flow from a neglect of this imperious duty. The forsaken child will learn in time to forget its mother, to think of her as a splendid being very far from him—one not to be annoyed by his cries or made nervous by his romps, but to be gazed at from afar, like a grand picture or work of art. Happy child if an affectionate, compassionate nurse takes the vacant place of his own mother, and makes him familiar with those sweet, nameless trivialities that make up the world of a child’s heart; but, even so, how sad the necessity for such comfort! How much more sad, then, the position of the unloved child, neglected even by its nurse, or left to the well-meaning but questionable petting of the other servants! They will not be reticent, though they may be obsequious, and the future character of their charge will be warped beyond remedy. Pride, too, will be ridiculously fostered, and will drive tenderness away; a certain recklessness will be infused into the child’s habits, and reverence, refinement, sensitiveness, will be petrified within him. He will feel himself of no value, since no one cares for him, and, if no happy influence stops his downward course, he will be a cynic before he is twenty-five.We have said so much in this strain, and made so much of the gloomy side of the question, that we feel bound to speak a little more fully of the model Christian home, not only as it should be, but—thank God that we can say it!—as it very often is. We know that, according to Father Faber’s beautiful expression, “God has many Edens in this world,” and surely among our Christian homes many deserve this name.There are those in which the father is not absorbed in business and the mother by fashion, where the servants are happy and attached members of the family, where daily prayer and cheerful work alternate with each other in order, where recreation does not degenerate into riot, nor work conduce to moroseness. Healthy exercise and early hours keep the doctor from the door, while constant industry repulses the proverbial visitor who always “finds mischief for idle hands to do.” The father is the genial companion of his children, and does not lose their respect by gaining their confidence; the mother is the guardian spirit of the household, the wise woman of the Proverbs, “whose children rose up and called her blessed; her husband, and he praised her.” Towards each other the husband and wife behave as they would before the angels of God, because they remember that he who scandalizeth “a little one” is accursed, and that the angel of “the little one,” who is there continually beside him and in some sort represents him in heaven, “beholds the face of the Lord.” The children are submissive, not through fear, but throughreasonand love; for the acknowledged superiority of their elders has a rational force with them, and they think themselves honored in obeying those who are wiser than they. They have Jesus of Nazareth ever before their eyes—the Boy who, as he grew in years, “waxed strong in wisdom and grace,” and who, though he was God, “went down, and was subject to them.”This life, peaceful, orderly, religious, the life of the cloister translatedinto the home, is in itself education. Its holy influence is not confined to space or time, but will live in the hearts of the scattered family through youth and manhood to extreme old age. In fancy, they will be able to reconstruct that home; in spirit, to revisit it long after its dearest inmates shall have left it for their heavenly home, long after its material frame shall have passed away to other, perhaps to careless, hands. In their various resting-places, whether a new home, the daughter of that shrine, or only a rock just above the level of the sea of fortune, the hallowed remembrance will come back to them freighted with hope and strength for the future. Even in heaven, the Son of God is called Jesus ofNazareth, and canweforget the home and the mother that made us what we are?In all that pertains to this ideal, although man is bound to subserve it to the utmost, woman is more solemnly pledged to its fulfilment. Man has the world for his empire: woman has man—during the years of his pupilage. The mother’s education is the child’s second birth, and she who, being mother to the body of her child, neglects that more laborious training which accompanies its moral development, practically refuses to be the mother of its soul. To a woman failing in her home duties is attached more reproach than to a neglectful husband and father, because her office is the more sacred, her position the nearer to God. It was a woman who was glorified by the most miraculously close union with God that the universe has ever seen, and by that standard alone should womanhood and motherhood be judged. If it falls short of a faint copy of Mary the mother of Jesus, it is condemned, for the state that has been the most divinely exalted should ever after remain the most humanly perfect.The mere temporal importance of home education, though secondary to its spiritual aspect, cannot be overlooked. Besides the duty of the angel—training souls for heaven—woman has the duty of the citizen,i.e.training patriots for the state. Without faith there is no love of country in the highest sense; without discipline, no love of law. It is woman’s task to mould the men who, in the future, will mould the nation. High or low it matters not: the mother of the statesman and the mother of the laborer work alike towards their country’s glory. The state needs hands as well as heads, and the mason who cuts the common stones has as much part and should have as much pride in the completed building as the artist who carves the wonderful pinnacles or fashions the marvellous capitals.We have spoken perhaps too exclusively of the duties and circumstances of the higher classes in this matter of home education. Perhaps it is not altogether unprovidential that we should have been led to do so; for of the various divisions of humanity which our Lord in his parable of the sower represents under the figure of the different accidents that befell the good seed, we know which is, unhappily, the least productive. Jesus himself has explained that the thorns which choked the seed are the “cares, and riches, and pleasures of this life.” Mark well, thecares; not only the riches and pleasures, for those self-sought and profitless cares have not the blessings on them which the God-given cares of poverty have. The poor and lowly too often shame their more fortunate brethren by their greater self-devotion and generosity. Their homes, so much less prosperous, are yet often so much more edifying, than ours; and let it be rememberedthat every act of theirs has, according to the measure of their inferior opportunities, double the merit of any similar act of ours. So with the wholesome reticence which becomes us who have so many opportunitiesand neglect them: we have preferred to point out the beam that is in our own eye, rather than pharisaically to expatiate on the mote that is in our neighbor’s. Yet we would not that any class should deem itself exempt from the duties of home education—duties which, with the poor, have all the added merit of absolute heroism. The poor are told, and doubtless truly, by our teachers and superiors, that their condition should be dear to them because it was that of our Lord himself; but we, their brethren and fellow-pilgrims, should labor to supplement this teaching by making that very condition less irksome to them. Who can dream of Jesus on earth asnotbeing poor and destitute? But, on the other hand, who would dare, were he now on earth, to be behindhand in ministering to his poverty? Now, the alms weoweto his earthly representatives are twofold,i.e.spiritual and temporal. Among the former, none are so meritorious as good examples. Have we not in these days a perpetual and most sadly grotesque picture of class aping class, of tawdriness following close on the heels of fashion, of aspiring vanity actually crowding out the legitimate needs of the body? If this system of imitation must be, why not give it a worthy subject to practise upon?Reform, to be practical, must begin in the higher strata of society; for not only to individuals, but also, in a wider sense, to classes, is the keepership of brotherhood entrusted. Weareour “brother’s keeper,” and our “brother” is the mass of men who look up to us for guidance. As long as our fathers and husbands care more for their office than their home, so long will the bulk of the nation be mere animated machines snatching after precarious wealth; as long as our wives and mothers care more for the drawing-room than for the nursery and study, so long will the mass of women be heartless coquettes or abandoned harlots. We speak strongly, because we feel strongly. This is an age of initial struggle, which our faith should turn into an era of better things. If we need any “new departure,” let it be the departure from frivolity to domesticity, from contemptible weakness to the manliness of the Gospel. And here let us say one word to the head of the family, to him without whose example even the mother’s influence is incomplete. Business isnotthe whole of life; it isnoteven the first earthly good to be sought for. Success often kills happiness, and its exclusive pursuit always kills peace. The father who allows business to isolate him from all the tenderer interests of his home achieves two things: he alienates his children’s affection—after having very likely worn out his wife’s devotion—and he teaches them betimes the baneful lesson that before Mammon all other interests must bow. This false doctrine his children will teach to theirs by an example equally gloomy with his own, and thus God will be forgotten in the very gifts which one word of his mouth could turn in a moment to dust and ashes.Shall this be so, or will Christian parents take heed to their duty?

HOME EDUCATION.Asthe family is the type and basis of society, so does it contain, as in a microcosm, all the questions, problems, and difficulties that agitate the larger world. Marriage is first in importance within the family and in society, as representing the principle of creation; education comes next, as representing the principle of development. Given a new and perfect society, made up of individual couples whose union should be absolutely satisfactory, and whose motives, thoughts, and actions absolutely irreproachable, how is it to be perpetuated in this desirable state? If to the perfection of marriage were not added the consequent perfection of education, the new society, for a moment raised up above former standards of approximative goodness, would, in the course of half a generation, be reduced lower than any standard of Christian times. This is so well understood that education has come to be the one cry of all parties, representing with some the conscientious result of their religious belief, with others merely their ambition to make a stir in the political world. Christians look to it as fitting men for heaven; statesmen turn to it as fashioning the law-abiding citizen; atheists see in it the means whereby successfully to blind mankind, and make them swallow the poison hidden under the appearance of superficial cleverness; the devil grasps it as a tool, or recoils from it as from a thunderbolt; but to no thinking being can it be a matter of indifference.We do not propose to go into that broader question of public education which, once within the scope of the law, and face to face with established national systems, immediately sets both hemispheres in a ferment; but to discuss that preliminary and more vital training whose silent power shows itself every day in the homes of thousands, neutralizing on the one hand good examples and wholesome teaching, and on the other often redeeming from utter badness its half-corrupted subject. And first taking the literal meaning of the word education,i.e.tolead up, orout of(e-duco), we must remark that as education is coeval with the dawn of reason, so it is also continuous. It begins in the cradle, and goes on hand in hand with life to the grave. All experience, good or bad, is education, not only the lessons taught in school-hours, the lectures given in classes, halls, and colleges, not alone the books we read and the examinations we undergo, but, more emphatically, the places we frequent, the people we meet, the misfortunes we go through, the work we perform. Even prosperity is education, though seldom in the highest sense, but it is chiefly in the lower walks of fortune that the more important part of this daily and hourly education is imparted. For this reason specially, and in view of the future in which a chance word heard in the street or a stray visit to some place or person may become of such subtle and paramount gravity, should home education in the Christian sense of the word be encouraged to the utmost. More particularly should this be the case in non-Catholic countries. We haveno outward atmosphere of religion to trust to; no wayside crosses to remind us of the sufferings which our sins caused our Blessed Saviour; no simple shrines to bid us remember to pray for our invisible brethren in purgatory; no street processions to bring vividly before our minds that our King is more than an earthly lord, and our Mother more than an earthly parent.We do not breathe Catholicity in our daily life, and there is therefore the greater need of our drinking it in with our mother’s milk. This insensible and gradual instilling of religion into our infant minds is the essence of Christian “home education.” First among all the influences that go towards it is example. This extends over every detail of the household, and can be and should be kept in view in the poorest as well as the most comfortable home. In the latter, certainly, the duty is more stringent, the incentives to its performance lying so near at hand that it requires an absolutely guilty carelessness to neglect them. In the former, though a thousand excuses might be made for the neglect of this paramount duty, it should still be remembered that God’s grace is all-powerful, and never fails those who seek to do his will. Parents sorely tried during a day of toil and anxiety are often found more loving and forbearing towards their helpless children than others who, with no trouble on their minds, yet delegate the “tiresome” office of nurse to a hired attendant; and although it is certainly to be deplored that in so many cases the children of the poor should be nothing but little men and women already weighed down by cares that ought to belong only to a later age, still it may be questioned whether even this is not a lesser evil in the long run than that other sort of neglect which makes the children of the rich, for the most part, only the playthings of their parents.The poor, on the contrary, though necessity may make their children drudges, yet have in them early friends, while too often among their more fortunate neighbors children count only as the ornaments of the house. So that even out of evil comes good, and God has planted consolations in the path of his poor which go far to soften the miseries of their inevitable lot. We say inevitable, not as denying the immense, unexplored possibilities of alleviating this lot which remain in the power of future philanthropists, but as believing in our Lord’s prophecy, “The poor you havealwayswith you,” which blessed promise we count as a staff vouchsafed in mercy to help us on our way to heaven.We have said that the duty of good example is incumbent upon every parent, rich or poor. But not only those broad examples which could hardly fail to strike even an idiot, such as abstaining from unseemly brawls, from excesses of language and of self-indulgence—in plain words, from swearing and drinking—or from manifest dishonesty; there are subtler things than these, and which produce indeed greater effect on the child spectator. Gross vice has often that redeeming phase of being its own antidote by disgusting those who come in daily contact with it. The principle on which the Spartans educated their children in temperance by exhibiting before them the drunken helots was (however cruel its application on the persons of their unhappy prisoners) a consummate proof of practical wisdom. That which does not carry such an antidote with it is more to be feared in the education of a child. A spirit of irritability between husband andwife; a carelessness on the part of either in entering cordially into the other’s little interests; an exhibition of temper over absurd trifles or of unamiability in small questions of self-denial—these tell gravely upon a child’s character. Observation and criticism are childhood’s natural characteristics, and very logical and very pitiless are childhood’s judgments. The old-fashioned code of a “well-behaved” child used to be never to ask questions; we are not so sure that this code was faultlessly wise. We suffer perhaps under a somewhat aggravated form of a very dissimilar one just now, and may be tempted—not unpardonably—to wish for the peace of the good old times back again. As usual, the middle course is the most rational as well as beneficial, and if it were in our power to stop the violent swayings of the social pendulum from one extreme to the other, we would gladly do our part in the work.It is therefore in the more unheeded and less abnormal occurrences of every day that the greatest force of example lies, and that harm or good may be done beyond recall. Christian gentleness, that daily unobtrusive charity which in rough homes amply makes up for what outward refinement may be lacking, and in more prosperous households alone sets the seal of true worth upon such exterior polish as there is, is the golden secret of a perfect example. And this spirit should extend to every domestic relation, covering the whole field of contingencies which may assume such grave proportions in a child’s memory. Your deportment to the poor, if you are rich yourself, has an invaluable force of example; the patience with which you listen to a tale of distress, the delicate courtesy implied in an attentive attitude, the gracefulness of your alms, and the wise but gentle discrimination of your questioning, all have an untold effect upon the little trotter by your side, hardly old enough to reason however dimly, but old enough to bear away a nameless impression of the scene. On the other hand, think of the responsibility incurred by a rude or callous reception; a sneering or lofty air of caution against what you think may be an imposture; above all, perhaps, a careless alms given to be rid of a disagreeable importunity, and a half-expression of relief when the interruption is happily over! The child at your side bears away this impression quite as surely, and in after-years uses its imitative powers quite as skilfully, as if the impression had been one of mercy and kindness; and a very few scenes of this sort are enough to mould for a child a certain standard of behavior.Among the domestic relations, none is more likely to strike a child’s eye than that between master and servant. Here also dangerous seeds of future heartlessness may be easily sown by the example of a careless or haughty parent. Considerate thought for the proper comforts of those whose toil ensures your leisure is one of the foremost Christian duties. A child is naturally tyrannical, and this disposition, if fostered by an injudicious mother, may lead to a shameless persecution of the very persons to whose care children are most often left. This, in turn, will encourage tyranny on the nurse’s part, and engender a system of mutual deceit; the child and the servant trying to circumvent each other in carrying tales, and then sheltering themselves by lies from the consequences of having carried them. Now, all this is to the last degree injurious to the future character of the child; it withers the principle of honor;it kills all manliness and straightforward dealing, and sows the seeds of those two inseparable vices, cruelty and cowardice. In after-life, when the despairing mother sees her darling sink below himself, and earn the unenviable names of bully and sneak, can she blame him for shattering the ideal she blindly worshipped in his person? Not so, for with justice can she look back on her own folly, and with bitterness cry out, “It was my fault.”Very different is the other and the good example shown by so many holy and conscientious women in their relations with their households. Considerateness and forbearance in all things are not incompatible with firmness in some. A sense of your own dignity, were it nothing higher, will dictate a kind bearing towards those in humbler station; for to those who never obtrude their superiority a double homage will ever be accorded. A child can exercise on its attendants some of the noblest virtues of manhood; the household is a little world, a preparatory stage on which to rehearse in miniature the opportunities of after-life. Pleasure given to some, a little gift or a gracious speech vouchsafed to others; consolation afforded to one in grief, attention shown to one in sickness; and, above all, a mindfulness of not making the yoke of servitude too galling by restricting the natural and proper diversions of those whom God has destined to bear it—such are a few of the lessons a child should learn, not in words alone, but in the manner of its parents and the unconscious radiating of an habitual example.Another class of influences under which a child will necessarily come is that of social relations. For the most part, children are made too much of a show. They are taught—or allowed—certain little mannerisms which, at their age, are called charming, but, if looked at by the light of common sense, are simply as absurd as they are forward. Later on, when they begin to use their reason, they are often listeners to frivolous or scandalous conversations, in which they pick up, if not a half-knowledge of vice, certainly a whole love of gossip. Now, all this is deplorable from a Christian point of view. In a really Christian home—a home such as we aspire to see at least in every Catholic family—the case would be very different. Entertainments and fêtes would be judiciously “few and far between,” and in its mother’s visitors the child would see only fresh objects of its mother’s charitable tact. If anything against charity were said, the hostess would gently check the conversation, either by palliating the fault alluded to, suggesting a better motive than the apparent one concerning any person implicated, or turning the conversation skilfully to some less dangerous topic. Those formal visits, made to kill time or otherwise uselessly, would have no part in her day’s programme, and with ever charitable but firm demeanor would she effectually check the frequent demands thus made upon her time by others. The child, quick of perception, as almost all children are, would be unconsciously moulded to habits of orderly and discriminating hospitality, and would soon learn to do something for God in every social pastime which it legitimately enjoyed.This brings us to the subject of order, an important virtue in the Christian home. Education itself, if given in a desultory fashion, would be next to useless, and some of that strict apportioning of time which gives to our study hours their wholesome monotony is essential also forthe home training of youth. This may seem at first sight a very arbitrary decision, but, when we come to look deeper into it, we find that it has the same relation to the future moral life as the study of the classics or of mathematics to the intellectual life. A knowledge of the Greek and Latin poets, orators, and historians has perhaps very little influence on the practical and ultimate result of a college education; but the effect of refinement it has on the mind, and the polished tone it imperceptibly gives to thought, manners, and conversation, are benefits simply incalculable. So with mathematics. A boy may not have any aptitude for that science, and may never hope to become proficient in it; still, the habit of application, the facility of concentrating and commanding his thoughts, which is the natural result of the close study demanded by the exact sciences, are things whose influence on his future career cannot be rated too high. They may not unlikely ensure temporal success, and, in these days of feverish competition, this argument should not be overlooked. Still, it is from a higher motive that we say the same of habits of order in the home. This regularity, which, no doubt, may be tedious, just as mathematics may be dry, is not lost on the general impressions of childhood, and, were it only for its own sake, should be looked upon as a seal of likeness to the works of God, which cannot fail to hallow the family circle. We have said that the family is the world in miniature, and as the principle of order was the presiding attribute in creation, so ought we in our daily lives to take it as a means of creating more and more time, more and more opportunities, for the service of God. “Be perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect.”In the education given by the constant example of the parents, nothing is more important than family prayer, or, at least, prayer said at the mother’s knee. In the most solemn of duties, it is not fitting that parent and child should be separated. If Jesus has said that his Father can refuse nothing to “two or threegatheredtogether in his name,” how much more invincible must be the joint prayer of those who are linked by such close and sacred ties, those who present to him a faint shadow of his own humble home at Nazareth! Think you that Jesus in his kingdom forgets the simple hearth where his Mother taught him, according to the development of his human nature, those formulæ of prayer and thanksgiving which he himself, in his divine nature, had taught to the Jewish lawgivers? Does he forget the rites of circumcision and presentation, the offerings and ransom paid for him according to the law, the visit to the temple at Jerusalem? He has shown us in his obedience to these religious observances his wish that we should imitate his outward devotion and submission to the church. Family worship is dear to him in remembrance of his own childhood, and as it is one of the most solemn, so it is also one of the sweetest duties of the Christian parent. It tends to give the child a proper spirit of faith and simple reliance, in that it sees its earthly parent, to whom it looks up for everything and considers as the final arbiter of its small world, prostrate before a higher Fatherhood, and taking towards the divine Omnipotence the very attitude of a submissive and expectant child.Next to prayer itself, pious reading cannot fail to demand our attention as the second great spiritual help in the routine of home education. Thisshould be simple and well suited to the understanding of young children, and, above all, should not be a dry and barren formality, but should be explained and amplified by the mother’s comments. How, unless questions are freely allowed—nay, encouraged—can the extent of the impression made by spiritual reading be measured? Then, what an inexhaustible resource does not this reading or its equivalent—descriptions by word of mouth—afford to a thoughtful parent! The beautiful narratives of the Old Testament, the stories of the four gospels, the many striking incidents in the lives of the saints, the legends of the faithful middle ages, the histories of the contemporaneous manifestations of God’s mercy, all offer mines of wealth to a skilful narrator. If, instead of goblin tales more fit for the entertainment of rational people than for the staple of a child’s too credulous meditations, these holy histories became the nursery rhymes of the future generation, it would be well indeed for the spiritual advance of our age. If among the romances of mediæval times more of those were chosen in which religion figures than of those where fairy and elf appear, it would be a better promise for the future health, moral and physical, of our people. Who knows how much of that nervousness which is the characteristic disease of our day is due to those unwholesome terrors of infancy, those threats of bogy and ogre, with which children are frightened into silence or lulled into uneasy sleep! The child who would be, in a manner, the companion of the boy Jesus, of the child Precursor, the infant Samuel, the Holy Innocents, the children of whom our Lord said, “Suffer them to come unto me, and forbid them not,” and of the many boy and girl saints—S. Rose of Viterbo, S. Aloysius Gonzaga, S. Stanislaus Kostka—would be a far healthier and more manly subject than the mental companion of deformed sprites and forest goblins. The young mind is so impressionable that it is the greatest possible mistake to let its first exercise of reason spend itself on unrealities; they are apt to take on an influence not readily shaken off, and to cumber the ground long after room is needed for more serious growths of thought. This may seem an exceptional mode of proceeding, perhaps an eccentric one, the contrary having for so many ages held sway, but we take leave to think that it has reason, expediency, and religion on its side.To this great duty of example, which ramifies itself as often as there are distinct classes of influence, is added the duty of vigilance. Parents need not only the knowledge of what to impart, but the instinct of what to shun. As watchers over a citadel, they have to guard against the masked inroads of the enemy, and carefully to sift their children’s surroundings, whether social or domestic, lest any taint should lurk in the association. We have read somewhere in a book of devotion that those who carry great treasures in a frail vessel naturally take the greater care as to their gait and speed; they look well to see if the road is level, or to avoid its irregularities if it is not; they take heed to keep their eyes and mind intent on what they bear, so as to bring it safe to its destination. Even so does the mother carry in her hands the priceless treasure of a human soul, and her solicitude for its perfect preservation from all taint or attack should be little less than that of the child’s Guardian Angel himself. If, as we have just hinted, she should choose with such scrupulous care even the companions of his fancy, somuch the more should this judicious censorship be extended to the real companions of his studies or recreations. Perhaps the influence of childish association is even greater than the mother’s own, and what the latter may have laboriously sown will be uprooted in a moment by the former. Children’s minds, in indiscriminate contact with each other, are as powder and spark brought together; if each had been kept until the right moment, and applied in the right way, we might have had an illumination; as it is, we have a conflagration. As childhood merges into youth, the choice of a school brings this question of companionship into prominence. In a public institution, it is not possible to admit only children who come, well-taught and docile-minded, from irreproachable homes; the very aim and end of the institution would thus be frustrated. Nor is it possible for its parents, once a child is admitted, to choose absolutely who, among its many school-fellows, shall be its special friends. Much may be done in that way by advice, tact, and prayer; still, guidance falls far short of absolute choice. It is therefore evident that the greater care should be taken to choose the school which in itself shall have the greatest influence in moulding the character of its scholars, and thereby in transforming into fitter companions for the new-comer those very children who,nolens volens, must needs be his everyday acquaintances. But the influence of home does not cease with the first day at school. Letters from home, breathing the old atmosphere, will carry the child back, week by week, to his old associations, be they good or bad; the holidays will bring him again within the fascination of the old circle, and occasional visits from the companions of his early childhood will complete the charm. Thus an infinite amount of good, or a corresponding amount of harm, may yet be done after the home education period has, strictly speaking, passed away.And here is, perhaps, the best place to touch upon the holy influence which an elder brother or sister may exercise on a younger one. This, one of the most powerful means of good, is only second to that of the parents themselves, and may furnish a very beautiful illustration of true and discerning brotherly love. It is spiritual friendship engrafted upon the stock of natural affection, itself a noble virtue and most sweet tie, which has often, even in heathen times, produced great effects. Under this figure of brotherhood God has typified his union with creatures; he made himself our Brother through the incarnation; and everywhere brotherhood is synonymous with the dearest and purest fellowship. Our brothers and sisters in the flesh, especially if they are younger than ourselves, are as much our care and charge as they are of our parents; and of this we have a striking instance in the very first book of the Pentateuch, and only a few years after the sinless creation of Adam. Cain’s defiant plea, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” failed to meet with God’s endorsement, but brought instead the terrible answer that he should be “a fugitive and a vagabond upon the earth.” In the daily companionship of brotherhood, this scene is often re-enacted; souls are slain by their own kindred, and the world smiles and passes blindly on. But God has set a mark upon the murderer by which the devils know him and kill him not, because they know too well whose road he is even now treading, and that in the last day his mark shall be revealed to all. Here is the dark side of that continuous education which is as potently at work in dens of shame andplaces of pleasant danger as it is in Christian homes and schools. Here is that nefarious education which neutralizes or obliterates the happy past, and leads our young men by tortuous paths of gradual vice to the end of many such deceptive panoramas—the gallows or suicide.False example, insidious promptings, rash indulgences, intoxicating freedom, wily friendship—through these and many kindred forms, subtle may be and proportionately dangerous, the devil, in the person of your brother or your seeming friend, leads you on till the murder of Abel is repeated, and the insolent excuse flung back to heaven: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”The system of rewards and punishments has much to do with the moral training of youth. With regard to this, we may startle our readers by broaching views so different from those time-honored ones that pretend to find their sanction in the Biblical rule, “Spare the rod, and spoil the child,” as to seem heretical to good old-fashioned, jog-trot parents.[36]But what if the Scripture itself were to fail them? What authority have they for understanding “the rod” in its literal instead of its figurative sense? The rod was, with the Hebrews, an emblem of power: witness the miracles of Aaron in Egypt, and the blossoming of his rod when his supreme authority was called in question by the rebellion of Core. “The rod” may therefore very plausibly be taken as meaning parental authority, and the text would thus imply nothing more than a declaration that thecarelessnessof the parent will be responsible for the wrong-headedness of the child. In this sense we prefer to read this passage, and for this reason: physical punishments and rewards will be indissolubly associated in a young child’s mind with his good or bad actions, just as they are coupled in the memory and instinct of a dog with the various desirable or undesirable things it has been taught or forbidden to do. This produces a low and degrading standard by which moral actions are henceforward measured by the child, and later on will lead to the impression that the absence of such tangible consequences argues the right to do as he pleases, irrespective of merely moral restraints; whereas, if the rewards and punishments meted out to him are of the moral and intellectual order, his conception of the principle of duty will be abstract and independent. Childhood has a natural leaning towards deception; therefore truth should be made not only prominent, but attractive. To own a fault, and even to confess it unasked, should be an understood palliation of the fault itself; whereas any attempt at concealment should be treated as a far graver offence than the action concealed. In a word, the principle of Christian honor should be the keynote of home education, and any meanness should be condemned as the most contemptible of all faults. Sensitive as children are to the slightest alteration of manner in their regard, they would feel keenly the silence and avoidance which this plan presupposes in their parents’ conduct towards them when guilty of a dishonorable action, and, by associating the idea ofwrongwith that ofdisgrace, would very soon be brought to a truer estimate of morals than if wrong with them was only the synonyme ofpain. Again, the system of physical punishment invariably leads to defiance; it stirs up a spirit of contradiction and sullennesswhich gradually encrusts the young mind with the deplorable proof-armor of ultimate indifference. We need give but one example—a personal one—of the immense superiority of moral over physical punishment. As a child, we were stubborn and self-willed, and were frequently treated, not exactly to corporal indignities, but to threadbare schoolroom devices for overcoming temper. Two or three times it happened that, these worn-out means proving as inefficient as “water on a duck’s back,” fatherly authority had to be invoked. It always took one form—silence. For a week there would be none of the happy familiarities between father and child, but, instead, a cessation of the usual pleasant and indulgent intercourse, and now and then a grave look of displeasure as the culprit would make some spasmodic and despairing advance. This was the only punishment which made the slightest impression, and the keen remembrance of it lasts to this day. Sometimes, when we were older, another variety was tried. Instead of being, according to the old code, starved on bread and water in a dark closet, we were seated alone at a table, while the rest of the family ate together as usual; every dish was ceremoniously brought up and served at our solitary meal, and every servant in the house was perfectly aware of the cause; no one spoke or offered us the least attention beyond the ordinary formalities, and we were treated half like a distinguished prisoner, half like an excommunicated person. The result was admirable, prompt in the extreme, and certain to ensure an unusually long term of subsequent docility.Rewards are no less important than punishments. Of these, knowledge and religious opportunities should, in our idea, form the staple. They are thus invested with a personal interest to the child; they come before him as things specially concerning his own good behavior and his parents’ appreciation of it. For instance, the mother reads him Scripture stories and the legends of the saints; he listens with absorption, and longs to read the book himself, but the road through the alphabet and spelling-book is uninviting. Why not teach him through the book itself? The illuminated capitals will strike him by their beauty, the pictures will lend force to the difficult words, and help his memory to connect them with the illustrated subject. Instead of finding church services an irksome interruption to his games, he might be made to look upon them as the highest rewards he can obtain. For a well-learnt lesson in catechism, he might be taught to chant one of those immortal poems, the Psalms; for proficiency in Bible history, he might be taken to some of the most picturesque of our solemn ceremonies, and hear, on the way, of the typical manner in which it is connected with that history; for an act of childish self-denial, he might be allowed to serve as acolyte at Mass. Even these rewards, however, should not be injudiciously multiplied, for familiarity would beget irreverence,—the worst stumbling-block that could be laid in a child’s spiritual path. We think that a Christian education in the early days of childhood could go no further in perfection than this—the thorough identification of all happiness with religion.We have yet to speak of a detail in household economy, which, in point of interest, is one of the foremost. Personal attention to a child is a part of the mother’s duty of vigilance, and the fashionable custom of leaving such attention to domesticscannot be reprobated too strongly. This personal care is, first of all, an instinct of nature which it must require a very thick coating of frivolity entirely to supersede; and it is, secondly, a duty of religion from which even great physical sickness cannot conscientiously release the parent. Numberless evils flow from a neglect of this imperious duty. The forsaken child will learn in time to forget its mother, to think of her as a splendid being very far from him—one not to be annoyed by his cries or made nervous by his romps, but to be gazed at from afar, like a grand picture or work of art. Happy child if an affectionate, compassionate nurse takes the vacant place of his own mother, and makes him familiar with those sweet, nameless trivialities that make up the world of a child’s heart; but, even so, how sad the necessity for such comfort! How much more sad, then, the position of the unloved child, neglected even by its nurse, or left to the well-meaning but questionable petting of the other servants! They will not be reticent, though they may be obsequious, and the future character of their charge will be warped beyond remedy. Pride, too, will be ridiculously fostered, and will drive tenderness away; a certain recklessness will be infused into the child’s habits, and reverence, refinement, sensitiveness, will be petrified within him. He will feel himself of no value, since no one cares for him, and, if no happy influence stops his downward course, he will be a cynic before he is twenty-five.We have said so much in this strain, and made so much of the gloomy side of the question, that we feel bound to speak a little more fully of the model Christian home, not only as it should be, but—thank God that we can say it!—as it very often is. We know that, according to Father Faber’s beautiful expression, “God has many Edens in this world,” and surely among our Christian homes many deserve this name.There are those in which the father is not absorbed in business and the mother by fashion, where the servants are happy and attached members of the family, where daily prayer and cheerful work alternate with each other in order, where recreation does not degenerate into riot, nor work conduce to moroseness. Healthy exercise and early hours keep the doctor from the door, while constant industry repulses the proverbial visitor who always “finds mischief for idle hands to do.” The father is the genial companion of his children, and does not lose their respect by gaining their confidence; the mother is the guardian spirit of the household, the wise woman of the Proverbs, “whose children rose up and called her blessed; her husband, and he praised her.” Towards each other the husband and wife behave as they would before the angels of God, because they remember that he who scandalizeth “a little one” is accursed, and that the angel of “the little one,” who is there continually beside him and in some sort represents him in heaven, “beholds the face of the Lord.” The children are submissive, not through fear, but throughreasonand love; for the acknowledged superiority of their elders has a rational force with them, and they think themselves honored in obeying those who are wiser than they. They have Jesus of Nazareth ever before their eyes—the Boy who, as he grew in years, “waxed strong in wisdom and grace,” and who, though he was God, “went down, and was subject to them.”This life, peaceful, orderly, religious, the life of the cloister translatedinto the home, is in itself education. Its holy influence is not confined to space or time, but will live in the hearts of the scattered family through youth and manhood to extreme old age. In fancy, they will be able to reconstruct that home; in spirit, to revisit it long after its dearest inmates shall have left it for their heavenly home, long after its material frame shall have passed away to other, perhaps to careless, hands. In their various resting-places, whether a new home, the daughter of that shrine, or only a rock just above the level of the sea of fortune, the hallowed remembrance will come back to them freighted with hope and strength for the future. Even in heaven, the Son of God is called Jesus ofNazareth, and canweforget the home and the mother that made us what we are?In all that pertains to this ideal, although man is bound to subserve it to the utmost, woman is more solemnly pledged to its fulfilment. Man has the world for his empire: woman has man—during the years of his pupilage. The mother’s education is the child’s second birth, and she who, being mother to the body of her child, neglects that more laborious training which accompanies its moral development, practically refuses to be the mother of its soul. To a woman failing in her home duties is attached more reproach than to a neglectful husband and father, because her office is the more sacred, her position the nearer to God. It was a woman who was glorified by the most miraculously close union with God that the universe has ever seen, and by that standard alone should womanhood and motherhood be judged. If it falls short of a faint copy of Mary the mother of Jesus, it is condemned, for the state that has been the most divinely exalted should ever after remain the most humanly perfect.The mere temporal importance of home education, though secondary to its spiritual aspect, cannot be overlooked. Besides the duty of the angel—training souls for heaven—woman has the duty of the citizen,i.e.training patriots for the state. Without faith there is no love of country in the highest sense; without discipline, no love of law. It is woman’s task to mould the men who, in the future, will mould the nation. High or low it matters not: the mother of the statesman and the mother of the laborer work alike towards their country’s glory. The state needs hands as well as heads, and the mason who cuts the common stones has as much part and should have as much pride in the completed building as the artist who carves the wonderful pinnacles or fashions the marvellous capitals.We have spoken perhaps too exclusively of the duties and circumstances of the higher classes in this matter of home education. Perhaps it is not altogether unprovidential that we should have been led to do so; for of the various divisions of humanity which our Lord in his parable of the sower represents under the figure of the different accidents that befell the good seed, we know which is, unhappily, the least productive. Jesus himself has explained that the thorns which choked the seed are the “cares, and riches, and pleasures of this life.” Mark well, thecares; not only the riches and pleasures, for those self-sought and profitless cares have not the blessings on them which the God-given cares of poverty have. The poor and lowly too often shame their more fortunate brethren by their greater self-devotion and generosity. Their homes, so much less prosperous, are yet often so much more edifying, than ours; and let it be rememberedthat every act of theirs has, according to the measure of their inferior opportunities, double the merit of any similar act of ours. So with the wholesome reticence which becomes us who have so many opportunitiesand neglect them: we have preferred to point out the beam that is in our own eye, rather than pharisaically to expatiate on the mote that is in our neighbor’s. Yet we would not that any class should deem itself exempt from the duties of home education—duties which, with the poor, have all the added merit of absolute heroism. The poor are told, and doubtless truly, by our teachers and superiors, that their condition should be dear to them because it was that of our Lord himself; but we, their brethren and fellow-pilgrims, should labor to supplement this teaching by making that very condition less irksome to them. Who can dream of Jesus on earth asnotbeing poor and destitute? But, on the other hand, who would dare, were he now on earth, to be behindhand in ministering to his poverty? Now, the alms weoweto his earthly representatives are twofold,i.e.spiritual and temporal. Among the former, none are so meritorious as good examples. Have we not in these days a perpetual and most sadly grotesque picture of class aping class, of tawdriness following close on the heels of fashion, of aspiring vanity actually crowding out the legitimate needs of the body? If this system of imitation must be, why not give it a worthy subject to practise upon?Reform, to be practical, must begin in the higher strata of society; for not only to individuals, but also, in a wider sense, to classes, is the keepership of brotherhood entrusted. Weareour “brother’s keeper,” and our “brother” is the mass of men who look up to us for guidance. As long as our fathers and husbands care more for their office than their home, so long will the bulk of the nation be mere animated machines snatching after precarious wealth; as long as our wives and mothers care more for the drawing-room than for the nursery and study, so long will the mass of women be heartless coquettes or abandoned harlots. We speak strongly, because we feel strongly. This is an age of initial struggle, which our faith should turn into an era of better things. If we need any “new departure,” let it be the departure from frivolity to domesticity, from contemptible weakness to the manliness of the Gospel. And here let us say one word to the head of the family, to him without whose example even the mother’s influence is incomplete. Business isnotthe whole of life; it isnoteven the first earthly good to be sought for. Success often kills happiness, and its exclusive pursuit always kills peace. The father who allows business to isolate him from all the tenderer interests of his home achieves two things: he alienates his children’s affection—after having very likely worn out his wife’s devotion—and he teaches them betimes the baneful lesson that before Mammon all other interests must bow. This false doctrine his children will teach to theirs by an example equally gloomy with his own, and thus God will be forgotten in the very gifts which one word of his mouth could turn in a moment to dust and ashes.Shall this be so, or will Christian parents take heed to their duty?

Asthe family is the type and basis of society, so does it contain, as in a microcosm, all the questions, problems, and difficulties that agitate the larger world. Marriage is first in importance within the family and in society, as representing the principle of creation; education comes next, as representing the principle of development. Given a new and perfect society, made up of individual couples whose union should be absolutely satisfactory, and whose motives, thoughts, and actions absolutely irreproachable, how is it to be perpetuated in this desirable state? If to the perfection of marriage were not added the consequent perfection of education, the new society, for a moment raised up above former standards of approximative goodness, would, in the course of half a generation, be reduced lower than any standard of Christian times. This is so well understood that education has come to be the one cry of all parties, representing with some the conscientious result of their religious belief, with others merely their ambition to make a stir in the political world. Christians look to it as fitting men for heaven; statesmen turn to it as fashioning the law-abiding citizen; atheists see in it the means whereby successfully to blind mankind, and make them swallow the poison hidden under the appearance of superficial cleverness; the devil grasps it as a tool, or recoils from it as from a thunderbolt; but to no thinking being can it be a matter of indifference.

We do not propose to go into that broader question of public education which, once within the scope of the law, and face to face with established national systems, immediately sets both hemispheres in a ferment; but to discuss that preliminary and more vital training whose silent power shows itself every day in the homes of thousands, neutralizing on the one hand good examples and wholesome teaching, and on the other often redeeming from utter badness its half-corrupted subject. And first taking the literal meaning of the word education,i.e.tolead up, orout of(e-duco), we must remark that as education is coeval with the dawn of reason, so it is also continuous. It begins in the cradle, and goes on hand in hand with life to the grave. All experience, good or bad, is education, not only the lessons taught in school-hours, the lectures given in classes, halls, and colleges, not alone the books we read and the examinations we undergo, but, more emphatically, the places we frequent, the people we meet, the misfortunes we go through, the work we perform. Even prosperity is education, though seldom in the highest sense, but it is chiefly in the lower walks of fortune that the more important part of this daily and hourly education is imparted. For this reason specially, and in view of the future in which a chance word heard in the street or a stray visit to some place or person may become of such subtle and paramount gravity, should home education in the Christian sense of the word be encouraged to the utmost. More particularly should this be the case in non-Catholic countries. We haveno outward atmosphere of religion to trust to; no wayside crosses to remind us of the sufferings which our sins caused our Blessed Saviour; no simple shrines to bid us remember to pray for our invisible brethren in purgatory; no street processions to bring vividly before our minds that our King is more than an earthly lord, and our Mother more than an earthly parent.

We do not breathe Catholicity in our daily life, and there is therefore the greater need of our drinking it in with our mother’s milk. This insensible and gradual instilling of religion into our infant minds is the essence of Christian “home education.” First among all the influences that go towards it is example. This extends over every detail of the household, and can be and should be kept in view in the poorest as well as the most comfortable home. In the latter, certainly, the duty is more stringent, the incentives to its performance lying so near at hand that it requires an absolutely guilty carelessness to neglect them. In the former, though a thousand excuses might be made for the neglect of this paramount duty, it should still be remembered that God’s grace is all-powerful, and never fails those who seek to do his will. Parents sorely tried during a day of toil and anxiety are often found more loving and forbearing towards their helpless children than others who, with no trouble on their minds, yet delegate the “tiresome” office of nurse to a hired attendant; and although it is certainly to be deplored that in so many cases the children of the poor should be nothing but little men and women already weighed down by cares that ought to belong only to a later age, still it may be questioned whether even this is not a lesser evil in the long run than that other sort of neglect which makes the children of the rich, for the most part, only the playthings of their parents.

The poor, on the contrary, though necessity may make their children drudges, yet have in them early friends, while too often among their more fortunate neighbors children count only as the ornaments of the house. So that even out of evil comes good, and God has planted consolations in the path of his poor which go far to soften the miseries of their inevitable lot. We say inevitable, not as denying the immense, unexplored possibilities of alleviating this lot which remain in the power of future philanthropists, but as believing in our Lord’s prophecy, “The poor you havealwayswith you,” which blessed promise we count as a staff vouchsafed in mercy to help us on our way to heaven.

We have said that the duty of good example is incumbent upon every parent, rich or poor. But not only those broad examples which could hardly fail to strike even an idiot, such as abstaining from unseemly brawls, from excesses of language and of self-indulgence—in plain words, from swearing and drinking—or from manifest dishonesty; there are subtler things than these, and which produce indeed greater effect on the child spectator. Gross vice has often that redeeming phase of being its own antidote by disgusting those who come in daily contact with it. The principle on which the Spartans educated their children in temperance by exhibiting before them the drunken helots was (however cruel its application on the persons of their unhappy prisoners) a consummate proof of practical wisdom. That which does not carry such an antidote with it is more to be feared in the education of a child. A spirit of irritability between husband andwife; a carelessness on the part of either in entering cordially into the other’s little interests; an exhibition of temper over absurd trifles or of unamiability in small questions of self-denial—these tell gravely upon a child’s character. Observation and criticism are childhood’s natural characteristics, and very logical and very pitiless are childhood’s judgments. The old-fashioned code of a “well-behaved” child used to be never to ask questions; we are not so sure that this code was faultlessly wise. We suffer perhaps under a somewhat aggravated form of a very dissimilar one just now, and may be tempted—not unpardonably—to wish for the peace of the good old times back again. As usual, the middle course is the most rational as well as beneficial, and if it were in our power to stop the violent swayings of the social pendulum from one extreme to the other, we would gladly do our part in the work.

It is therefore in the more unheeded and less abnormal occurrences of every day that the greatest force of example lies, and that harm or good may be done beyond recall. Christian gentleness, that daily unobtrusive charity which in rough homes amply makes up for what outward refinement may be lacking, and in more prosperous households alone sets the seal of true worth upon such exterior polish as there is, is the golden secret of a perfect example. And this spirit should extend to every domestic relation, covering the whole field of contingencies which may assume such grave proportions in a child’s memory. Your deportment to the poor, if you are rich yourself, has an invaluable force of example; the patience with which you listen to a tale of distress, the delicate courtesy implied in an attentive attitude, the gracefulness of your alms, and the wise but gentle discrimination of your questioning, all have an untold effect upon the little trotter by your side, hardly old enough to reason however dimly, but old enough to bear away a nameless impression of the scene. On the other hand, think of the responsibility incurred by a rude or callous reception; a sneering or lofty air of caution against what you think may be an imposture; above all, perhaps, a careless alms given to be rid of a disagreeable importunity, and a half-expression of relief when the interruption is happily over! The child at your side bears away this impression quite as surely, and in after-years uses its imitative powers quite as skilfully, as if the impression had been one of mercy and kindness; and a very few scenes of this sort are enough to mould for a child a certain standard of behavior.

Among the domestic relations, none is more likely to strike a child’s eye than that between master and servant. Here also dangerous seeds of future heartlessness may be easily sown by the example of a careless or haughty parent. Considerate thought for the proper comforts of those whose toil ensures your leisure is one of the foremost Christian duties. A child is naturally tyrannical, and this disposition, if fostered by an injudicious mother, may lead to a shameless persecution of the very persons to whose care children are most often left. This, in turn, will encourage tyranny on the nurse’s part, and engender a system of mutual deceit; the child and the servant trying to circumvent each other in carrying tales, and then sheltering themselves by lies from the consequences of having carried them. Now, all this is to the last degree injurious to the future character of the child; it withers the principle of honor;it kills all manliness and straightforward dealing, and sows the seeds of those two inseparable vices, cruelty and cowardice. In after-life, when the despairing mother sees her darling sink below himself, and earn the unenviable names of bully and sneak, can she blame him for shattering the ideal she blindly worshipped in his person? Not so, for with justice can she look back on her own folly, and with bitterness cry out, “It was my fault.”

Very different is the other and the good example shown by so many holy and conscientious women in their relations with their households. Considerateness and forbearance in all things are not incompatible with firmness in some. A sense of your own dignity, were it nothing higher, will dictate a kind bearing towards those in humbler station; for to those who never obtrude their superiority a double homage will ever be accorded. A child can exercise on its attendants some of the noblest virtues of manhood; the household is a little world, a preparatory stage on which to rehearse in miniature the opportunities of after-life. Pleasure given to some, a little gift or a gracious speech vouchsafed to others; consolation afforded to one in grief, attention shown to one in sickness; and, above all, a mindfulness of not making the yoke of servitude too galling by restricting the natural and proper diversions of those whom God has destined to bear it—such are a few of the lessons a child should learn, not in words alone, but in the manner of its parents and the unconscious radiating of an habitual example.

Another class of influences under which a child will necessarily come is that of social relations. For the most part, children are made too much of a show. They are taught—or allowed—certain little mannerisms which, at their age, are called charming, but, if looked at by the light of common sense, are simply as absurd as they are forward. Later on, when they begin to use their reason, they are often listeners to frivolous or scandalous conversations, in which they pick up, if not a half-knowledge of vice, certainly a whole love of gossip. Now, all this is deplorable from a Christian point of view. In a really Christian home—a home such as we aspire to see at least in every Catholic family—the case would be very different. Entertainments and fêtes would be judiciously “few and far between,” and in its mother’s visitors the child would see only fresh objects of its mother’s charitable tact. If anything against charity were said, the hostess would gently check the conversation, either by palliating the fault alluded to, suggesting a better motive than the apparent one concerning any person implicated, or turning the conversation skilfully to some less dangerous topic. Those formal visits, made to kill time or otherwise uselessly, would have no part in her day’s programme, and with ever charitable but firm demeanor would she effectually check the frequent demands thus made upon her time by others. The child, quick of perception, as almost all children are, would be unconsciously moulded to habits of orderly and discriminating hospitality, and would soon learn to do something for God in every social pastime which it legitimately enjoyed.

This brings us to the subject of order, an important virtue in the Christian home. Education itself, if given in a desultory fashion, would be next to useless, and some of that strict apportioning of time which gives to our study hours their wholesome monotony is essential also forthe home training of youth. This may seem at first sight a very arbitrary decision, but, when we come to look deeper into it, we find that it has the same relation to the future moral life as the study of the classics or of mathematics to the intellectual life. A knowledge of the Greek and Latin poets, orators, and historians has perhaps very little influence on the practical and ultimate result of a college education; but the effect of refinement it has on the mind, and the polished tone it imperceptibly gives to thought, manners, and conversation, are benefits simply incalculable. So with mathematics. A boy may not have any aptitude for that science, and may never hope to become proficient in it; still, the habit of application, the facility of concentrating and commanding his thoughts, which is the natural result of the close study demanded by the exact sciences, are things whose influence on his future career cannot be rated too high. They may not unlikely ensure temporal success, and, in these days of feverish competition, this argument should not be overlooked. Still, it is from a higher motive that we say the same of habits of order in the home. This regularity, which, no doubt, may be tedious, just as mathematics may be dry, is not lost on the general impressions of childhood, and, were it only for its own sake, should be looked upon as a seal of likeness to the works of God, which cannot fail to hallow the family circle. We have said that the family is the world in miniature, and as the principle of order was the presiding attribute in creation, so ought we in our daily lives to take it as a means of creating more and more time, more and more opportunities, for the service of God. “Be perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

In the education given by the constant example of the parents, nothing is more important than family prayer, or, at least, prayer said at the mother’s knee. In the most solemn of duties, it is not fitting that parent and child should be separated. If Jesus has said that his Father can refuse nothing to “two or threegatheredtogether in his name,” how much more invincible must be the joint prayer of those who are linked by such close and sacred ties, those who present to him a faint shadow of his own humble home at Nazareth! Think you that Jesus in his kingdom forgets the simple hearth where his Mother taught him, according to the development of his human nature, those formulæ of prayer and thanksgiving which he himself, in his divine nature, had taught to the Jewish lawgivers? Does he forget the rites of circumcision and presentation, the offerings and ransom paid for him according to the law, the visit to the temple at Jerusalem? He has shown us in his obedience to these religious observances his wish that we should imitate his outward devotion and submission to the church. Family worship is dear to him in remembrance of his own childhood, and as it is one of the most solemn, so it is also one of the sweetest duties of the Christian parent. It tends to give the child a proper spirit of faith and simple reliance, in that it sees its earthly parent, to whom it looks up for everything and considers as the final arbiter of its small world, prostrate before a higher Fatherhood, and taking towards the divine Omnipotence the very attitude of a submissive and expectant child.

Next to prayer itself, pious reading cannot fail to demand our attention as the second great spiritual help in the routine of home education. Thisshould be simple and well suited to the understanding of young children, and, above all, should not be a dry and barren formality, but should be explained and amplified by the mother’s comments. How, unless questions are freely allowed—nay, encouraged—can the extent of the impression made by spiritual reading be measured? Then, what an inexhaustible resource does not this reading or its equivalent—descriptions by word of mouth—afford to a thoughtful parent! The beautiful narratives of the Old Testament, the stories of the four gospels, the many striking incidents in the lives of the saints, the legends of the faithful middle ages, the histories of the contemporaneous manifestations of God’s mercy, all offer mines of wealth to a skilful narrator. If, instead of goblin tales more fit for the entertainment of rational people than for the staple of a child’s too credulous meditations, these holy histories became the nursery rhymes of the future generation, it would be well indeed for the spiritual advance of our age. If among the romances of mediæval times more of those were chosen in which religion figures than of those where fairy and elf appear, it would be a better promise for the future health, moral and physical, of our people. Who knows how much of that nervousness which is the characteristic disease of our day is due to those unwholesome terrors of infancy, those threats of bogy and ogre, with which children are frightened into silence or lulled into uneasy sleep! The child who would be, in a manner, the companion of the boy Jesus, of the child Precursor, the infant Samuel, the Holy Innocents, the children of whom our Lord said, “Suffer them to come unto me, and forbid them not,” and of the many boy and girl saints—S. Rose of Viterbo, S. Aloysius Gonzaga, S. Stanislaus Kostka—would be a far healthier and more manly subject than the mental companion of deformed sprites and forest goblins. The young mind is so impressionable that it is the greatest possible mistake to let its first exercise of reason spend itself on unrealities; they are apt to take on an influence not readily shaken off, and to cumber the ground long after room is needed for more serious growths of thought. This may seem an exceptional mode of proceeding, perhaps an eccentric one, the contrary having for so many ages held sway, but we take leave to think that it has reason, expediency, and religion on its side.

To this great duty of example, which ramifies itself as often as there are distinct classes of influence, is added the duty of vigilance. Parents need not only the knowledge of what to impart, but the instinct of what to shun. As watchers over a citadel, they have to guard against the masked inroads of the enemy, and carefully to sift their children’s surroundings, whether social or domestic, lest any taint should lurk in the association. We have read somewhere in a book of devotion that those who carry great treasures in a frail vessel naturally take the greater care as to their gait and speed; they look well to see if the road is level, or to avoid its irregularities if it is not; they take heed to keep their eyes and mind intent on what they bear, so as to bring it safe to its destination. Even so does the mother carry in her hands the priceless treasure of a human soul, and her solicitude for its perfect preservation from all taint or attack should be little less than that of the child’s Guardian Angel himself. If, as we have just hinted, she should choose with such scrupulous care even the companions of his fancy, somuch the more should this judicious censorship be extended to the real companions of his studies or recreations. Perhaps the influence of childish association is even greater than the mother’s own, and what the latter may have laboriously sown will be uprooted in a moment by the former. Children’s minds, in indiscriminate contact with each other, are as powder and spark brought together; if each had been kept until the right moment, and applied in the right way, we might have had an illumination; as it is, we have a conflagration. As childhood merges into youth, the choice of a school brings this question of companionship into prominence. In a public institution, it is not possible to admit only children who come, well-taught and docile-minded, from irreproachable homes; the very aim and end of the institution would thus be frustrated. Nor is it possible for its parents, once a child is admitted, to choose absolutely who, among its many school-fellows, shall be its special friends. Much may be done in that way by advice, tact, and prayer; still, guidance falls far short of absolute choice. It is therefore evident that the greater care should be taken to choose the school which in itself shall have the greatest influence in moulding the character of its scholars, and thereby in transforming into fitter companions for the new-comer those very children who,nolens volens, must needs be his everyday acquaintances. But the influence of home does not cease with the first day at school. Letters from home, breathing the old atmosphere, will carry the child back, week by week, to his old associations, be they good or bad; the holidays will bring him again within the fascination of the old circle, and occasional visits from the companions of his early childhood will complete the charm. Thus an infinite amount of good, or a corresponding amount of harm, may yet be done after the home education period has, strictly speaking, passed away.

And here is, perhaps, the best place to touch upon the holy influence which an elder brother or sister may exercise on a younger one. This, one of the most powerful means of good, is only second to that of the parents themselves, and may furnish a very beautiful illustration of true and discerning brotherly love. It is spiritual friendship engrafted upon the stock of natural affection, itself a noble virtue and most sweet tie, which has often, even in heathen times, produced great effects. Under this figure of brotherhood God has typified his union with creatures; he made himself our Brother through the incarnation; and everywhere brotherhood is synonymous with the dearest and purest fellowship. Our brothers and sisters in the flesh, especially if they are younger than ourselves, are as much our care and charge as they are of our parents; and of this we have a striking instance in the very first book of the Pentateuch, and only a few years after the sinless creation of Adam. Cain’s defiant plea, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” failed to meet with God’s endorsement, but brought instead the terrible answer that he should be “a fugitive and a vagabond upon the earth.” In the daily companionship of brotherhood, this scene is often re-enacted; souls are slain by their own kindred, and the world smiles and passes blindly on. But God has set a mark upon the murderer by which the devils know him and kill him not, because they know too well whose road he is even now treading, and that in the last day his mark shall be revealed to all. Here is the dark side of that continuous education which is as potently at work in dens of shame andplaces of pleasant danger as it is in Christian homes and schools. Here is that nefarious education which neutralizes or obliterates the happy past, and leads our young men by tortuous paths of gradual vice to the end of many such deceptive panoramas—the gallows or suicide.

False example, insidious promptings, rash indulgences, intoxicating freedom, wily friendship—through these and many kindred forms, subtle may be and proportionately dangerous, the devil, in the person of your brother or your seeming friend, leads you on till the murder of Abel is repeated, and the insolent excuse flung back to heaven: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The system of rewards and punishments has much to do with the moral training of youth. With regard to this, we may startle our readers by broaching views so different from those time-honored ones that pretend to find their sanction in the Biblical rule, “Spare the rod, and spoil the child,” as to seem heretical to good old-fashioned, jog-trot parents.[36]But what if the Scripture itself were to fail them? What authority have they for understanding “the rod” in its literal instead of its figurative sense? The rod was, with the Hebrews, an emblem of power: witness the miracles of Aaron in Egypt, and the blossoming of his rod when his supreme authority was called in question by the rebellion of Core. “The rod” may therefore very plausibly be taken as meaning parental authority, and the text would thus imply nothing more than a declaration that thecarelessnessof the parent will be responsible for the wrong-headedness of the child. In this sense we prefer to read this passage, and for this reason: physical punishments and rewards will be indissolubly associated in a young child’s mind with his good or bad actions, just as they are coupled in the memory and instinct of a dog with the various desirable or undesirable things it has been taught or forbidden to do. This produces a low and degrading standard by which moral actions are henceforward measured by the child, and later on will lead to the impression that the absence of such tangible consequences argues the right to do as he pleases, irrespective of merely moral restraints; whereas, if the rewards and punishments meted out to him are of the moral and intellectual order, his conception of the principle of duty will be abstract and independent. Childhood has a natural leaning towards deception; therefore truth should be made not only prominent, but attractive. To own a fault, and even to confess it unasked, should be an understood palliation of the fault itself; whereas any attempt at concealment should be treated as a far graver offence than the action concealed. In a word, the principle of Christian honor should be the keynote of home education, and any meanness should be condemned as the most contemptible of all faults. Sensitive as children are to the slightest alteration of manner in their regard, they would feel keenly the silence and avoidance which this plan presupposes in their parents’ conduct towards them when guilty of a dishonorable action, and, by associating the idea ofwrongwith that ofdisgrace, would very soon be brought to a truer estimate of morals than if wrong with them was only the synonyme ofpain. Again, the system of physical punishment invariably leads to defiance; it stirs up a spirit of contradiction and sullennesswhich gradually encrusts the young mind with the deplorable proof-armor of ultimate indifference. We need give but one example—a personal one—of the immense superiority of moral over physical punishment. As a child, we were stubborn and self-willed, and were frequently treated, not exactly to corporal indignities, but to threadbare schoolroom devices for overcoming temper. Two or three times it happened that, these worn-out means proving as inefficient as “water on a duck’s back,” fatherly authority had to be invoked. It always took one form—silence. For a week there would be none of the happy familiarities between father and child, but, instead, a cessation of the usual pleasant and indulgent intercourse, and now and then a grave look of displeasure as the culprit would make some spasmodic and despairing advance. This was the only punishment which made the slightest impression, and the keen remembrance of it lasts to this day. Sometimes, when we were older, another variety was tried. Instead of being, according to the old code, starved on bread and water in a dark closet, we were seated alone at a table, while the rest of the family ate together as usual; every dish was ceremoniously brought up and served at our solitary meal, and every servant in the house was perfectly aware of the cause; no one spoke or offered us the least attention beyond the ordinary formalities, and we were treated half like a distinguished prisoner, half like an excommunicated person. The result was admirable, prompt in the extreme, and certain to ensure an unusually long term of subsequent docility.

Rewards are no less important than punishments. Of these, knowledge and religious opportunities should, in our idea, form the staple. They are thus invested with a personal interest to the child; they come before him as things specially concerning his own good behavior and his parents’ appreciation of it. For instance, the mother reads him Scripture stories and the legends of the saints; he listens with absorption, and longs to read the book himself, but the road through the alphabet and spelling-book is uninviting. Why not teach him through the book itself? The illuminated capitals will strike him by their beauty, the pictures will lend force to the difficult words, and help his memory to connect them with the illustrated subject. Instead of finding church services an irksome interruption to his games, he might be made to look upon them as the highest rewards he can obtain. For a well-learnt lesson in catechism, he might be taught to chant one of those immortal poems, the Psalms; for proficiency in Bible history, he might be taken to some of the most picturesque of our solemn ceremonies, and hear, on the way, of the typical manner in which it is connected with that history; for an act of childish self-denial, he might be allowed to serve as acolyte at Mass. Even these rewards, however, should not be injudiciously multiplied, for familiarity would beget irreverence,—the worst stumbling-block that could be laid in a child’s spiritual path. We think that a Christian education in the early days of childhood could go no further in perfection than this—the thorough identification of all happiness with religion.

We have yet to speak of a detail in household economy, which, in point of interest, is one of the foremost. Personal attention to a child is a part of the mother’s duty of vigilance, and the fashionable custom of leaving such attention to domesticscannot be reprobated too strongly. This personal care is, first of all, an instinct of nature which it must require a very thick coating of frivolity entirely to supersede; and it is, secondly, a duty of religion from which even great physical sickness cannot conscientiously release the parent. Numberless evils flow from a neglect of this imperious duty. The forsaken child will learn in time to forget its mother, to think of her as a splendid being very far from him—one not to be annoyed by his cries or made nervous by his romps, but to be gazed at from afar, like a grand picture or work of art. Happy child if an affectionate, compassionate nurse takes the vacant place of his own mother, and makes him familiar with those sweet, nameless trivialities that make up the world of a child’s heart; but, even so, how sad the necessity for such comfort! How much more sad, then, the position of the unloved child, neglected even by its nurse, or left to the well-meaning but questionable petting of the other servants! They will not be reticent, though they may be obsequious, and the future character of their charge will be warped beyond remedy. Pride, too, will be ridiculously fostered, and will drive tenderness away; a certain recklessness will be infused into the child’s habits, and reverence, refinement, sensitiveness, will be petrified within him. He will feel himself of no value, since no one cares for him, and, if no happy influence stops his downward course, he will be a cynic before he is twenty-five.

We have said so much in this strain, and made so much of the gloomy side of the question, that we feel bound to speak a little more fully of the model Christian home, not only as it should be, but—thank God that we can say it!—as it very often is. We know that, according to Father Faber’s beautiful expression, “God has many Edens in this world,” and surely among our Christian homes many deserve this name.

There are those in which the father is not absorbed in business and the mother by fashion, where the servants are happy and attached members of the family, where daily prayer and cheerful work alternate with each other in order, where recreation does not degenerate into riot, nor work conduce to moroseness. Healthy exercise and early hours keep the doctor from the door, while constant industry repulses the proverbial visitor who always “finds mischief for idle hands to do.” The father is the genial companion of his children, and does not lose their respect by gaining their confidence; the mother is the guardian spirit of the household, the wise woman of the Proverbs, “whose children rose up and called her blessed; her husband, and he praised her.” Towards each other the husband and wife behave as they would before the angels of God, because they remember that he who scandalizeth “a little one” is accursed, and that the angel of “the little one,” who is there continually beside him and in some sort represents him in heaven, “beholds the face of the Lord.” The children are submissive, not through fear, but throughreasonand love; for the acknowledged superiority of their elders has a rational force with them, and they think themselves honored in obeying those who are wiser than they. They have Jesus of Nazareth ever before their eyes—the Boy who, as he grew in years, “waxed strong in wisdom and grace,” and who, though he was God, “went down, and was subject to them.”

This life, peaceful, orderly, religious, the life of the cloister translatedinto the home, is in itself education. Its holy influence is not confined to space or time, but will live in the hearts of the scattered family through youth and manhood to extreme old age. In fancy, they will be able to reconstruct that home; in spirit, to revisit it long after its dearest inmates shall have left it for their heavenly home, long after its material frame shall have passed away to other, perhaps to careless, hands. In their various resting-places, whether a new home, the daughter of that shrine, or only a rock just above the level of the sea of fortune, the hallowed remembrance will come back to them freighted with hope and strength for the future. Even in heaven, the Son of God is called Jesus ofNazareth, and canweforget the home and the mother that made us what we are?

In all that pertains to this ideal, although man is bound to subserve it to the utmost, woman is more solemnly pledged to its fulfilment. Man has the world for his empire: woman has man—during the years of his pupilage. The mother’s education is the child’s second birth, and she who, being mother to the body of her child, neglects that more laborious training which accompanies its moral development, practically refuses to be the mother of its soul. To a woman failing in her home duties is attached more reproach than to a neglectful husband and father, because her office is the more sacred, her position the nearer to God. It was a woman who was glorified by the most miraculously close union with God that the universe has ever seen, and by that standard alone should womanhood and motherhood be judged. If it falls short of a faint copy of Mary the mother of Jesus, it is condemned, for the state that has been the most divinely exalted should ever after remain the most humanly perfect.

The mere temporal importance of home education, though secondary to its spiritual aspect, cannot be overlooked. Besides the duty of the angel—training souls for heaven—woman has the duty of the citizen,i.e.training patriots for the state. Without faith there is no love of country in the highest sense; without discipline, no love of law. It is woman’s task to mould the men who, in the future, will mould the nation. High or low it matters not: the mother of the statesman and the mother of the laborer work alike towards their country’s glory. The state needs hands as well as heads, and the mason who cuts the common stones has as much part and should have as much pride in the completed building as the artist who carves the wonderful pinnacles or fashions the marvellous capitals.

We have spoken perhaps too exclusively of the duties and circumstances of the higher classes in this matter of home education. Perhaps it is not altogether unprovidential that we should have been led to do so; for of the various divisions of humanity which our Lord in his parable of the sower represents under the figure of the different accidents that befell the good seed, we know which is, unhappily, the least productive. Jesus himself has explained that the thorns which choked the seed are the “cares, and riches, and pleasures of this life.” Mark well, thecares; not only the riches and pleasures, for those self-sought and profitless cares have not the blessings on them which the God-given cares of poverty have. The poor and lowly too often shame their more fortunate brethren by their greater self-devotion and generosity. Their homes, so much less prosperous, are yet often so much more edifying, than ours; and let it be rememberedthat every act of theirs has, according to the measure of their inferior opportunities, double the merit of any similar act of ours. So with the wholesome reticence which becomes us who have so many opportunitiesand neglect them: we have preferred to point out the beam that is in our own eye, rather than pharisaically to expatiate on the mote that is in our neighbor’s. Yet we would not that any class should deem itself exempt from the duties of home education—duties which, with the poor, have all the added merit of absolute heroism. The poor are told, and doubtless truly, by our teachers and superiors, that their condition should be dear to them because it was that of our Lord himself; but we, their brethren and fellow-pilgrims, should labor to supplement this teaching by making that very condition less irksome to them. Who can dream of Jesus on earth asnotbeing poor and destitute? But, on the other hand, who would dare, were he now on earth, to be behindhand in ministering to his poverty? Now, the alms weoweto his earthly representatives are twofold,i.e.spiritual and temporal. Among the former, none are so meritorious as good examples. Have we not in these days a perpetual and most sadly grotesque picture of class aping class, of tawdriness following close on the heels of fashion, of aspiring vanity actually crowding out the legitimate needs of the body? If this system of imitation must be, why not give it a worthy subject to practise upon?

Reform, to be practical, must begin in the higher strata of society; for not only to individuals, but also, in a wider sense, to classes, is the keepership of brotherhood entrusted. Weareour “brother’s keeper,” and our “brother” is the mass of men who look up to us for guidance. As long as our fathers and husbands care more for their office than their home, so long will the bulk of the nation be mere animated machines snatching after precarious wealth; as long as our wives and mothers care more for the drawing-room than for the nursery and study, so long will the mass of women be heartless coquettes or abandoned harlots. We speak strongly, because we feel strongly. This is an age of initial struggle, which our faith should turn into an era of better things. If we need any “new departure,” let it be the departure from frivolity to domesticity, from contemptible weakness to the manliness of the Gospel. And here let us say one word to the head of the family, to him without whose example even the mother’s influence is incomplete. Business isnotthe whole of life; it isnoteven the first earthly good to be sought for. Success often kills happiness, and its exclusive pursuit always kills peace. The father who allows business to isolate him from all the tenderer interests of his home achieves two things: he alienates his children’s affection—after having very likely worn out his wife’s devotion—and he teaches them betimes the baneful lesson that before Mammon all other interests must bow. This false doctrine his children will teach to theirs by an example equally gloomy with his own, and thus God will be forgotten in the very gifts which one word of his mouth could turn in a moment to dust and ashes.

Shall this be so, or will Christian parents take heed to their duty?

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