them? Do you expect by nature to rise above nature, to get out of nature, or to make for yourselves another nature? Do you not know that from nature you can get only nature, and that you cannot by your nature make your nature more or other than it is?

Now unhappily the system of education in vogue is based on the very principle that underlies all these modern revolutionary and social reform movements, that is, the natural perfectibility of man, or his progressiveness by his own natural forces, or by natural means; that is, it is based on a falsehood, in plain English, a lie, and Carlyle has well said, "the first of all Gospels is, that no lie shall live." We do not think the age overrates the importance of education, for Solomon has said, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it." The error is in not discriminating between a false and mischievous education and a true and salutary education. Education based on the principle that man is naturally perfectible, and which aims to cultivate the faculties of the soul in relation to the natural order alone, can never be beneficial either to the individual or to society. Nothing is more false than Goethe's doctrine, on which he appears to have acted through his long life, and which he inculcates ad nauseam in his "Wilhelm Meister," that the end of education, and therefore of life, is self-culture, or the harmonious and complete development of all the natural faculties of the soul. Schiller was no better, for if he aimed at the ideal, as our German friends say, it was only an ideal in the natural order, to be attained or realized, if realized at all, by our natural faculties. Bulwer, Lord Lytton, shows, like Schiller, a straining after the ideal, but it is always an ideal of nature, and the religion which he so lavishly introduces in his later novels has in it no supernatural element, and never raises man above nature. He was-as "Kenelm Chillingly," his last novel, shows-only a wise and accomplished pagan, like Goethe, and had never approached the frontier of the Christian kingdom. The highest possible culture of our whole nature, intellectual, æsthetic, domestic, and social, does not advance us a single step in the way we should go, or toward the true end or destiny of life. Man being perfectible or progressive only by aid of the supernatural grace of Christ, no education not based on the supernatural principle in which Christianity itself originates can aid us in our life-work, be a good and salutary education, or help us either individually, socially or politically.

Here may be seen the reason why the Holy Father and the whole Catholic hierarchy reject the educational system now in vogue with non-Catholics, assert the insufficiency of merely secular education, and demand for Catholics a Catholic education. We do not credit all that is said against our public schools by individuals who are unacquainted with them, nor do we attribute to them or to their influence the growing immorality of American society. The evil is not especially in the schools, but in the paganism, or secularism, which pervades the American community, on which our public school system is based, and which American children imbibe with their mother's inilk, and far more effectually from the domestic and social atmosphere in which they are reared than from the public schools themselves. But it is clear that we cannot in these schools give our children a Catholic education, or educate them in relation to the supernatural order, or in relation to the true destiny of the soul. We cannot, in them, train up the child in the way he should go.

It is not so much what is taught or inculcated in the public schools that renders them objectionable to us Catholics, as what is not and cannot be taught or inculcated in them. They are and must be either sectarian or secular schools, and in either case exclude the true principle of moral and religious life. The education they give or permit to be given is a false, because an unchristian education. He who is not for Christ is against him, and separation from him is death; for his is the only name given among men in which there is life for the soul, life for men, or nations. An education that omits him as its central and informing principle, or fails to recognize him as its alpha and omega, its beginning and end, is simply an atheistic education, and can train up the young generation only as pure secularists, and to feel that they are free from all moral or social obligation, from all accountability to any power above themselves, and from. all law not imposed by their own will. The stream cannot rise higher than its fountain. An education founded in nature alone, can give nothing above nature, nor do any thing to strengthen or perfect it; for nature without God, or severed from God, is simply nothing, and we know no philosophy by which nothing can make itself something. Such an education is repugnant to the principles and conditions of life, and can give nothing better than "death in. life."

This is not mere theory or speculation. It follows, indeed, from the invariable and inflexible principles of reason and revelation, but it is confirmed by daily and hourly experience. The public schools are not the sources of the moral corruption becoming almost universal in American society; they are at most only the exponents of the false principles and ideas that generate it. They are impotent to check it, because impotent to infuse any principle of moral or social life. The education given has no power to restrain the evil passions or propensities of men, and leaves them to the unrestrained workings of their fallen nature. These false principles and ideas in which the American youth are educated-still more out of school than in it-and which sectarian and secular schools can do nothing to correct, are the real sources of the moral, domestic, and social corruption of the American people. This corruption, especially since the late civil war, is hardly less, perhaps even greater among the easy classes, than that of ancient Sodom and Gomorrha. From the crown of the head to the sole of the foot, there is no soundness in us. We are one mass of rottenness. There is no longer even common honesty, and no man knows whom he may trust. The leaders of our society are engaged in transferring the money in their neighbors' pockets to their Our financial system is as inflated as our currency, and the active governing capital of the country is invested in paper, and consists in certificates of stock, or evidences of credit, that is to say, of debts which are counted as wealthso long as payment is not demanded. But let payment be demanded, and forthwith there comes a panic; the assets, though ample as paper assets, are found to be unavailable, and banks, bankers, and brokers suspend, and thousands who yesterday thought themselves independent, or amply provided for during life, find themselves reduced to utter poverty and misery. The whole system is a sham, a fraud, and designed solely to enrich a few sharpers by impoverishing the many. The cry of the Exchange is "confidence," that is, "give us your money, and take our due-bills, without asking us to redeem them. Then all will go smoothly. No doubt of it. We know nothing more disturbing than to be called upon to pay our debts when we lack the wherewith to pay them; it disorders the digestion, and upsets one's equanimity; or when I O Us are discredited, and will no longer pass current. The Exchange is quite right. It is confidence that is wanting.

own.

VOL. XIII-29

Aside from our general financial system, as hollow as a soap-bubble and as unsubstantial, though it reflects with rare brilliancy all the hues of the rainbow, the individual frauds, peculations, and defalcations, in all positions of trust, are becoming alarmingly frequent and on a scale so large as to be almost sublime. The government has its army of revenue-officers, and a still larger army to keep watch over them. Detectives are everywhere, and everywhere detectives are needed to act as spies on the detectives. Trust can safely be placed nowhere. We want keepers for the keepers, who themselves equally require keepers. If the criminal can bid the highest, the police fail to arrest or to discover him.

In the whole history of the world we can find nothing to match the irreverence and impudence of young America, whether male or female. The question between modesty and immodesty is, which, upon the whole, pays the best? Children grow up without respect for their parents, and without filial reverence or affection. They are wiser than the old fogies the law recognizes as their parents. Husbands and wives, after the honeymoon is over, have little confidence in one another, and neither can do or say any thing that is right or proper in the other's eyes. Even the mother loses the maternal sentiment, and seeks, or suffers, the destruction of the fruit of her womb before it is born. Such, in general terms, is no exaggerated description of our American society, though we would hope not without some, even many, individual exceptions. The reformation has gone to seed in secularism, and secularism is now bearing its fruit. We ask, then, how can sectarianism or secularism which produces this state of things supply a remedy? How can a system of schools based on either, or on the assumption of man's perfectibility by natural means and influences alone, do any thing to remedy this state of society, or to restore our American people to moral or social health? What new principle or what new power can a purely secular education introduce to counteract the deleterious causes and influences now at work among us? It can only accord with secularism, and cultivate and perpetuate the principles that are working our moral and social ruin.

For these reasons it must be obvious to every reflecting mind that, however powerful our public schools may be in sharpening the wits of their pupils and rendering them efficient for evil, they cannot be relied on to work any moral

or religious melioration of society. No melioration can come from nature; any melioration possible must come in the divine order, from principles and influences which proceed from a source above nature, from the Christian order, the order of grace, which places before men and nations a supernatural ideal, and while accepting nature elevates it by regeneration in Christ, and infuses into it the supernatural disposition and strength to aspire to that ideal and to realize it in life. The reliance that our statesmen, politicians, philanthropists, journalists, and platform orators pretend to place on our public school system, whether of the higher or lower grades, to maintain the virtue of the people and to preserve the free and healthy working of the republic, is inanifestly and undeniably misplaced. Our most corrupt and dangerous classes are our educated and governing classes, and under the influence of the secularism which it represents and fosters, the American people are manifestly deteriorating. The history of Greece and Rome should teach us the impotence of mere intellectual and æsthetic culture to save a nation.

Hence the condemnation of purely secular schools and the necessity of Catholic education. The only support for private or public virtue is religion, is in training the people in those principles which religion alone introduces and sustains; and the only religion is Christianity, the Christian religion, inseparable alike from Christ, the incarnate Word, and the Catholic Church. The sects are all from the devil; they form no part of the church of God, and have no lot or part in the Man Christ Jesus, the only mediator of God and men. None but the Catholic Church can train up the child in the way he should go, or educate in accordance with the principles of the life and the destiny of man and society. Obviously then the church is the only competent educator, and only a thorough Catholic education has or can have any value for men or nations. There is no use in multiplying words about it; there is and ever has been but one religion, and that is the Catholic religion; there is and ever has been but one law of life, the law committed to the church, to be applied by her to the government of men and nations. These heathen superstitions, these ancient and modern sects, are all vain pretenders, and are as far from being the true religion as man or Satan is from being God. We must dismiss once for all the notion that there is any religion or any possibility of salvation for the soul or for