neighbors should believe the veriest fables, the most ancient lies, the most stupid stories about Catholics and their beliefs, or will never the reign of that broad-mindedness, so greatly in honor among us as a theory, bring to pass the day when Maria Monk and all her class of stories will remain unprinted and unread because men, of no matter what religion, know us well enough to consign these pitiful fables to oblivion?

THE RIDDLE OF MODERN UNREST

ADDRESS BY THE RIGHT REV. JOHN E. GUNN, S.M., D.D.
BISHOP OF NATCHEZ, MISS.

THE closing exercises of a large institution like this bring together interests as varied as are the individuals. We have the boys, their parents, their teachers, and their friends - the parents proud that their boys have left the nursery and the school; the teachers proud of their graduates as they see in them a percentage of those for whom and with whom they labored; the boys, the happiest of all, see regulated, systematized school work at an end and other work of their own choosing inviting and beckoning them to tackle it. Along with these individually interested are always to be found the disinterested thinkers and observers; those who follow big questions and live with big thoughts; who take an opportunity like this to scan the educational horizon, to look over the educational field, to note the progress made, to register the striking drawbacks and setbacks, and to check with approval or disfavor the local work and workers in the light of an ever-broadening experience.

To the interested I would say well done; to the boys: You have acquired habits of thought and study and self-sacrifice and control. Boys, do not put these habits aside with your textbooks; they are your most valuable assets. To the parents I say only one word: God bless you. You have given your boy an education which will make him a man who, in life, will be influenced not by impulses, but by principles, and guided

not by expediency, but by the unchanging axioms of righteousness. To the teachers to the most abused and best loved teaching organization in the world—I say neither well done nor God bless you. I point to your motto, which is your life, as it embodies both the ways and means, aims and ambitions, hopes and rewards of your very existence: "Ad majorem Dei gloriam."

To those of us not individually interested here there comes a thought that perhaps the riddle of modern unrest may find a solution at a commencement exercise. We stand aghast at the world as we see it to-day; at the world, both old and new. We are spectators of history at the making. We are witnessing a setback of European civilization, putting it where it was two thousand years ago.

We see the highly cultured nations of Europe violating every law natural, national, human, and divine. We witness nations vying with one another in their disregard of solemn pledges; treaties considered as scraps of paper and alliances merely vantage points to secure another thirty pieces of silver. Observers and thinkers are asking when will the Bible and Magna Charta and the Declaration of Independence reach the scrap basket as worthless and unheeded. If we bring our thoughts nearer home, they are focussed on a nation drifting from its God, on a land of empty churches, on a Christian nation whose schools are religionless and whose homes are at the mercy of the divorce courts.

Recognizing this condition of things in the old world and in our own, the question may be asked: What is the cause and where is the remedy? You are familiar with all the answers given-militarism, Kulturism, navalism, commercialism, rationalism, indifference. May I suggest another reason?

There was a time when ignorance was blamed for every

thing and instruction advocated as a kind of cure-all, a universal panacea.

No one can say that either modern Europe or our own America is ignorant. They are the two best instructed samples of civilized humanity since the creation. I say instructed; unfortunately I cannot say that either Europe or America is educated. The intellectual faculties in both are stimulated, even overstimulated; the moral faculties in both are left untrained and untaught. There is intellectual alertness and smartness; give it any name you please, but there is moral dulness and atrophy of the most appalling character. Modern education seems to be based on the false assumption that man is all head or all animal. The immediate result is a divorce between head and heart and between their products, smartness and goodness.

The education of to-day, in the old world and in the new, does not educate the man as a man; it takes no account of the fact that he has a soul, and it pays no attention to those moral principles which underlie the Decalogue, which regulate the relations of individuals and nations along the lines of justice and charity, which distinguish right from might and give to scraps of paper something more than the intrinsic value of pulp and printer's ink. Religion has been taken out of the modern school, college, and university, and thinkers and observers are beginning to agree that it should simply be put back, so as to save the man and his home and his country.

Another thing, and this is particularly true of ourselves. We are experimenting too much along educational lines. The ways and means and methods of mind training to-day are disregarded to-morrow, until we have reached the point where everything is in a muddle and only one thing seems clear that information and not formation is the purpose of modern

education. Of course I am not now speaking or finding fault with our costly buildings, highly paid teachers, or an educational paternalism which costs nearly four hundred million a year, but I do find fault with a system that seems wanting in unity, continuity, coördination, and plain logic. Its operation reminds me of "the painful toil of dropping buckets into empty wells and growing old in drawing nothing up." I never could see, either by any system of reason or logic, why the poor man must be taxed to educate the children of the rich.

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There is also the indecent but encouraged haste of young America to get to a university to listen to lectures when he should be in the high school or college reciting his lessons. It very like trying to get to the homeplate on the baseball field without touching the bases. There is no such thing as a hothouse education. Education is a growth, a development, an unfolding of faculties. Force this and you kill the very powers you want to stimulate and to develop.

This craving to be in a university, to have cap and gown, to attend lectures instead of recitations, to live in boarding houses instead of being in college quarters sub magistro, has filled our universities with boys who should be in the high school or college and has lowered the university standard to a college level. Did I say to a college level? To avoid that comparison the college has been conveniently sidetracked and eliminated out of our modern systems and, to the permanent detriment of young America, he steps from the high school into a full-edged university. Three or four years in college are as necessary as three or four years in a high school, and if skipped, university work is an impossibility.

Why do I dwell on these two things - religion in the school and a college in the curriculum? Why, because I want our college and university men to be not merely instructed, but