est in word and work, who escapes inquiry- Jesus of Nazareth. Who He is no one must ask, no one must answer. It were sectarianism whether the reply were affirmation or negation. The literatures of the world open their pages to nurture the mind and inflame the heart. But the Book of Books, that which is the most sublime in beauty, which more than all others has dominated the civilized world, the Bible, is not read nor even seen. It is a book of religion around which controversies rage; silence in its regard is the price of peace. What else is the secularized school but the woeful mutilation of the field of secular knowledge, within the most vitalizing scopes of its own teachings? But my present contention is with Catholics: The Catholic school for the Catholic child.

Glacial and soul-chilling the secularized school, from which God, His Christ, His Church are bidden away. How could the Catholic parent dare thrust into the vast void his tenderminded, tender-hearted child! To have the supernatural world forgotten, designedly and professedly, is a sacrilege, a violence to God, a violence to the soul of the child. God is the Creator, Alpha and Omega of all things; Christ is the Saviour, through whose name there is salvation to men and to nations; religion, the ascension of the soul to God and to Christ, is the all in all in the life of the human soul. Yet during school hours, the time of serious thought, God, Christ, religion are not spoken of, the entire span of the hours being devoted exclusively to the earth and to the things of the earth. The compelling effect upon the pupil is the impression that amid the activities of men the earth and the things of the earth prevail, that heaven and the things of heaven, if at all worthy of notice, must be confined to odd moments, the nooks and corners of human life. The negation of religion in the schoolroom is fatal to religion, to the sense of its importance, to the

vigor of the influences that should radiate from it across the whole sphere of man's thinking and acting. Memories of youth endure; to the adult whose formative days were spent in a secularized schoolroom, memories those are of a humanity without God, without Christ. The secularized school is the expulsion of God and of Christ from the mind and the heart of the child, with the resulting expulsion of Him from the mind and the heart of the adult.

But we must go farther and see facts as they really are. There is no neutrality in the secularized school. Textbooks abound in misrepresentations and calumnies with regard to the Church; teachers, non-Catholics, non-Christians, do not refrain from giving expression to their views. Their views, when not openly spoken, exude from the very atmosphere teachers create, consciously or unconsciously. To the pupil the teacher sits in the chair of knowledge; he is listened to with respect and obedience; his opinions and judgments, whether he will it or not, he cannot conceal. For the child, untutored and tender-minded, the school is not neutral; it is Catholic or Protestant, Christian or Hebrew, theist or agnostic or baldly materialistic.

Not taught in the schoolroom, where will religion be taught? Let us remember that the Catholic faith is a science in itself, lengthy and complex in its propositions, precise and dogmatic in its demands. It is not learnt in brief moments, with easy expenditures of attention. It is no general mental assent to which the slight promoting of the will gives birth; it is no vague aspiration to which a passing word or example lends a power of uplift. The Catholic faith is a well-coördinated and explicit system of divinely received truths; it is the firm grasp of those truths by mind and heart; it is the plenary yielding of the energies of life to the consequences of those

truths. An attempt to teach Catholic faith, short of long-time and thorough drilling, is a profitless beating of the air. The place to teach religion is the schoolroom, where time and circumstances permit and authorize thought and work, where each theme of study takes its proper rank, religion first and foremost, permeating and inspiring all else, while other themes are loyally treated to their due share of attention and respect.

Need I discuss the home and the Sunday-school as factors in the religious formation of the child? As a matter of fact, religion is not taught in the home. Few parents are capable of teaching religion; fewer yet take the time or have the will to teach it. If they fain would teach religion, when and where the opportunity? The day's harassing labor over, fathers and mothers covet rest and recreation; the wearisome drudgery of the schoolroom sloughed off, children are loath to listen. Parents do not trust in the lessons of the home to teach to their children the sciences of earth. Are lessons in religion less valuable or more easily dealt out than lessons in music or grammar, in chemistry or history? The Sunday-school! For multitudes of children the Sunday-school does not exist; they do not, they will not come to it. To those who do come, what is the Sunday-school? One hour in the week, a hurried rehearsal of words, a specious makeshift, harmful inasmuch as it excuses from the thorough study that alone suffices in matters of religion.

Were the Catholic Church in America to confide in the home and the Sunday-school for the religious education of her children, she would be preparing a death-blow to herself and to the sacred message of which she was made the voice-bearer and the defender. I refer to the examinations in religion over which I preside when I visit parishes for the administration of the

Sacrament of Confirmation. Few the glances, few the questionings needed to differentiate the pupils of the Catholic school from those whose religious training is presumed to have come from the home or the Sunday-school. As the pupils of the Catholic school pass in review, prompt in reply and elucidation, beaming in countenance with the joyous rays of spiritual grace and piety, I feel that in the future years the Church is sure to have from them its throng of loyal soldiers, in whose hands her destinies are safe. But as I observe and question those children who, for their religious training, have relied on other agencies, I tremble for the faith of those children, for the fortunes of the Church so far as they are to be her champions. I never arise from a Confirmation examination without an act of praise to God for our Catholic schools, without an act of deep regret that still there are Catholic children outside their tutelage.

Religion barred from the schoolroom, the all-important question is sprung: What is done to ground the pupil in good morals? The effective foundation of good morals is faith in the living God, supreme Ruler of men, faith in the ever-abiding Christ, Saviour of mankind, faith in the sacramental graces flowing from the merits of Christ and distributed over souls through the agencies of His Church. The supernatural is the birthplace of human virtue; thence the rays to enlighten the reason of man, thence the inspiration to awaken and fortify his conscience, thence, too, the sanction of love and of fear to impel his will to the observance of righteousness, to deter it from evil-doing. But all this is religion, of which no mention is allowed. What remains? Pitiable appeals to counsels of reason, to impending punishments of human law, to frowns of public opinion, to policies of worldly expediency. Pathetic it is to listen to the devices proposed as substitutes for reli

gion in the teaching of morals. The imperious need of morals none there are who doubt, none who doubt that the season of formation in morals is childhood and youth. The cry of public opinion is that in some way morals be taught in the schools of the land, and panacea after panacea is read out to instructors and to pupils. The vainest illusion the panacea is at best a whispering of words that for a moment, perhaps, temper temptation in specially favored circumstances of soul and of surroundings, unable, however, to raise a ripple over the angry billows of sin and of peril of sin in which are immersed the masses of our common humanity. God and Christ are the masters, the guardians of morals; dare not, Catholic fathers and mothers, choose for your little ones schools that vow their names to silence and oblivion.

Were I to argue further as to the effect of the secularized school upon religion, I should invite you to remark its too visible results in the country at large outside the Catholic Church. Time was, not so long ago, when the masses of Americans held firmly to one form or to another of Christian faith, when to stay away from religious services on Sunday was to invoke upon oneself public criticism. To-day, among the masses, only tattered and shattered shreds of Christianity subsist, when it is at all anything more than a memory or a mere wave of so-called human brotherhood or social uplift. To-day Protestant temples gather into their pews on Sunday the handfuls of worshippers, and the thinning of the ranks grows yearly apace. The fatal day seems near when, outside the Catholic Church, Christ and His Gospel shall be accepted as naught else than ordinary natural incidents on the pages of humanity's history. To the effacement of the supernatural there may be auxiliary causes; the chief cause, it cannot be denied, is that religion is barred from the school and that,