“You have offered yourself,” the author says to Bartolommea, “body and soul, with all your possessions and your children, as far as they belong to you, to God, Our Lord, and now you want to know how to make the best use of all these things for His glory.” Thus, with the precision of the schoolman, he states and divides his subject. The first book, then, tells how to use the powers of the soul for God; the second, the faculties and senses of the body; the third, temporal goods. The fourth book tells how children are to be trained, and is, indeed, a most thorough treatise on Education. Children are to be brought up (1) for God, (2) for father and mother, (3) for themselves, (4) for their country, (5) for the trials of life. Again, you see the schoolman, and admire the method. Can anything be more admirable than this summing up of the whole end and aim of Catholic Education, which takes account of the child in his future relations as Christian, member of a family, individual with an individual’s responsibilities for the investment of his talents (the faculties of soul and body), citizen, and man? Then, with an astonishing feeling for realities, he prescribes the practical method by which this end shall be attained. “You are bringing up your child for God. Therefore, let the thought of God await his first consciousness. For such as him, God became a Little Child. Show him that Little Child; have His image and that of Saint John in your homes, and let your baby make a playmate of Jesukin. (Does that not make one think a little of Iosagan playing with the children along the stone ditches of the Connemara roads?) For the girl have pictures of the girl-saints: Agnes with her lamb; Elizabeth and Cecilia with their roses; and Catherine with her wheel. But if you cannot afford to have these pictures in your homes (for those were not the days of colour printing and lithography) be sure to bring the little ones often to the Church, and let them see them there.” I like to think that a great master, painting in those years, had a thought of dear, little, chubby, dark-eyed boys and girls being taken, one of the days soon to follow, into the church, when the masterpiece should be hanging in its place, and making friends with his “Bambino.” Not by “sight” alone shall you teach your little ones to know God. “While they lie against your breast, and you feed them with your own substance, feed their souls with the sweetness of the love of Jesus, that wells first from your own heart; let the first words they utter be: ‘Jesus, Ave Maria, Deo Gratias, Pater noster qui es in coelo.’