Now the Christian school is the place and the provision made for the training of those who are baptized into the Christian faith. They have been made children of God, and as such they have a right to four things belonging to them by a right of inheritance, to which all other rights are secondary. They have a right to the knowledge of their faith; to the training of their conscience by the knowledge of God's commandments; to the Sacraments of grace; and to a moral formation, founded on the precepts and example of our Divine Saviour. These four things belong, by a Divine right, to the child of the poorest working man; by a right more sacred than that which guards the inheritance of lands and titles to the child of the rich. A child of God, and an heir to the kingdom of heaven, holds these four things by a higher title; and his claim is under the jurisdiction of a Divine Judge. But the school is the place and the provision for the insuring of these four vital parts of his right to the Christian child. They cannot be taught or learned elsewhere; there is no other place of systematic and sufficient formation. And if so, then the school becomes the depository of the rights of parents, and of the inheritance of their children. The school is strictly a court of the Temple, a porch outside the Sanctuary. It cannot be separated from the Church. It was created by the Church, and the Church created it for its own mission to its children. As the Church cannot surrender to any power on earth the formation of its own children, so it cannot surrender to any the direction of its own schools. It was the Church, as I have shown in the second chapter, that gave life and being to Christian education; and education must remain under the guardianship of the Church, if it will not cease to be Christian. History shows us that it is the Church that has civilized the nations, and it is the Church that keeps them from falling back into their former degradation. Learning was not diffused among mankind until the Church removed the veil of sin and ignorance, made man really free, and widened the narrow limits of human thought by showing to man the infinite, the eternal destiny that awaited him. This supernatural light--this "freedom of the children of God"--is the very foundation, the very lifespring of civilization. The Catholic Church, then, far from being opposed to education, is its great and most zealous promoter. But she cannot help being opposed to the Pagan system of education adopted in the Public Schools of this country.