The father answered: "If we look at our own sins, we will not see the sins of others. It is foolishness for a man having a corpse in his own house to leave it and go to weep over that of his neighbor." Abbot Marcus said to Abbot Arsenius: "Why do you avoid us?" He answered: "God knows I love you, but I cannot be with God and with men." -------- {93} An Old Guide to Good Manners. In the first number of _The Catholic World_ we gave our readers some account of the great Christian school of Alexandria in the time of St. Clement, the philosopher. The article, borrowed from _The Dublin Review_, sketched the corrupt, luxurious, and effeminate society of the Egyptian metropolis--that gay, bustling, frivolous city which was to the old Eastern world what Paris now is to the continent of Europe--and showed how St. Clement thought it well worth his while to spare an occasional hour from the discussions of philosophy and dogma, and the definition of a code of Christian ethics, to rebuke the scandalous luxury of dandies and _gourmands_, and the follies of fashionable ladies. It would have been but a meagre code of ethics, indeed, which had overlooked the busy trifles that made up so much of the life of Alexandrian gentlefolks. The teacher who would form a better school of morality could not confine himself to the church and the market-place. He must enter the bath and the banquet-hall, the shops of the silk merchant, the jeweller, and the perfumer. He must touch with sharp hand little things which are only foolishness to us, but, to the pagan society of Egypt, made up a large part of the sum of human existence. All this St. Clement did, and the substance, if not the words, of his directions to the flock has come down to us in the pages of his _Instructor_.