Next to prayer itself, pious reading cannot fail to demand our attention as the second great spiritual help in the routine of home education. This should be simple and well suited to the understanding of young children, and, above all, should not be a dry and barren formality, but should be explained and amplified by the mother’s comments. How, unless questions are freely allowed—nay, encouraged—can the extent of the impression made by spiritual reading be measured? Then, what an inexhaustible resource does not this reading or its equivalent—descriptions by word of mouth—afford to a thoughtful parent! The beautiful narratives of the Old Testament, the stories of the four gospels, the many striking incidents in the lives of the saints, the legends of the faithful middle ages, the histories of the contemporaneous manifestations of God’s mercy, all offer mines of wealth to a skilful narrator. If, instead of goblin tales more fit for the entertainment of rational people than for the staple of a child’s too credulous meditations, these holy histories became the nursery rhymes of the future generation, it would be well indeed for the spiritual advance of our age. If among the romances of mediæval times more of those were chosen in which religion figures than of those where fairy and elf appear, it would be a better promise for the future health, moral and physical, of our people. Who knows how much of that nervousness which is the characteristic disease of our day is due to those unwholesome terrors of infancy, those threats of bogy and ogre, with which children are frightened into silence or lulled into uneasy sleep! The child who would be, in a manner, the companion of the boy Jesus, of the child Precursor, the infant Samuel, the Holy Innocents, the children of whom our Lord said, “Suffer them to come unto me, and forbid them not,” and of the many boy and girl saints—S. Rose of Viterbo, S. Aloysius Gonzaga, S. Stanislaus Kostka—would be a far healthier and more manly subject than the mental companion of deformed sprites and forest goblins. The young mind is so impressionable that it is the greatest possible mistake to let its first exercise of reason spend itself on unrealities; they are apt to take on an influence not readily shaken off, and to cumber the ground long after room is needed for more serious growths of thought. This may seem an exceptional mode of proceeding, perhaps an eccentric one, the contrary having for so many ages held sway, but we take leave to think that it has reason, expediency, and religion on its side.