The Education of Catholic GirlsStuart, Janet Erskine
Religion
The Education of Catholic Girls
Stuart, Janet Erskine
Catholic Church -- Education; Women -- Education
All these things come with our Catholic faith and practice if it is
rightly understood. Catholic family life, Catholic citizenship,
Catholic patriotism are the truest, the only really true, because the
only types of these virtues that are founded on truth. But they do not
come of themselves. Many will let themselves be carried to heaven, as
they hope, in the long-suffering arms of the Church without either
defending or adorning her by their virtues, and we shall but add to
their number if we do not kindle in the minds of children the ambition
to do something more, to devote themselves to the great Cause, by
self-sacrifice to be in some sort initiated into its spirit, and
identified with it, and thus to make it worth while for others as well
as for themselves that they have lived their life on earth. There is a
price to be paid for this, and they must face it; a good life cannot
be a soft life, and a great deal, even of innocent pleasure, has to be
given up, voluntarily, to make life worth living, if it were only as a
training in _doing without_.
Independence is a primary need for character, and independence can
only be learnt by doing without pleasant things, even unnecessarily.
Simplicity of life is an essential for greatness of life, and the very
meaning of the simple life is the laying aside of many things which
tend to grow by habit into necessities. The habit of work is another
necessity in any life worth living, and this is only learnt by
refraining again and again from what is pleasant for the sake of what
is precious. Patience and thoroughness are requirements whose worth
and value never come home to the average mind until they are seen in
startling excellence, and it is apparent what a price must have been
paid to acquire their adamant perfection, a lesson which might be the
study of a lifetime. The value of time is another necessary lesson of
the better life, a hard lesson, but one that makes an incalculable
difference between the expert and the untried. We are apt to be always
in a hurry now, for obvious reasons which hasten the movement of life,
but not many really know how to use time to the full. Our tendency is
to alternate periods of extreme activity with intervals of complete
prostration for recovery. Perhaps our grandparents knew better in a
slower age the use of time. The old Marquise de Gramont, aged 93,
after receiving Extreme Unction, asked for her knitting, for the poor.
"Mais Madame la Marquise a ete administree, elle va mourir!" said the
maid, who thought the occupation of dying sufficient for a lady of her
age. "Ma chere, ce n'est pas une raison pour perdre son temps,"
answered the indomitable Marquise. It is told of her also that when
one of her children asked for some water in summer, between meals, she
replied: "Mon enfant, vous ne serez jamais qu'un etre manque, une
pygmee, si vous prenez ces habitudes-la, pensez, mon petit coeur, au
fiel de Notre Seigneur Jesus Christ, et vous aurez le courage
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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