The institute proceeds to remove from youth every species of bad example. It directs the prefect and the master how to dissolve growing friendships, that might be dangerous; it forbids the public explanation of books, or of single passages, which might mislead active imaginations; it ordains a scrutiny of all books, that come into the pupil's use; it charges the master to watch every trespass against the rules of civility and good manners. Falsehood and detraction, swearing, and foul words, are to be quickly corrected, or not tolerated within the {202} college. It is, again, the master's particular duty to form the manners of his pupils to decency, modesty, and politeness; to correct their errors in language, their faults in pronunciation, their awkwardness in gestures, their coarseness in behaviour, not less than to cultivate their memory and regulate their imagination. For this purpose the institute, without neglecting modern languages, prescribes, for the justest reasons, the study of Latin and Greek, in the purest models of Athens and ancient Rome. It joins to these the study of history, and its concomitants, geography, chronology, and mythology; and all this must precede the introduction of youth into the regions of eloquence and poetry, where sportive imagination may amuse and feed itself for a while with brilliant images and expressive language: but the institute teaches how to reduce all this to the standard of reason and sound judgment, by the succeeding study of philosophy and mathematics; and these, in their turn, are the preparation for the deeper discussions of theology, which lifts the {203} soul out of the narrow sphere of human science, and enables the mind, and, still more, the heart, to make excursions into the immensity of God. The short sketch, which is here presented, of education among the Jesuits, is enough to convince us, that no system was ever more solid, more calculated to produce eminent men, in every department of civil and ecclesiastical life. Undoubtedly it did produce a succession of them during two hundred years; and it thus verified the decisive sentence of Bacon, _Ad pædagogicam quod attinet, brevissimum foret dictu. Consule scholas Jesuitarum_[68]. Perhaps the real value of the system is still better proved by the miserable state of degradation, into which public education and public morals have sunk in catholic countries, since its utter suppression. {204}