The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 — John Shaqi
The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886Various
History
The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886
Various
Periodicals
'The masters will take such great care in the instruction of
all their scholars, that not one shall be left in ignorance,
at least of the things which a Christian ought to believe
and do. And to the end they may not neglect a thing of such
great importance, they will often meditate earnestly on the
account which they will have to give to God, and that they
will be guilty in his sight of the ignorance of the children
who shall have been under their care, and also of the sins
into which their ignorance may have caused them to fall.'
The faults which De la Salle regards as worthy of being treated with
most severity are these: untruthfulness, quarrelling, theft, impurity,
misbehaviour in church. It is notable that idleness and inattention to
lessons, sauciness, and other boyish faults, which have brought much
trouble upon many thousands of urchins, are not here enumerated at all;
probably the wise Superior of the Christian Brothers thought that these
and the like infirmities could be more successfully treated by other
means than by severe punishment. We incline to believe that he was
right. Certainly we shall have no difficulty in assenting to the wisdom
of the rules laid down as to the conditions of punishment being useful:
it must be (1) disinterested, that is, free from all feeling of revenge;
(2) charitable, that is, inflicted from a real love to the child; (3)
just; (4) proportioned to the fault; (5) moderate; (6) free from anger;
(7) prudent; (8) voluntary on the part of the scholar, that is,
understood and accepted by him; (9) received with respectful submission;
(10) in silence on both sides.
These samples must suffice to indicate M. de la Salle's practical and
simple wisdom.
The thought of all that we wish to say before concluding this article
compels us once more to appeal to the reader's imagination with regard
to the success of De la Salle's work. His fame went through France and
beyond it; he became the recognized apostle of elementary education;
when he made an expedition to Calais and the north in the latter part of
his career, it was almost a triumphal progress; nothing, however, could
spoil the sweet simplicity of his character, or interfere with his utter
devotion to his work, and his humble desire to shift the burden upon
what he believed to be stronger shoulders than his own. This desire was
at length accomplished, and on the 8th of May, 1717, after much earnest
consideration and religious observance, a second Superior of their
Society was unanimously elected by the Christian Brothers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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