Under these circumstances it really does not matter very much if the churches remain open or not, for the present. As an English ecclesiastic recently observed, “We can do without our churches, but we cannot do without our schools.” It is by means of Christian schools that Europe was redeemed from barbarism, and preserved from relapsing into its first estate. Each generation, in turn, must be redeemed from barbarism, as were our forefathers, by the Christian upbringing of the young, otherwise retrogression must inevitably ensue. Every gardener understands this. It is natural law in the spiritual world. To descend and retrograde is so much easier than to ascend. To-day, the eternal enemy of God and man seeks to wrest from the Church the great fulcrum by which Christendom was upraised from barbarism, and to use her own arms against the Church, by converting schools into nurseries of infidelity and immorality. In vain secularists would tell us that history, geography, and grammar are neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Mohammedan. The venom of infidelity and vice can be conveyed by the conjugation of a verb. Physical geography may be used as a catapult against the very notion of right and wrong. As to the misuse of history, its possibilities are unlimited. Moreover, the Church, that has received the divine commission to “teach all nations,” needs the aid of all the arts and sciences to accomplish this mission. The Catholic Church, that is essentially, and _jure divino_, _Ecclesia docens_, will never forego her right to teach them all, as she has been doing for two thousand years. In the sixteenth century China seemed hopelessly closed against Christian missionaries. But where apostles failed to penetrate, a man of science, who was also a saint, succeeded. Mathew Ricci, the Jesuit savant, was welcomed by mandarin _literati_, and founded the first Christian mission in China in 1581. All the old universities of Europe were founded by the Church. The arts and sciences grouped themselves around the Chair of Theology, as hand-maidens around their mistress. Religion is, indeed, the aromat which alone preserves them from becoming corrupt and corrupting. Already, society is beginning to discover the evil effects of separating religion from learning. The knowledge and uses of fire form one of the main lines of demarcation that separate us from animals. Monkeys appreciate the kindly blaze, but the smartest of them has never attempted to light a fire. When men, with this distinctive and dangerous knowledge of fire, shall have degraded their mentality to that of the simian by atheism or secularism, and its concomitant materialism, the social order will no longer be possible. A few rudely constructed, diminutive bombs can lay the proudest city in ruins.