To Right Rev. Monsignor M. J. Lavelle, Rector of St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, sometime President of the Catholic Summer School, to whose fatherly patronage this book is largely due, and without whose constant encouragement it would not have been completed, it is respectfully and affectionately dedicated by the author. {vi} PROEM. (EPIMETHEUS.) WAKE again, Teutonic Father-ages, Speak again, beloved primeval creeds; Flash ancestral spirit from your pages, Wake the greedy age to noble deeds. ..... Ye who built the churches where we worship, Ye who framed the laws by which we move, Fathers, long belied, and long forsaken, Oh, forgive the children of your love! (PEOMETHEUS.) There will we find laws which shall interpret, Through the simpler past, existing life; Delving up from mines and fairy caverns Charmed blades to cut the age's strife. _--Rev. Charles Kingsley.--The Saints' Tragedy._ {vii} PREFACE. "Why take the style of these heroic times? For nature brings not back the mastodon--Nor we those times; and why should any man Remodel models?" What Tennyson thus said of his own first essay in the Idyls of the King, in the introduction to the Morte D'Arthur, occurs as probably the aptest expression of most men's immediate thought with regard to such a subject as The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries. Though Tennyson was confessedly only remodeling the thoughts of the Thirteenth Century, we would not be willing to concede-- "That nothing new was said, or else. Something so said, 'twas nothing," for the loss of the Idyls would make a large lacuna in the literature of the Nineteenth Century, "if it is allowed to compare little things with great," a similar intent to that of the Laureate has seemed sufficient justification for the paradox the author has tried to set forth in this volume. It may prove "nothing worth, mere chaff and draff much better burnt," but many friends have insisted they found it interesting. Authors usually blame friends for their inflictions upon the public, and I fear that I can find no better excuse, though the book has been patiently labored at, with the idea that it should represent some of the serious work that is being done by the Catholic Summer School on Lake Champlain, {viii} now completing nearly a decade and a half of its existence. This volume is, it is hoped, but the first of a series that will bring to a wider audience some of the thoughts that have been gathered for Summer School friends by many workers, and will put in more permanent form contributions that made summer leisure respond to the Greek term for school.