one friend whose correction is swathed in
soft charity than await till a dozen sneerers send their poisoned
arrows to fester in your heart. In correcting yourselves and
asking your friends to admonish you, it will assist you to pocket
your pride, to remember that three such weighty issues as the
efficiency of your ministry, the honour of the priesthood, and
the comfort of your future home will in a large measure be
influenced by the degree of social culture you carry out of
college.

No man has greater need to fear than he who stands high in his
class. When any habit becomes fixed it requires a high degree of
humility and moral courage to root it out. But, intellectual
pride, nourished by college triumphs, is up in arms. He scorns to
be corrected or taught by a world he despises. Let me ask, did
God give him these intellectual gifts for himself or as
instruments by which to win souls back to their Father? The man
who, rather than bend his own pride, allows his talents to become
useless incurs an awful responsibility.

Stubbornly refuse to be corrected or to shape and polish your
manners while in college, and one thing I absolutely promise you,
with all the authority a long experience can give, that when you
do go out from the college you will meet a master that will bend
and break you. The roasting fire of the world's scorn will search
the very marrow of your bones.

CHAPTER SECOND

ENGLISH: ITS NECESSITY TO A YOUNG PRIEST

Let me begin by asking one plain question--If all the scholastic
wealth with which St. Thomas has enriched the world lay embedded
in the mind of a Missionary priest: if he more than rivalled
Suarez as a casuist, and Bellarmine as a controversialist, yet if
he failed to acquire a mastery over the only instrument by which
he could bring to bear the riches of his own intellect on the
minds of those around him, of what value is all the wealth
entombed within his head?

If he has acquired no command of the rich vocabulary, the
graceful elegance of diction, the mysterious beauty of
expression, the abundant illustration, the art of storing nervous
vigour and living thought into crisp and pregnant terseness: if
this one weapon, a finished English education, is not at his
disposal, his knowledge, as far as others are concerned, is so
much lumber: to the one spot alone--the Confessional--his
efficiency is narrowed. The other fields of his ministry are
deprived of the immense service this learni