ade by these unnoticed products.
Why not here?

[Side note: Our Ruins]

When the summer comes, the curate could easily organize
occasional bicycle excursions with the young men to some
memorable Catholic ruin, in whose history he should be well made
up. The saints and scholars who have glorified our annals are
lying around our churches; we stumble over their graves for forty
years sometimes, without enquiring who they were or what they
did. I am aware there are laudable exceptions: they are, however,
isolated. When the public wants to know anything about our
monasteries, they often have to turn to the layman and even to
the parson.

The small number of priests in the Archaeological Society is a
striking reproach. One would think that our saints and their
works were something to be ashamed of, since the natural
guardians of their memories have practically abandoned them. This
country is filled with catacombs. Every child should be made
acquainted with the life of the leading saint, and the history of
the most memorable ruin in the locality; those hoary prophets,
now so mute, would then speak with tongues of fire out of the dim
past, telling the story of our fathers' Faith and heroic
achievements.

Let us now rise to a higher plane of the young priest's
activities.

[Side note: Activity VII Literature]

It is a stupendous and a humiliating fact that, while this
country is deluged with the writings of the sensualist and the
infidel, there are over three thousand brainy priests upon the
land, and the world of thought knows nothing of them.

[Side note: Cambridge and Oxford]

[Side note: First Premium Men]

When we read of brilliant students at Cambridge or Oxford, we
naturally look forward to see them leaders of thought or action
in their own land, and we are seldom disappointed. Our Irish
colleges are discharging yearly swarms from their doors, many of
them men with brilliant records. Who hears of them after? What
have these first-class premium men, who gave such splendid
promise, done with their gifts and knowledge? How little does the
Irish Church owe them? The day the premium book was handed them,
all serious effort died. They were content to rest for the
remainder of their lives under the shade of their academic
laurels.

The soldier is not satisfied with the triumphs of his recruit
days. He knows that the purpose of his life then is not to gain a
prize and stop at that, but to acquire efficient skill