glories of the Church, the
majesties of the Apostolic See, and continually inflame the youthful
mind to the practice of good works, by proposing to them the lives and
virtues of holy men, and by continually reminding them of their
religious duties, of the end of man, and of other great motives
calculated to induce them to serve God. In regard to this matter, I
shall merely add that the common school-books have been generally
compiled by Protestants, that scarcely any extract from Catholic authors
is admitted in them, that they contain many Methodistical stories, that
their language is that of the Protestant Bible, and that they contain
many things offensive to our love of religion.

Do you want to see what man without God--without religion--can do? Read
the history of the last eighty years in Paris. You have there one simple
phenomenon--generation rising after generation, without God in the
world. And why? Because, without Christian education. First, an
atheistical revolution; next, an empire penetrated through with a
masking philosophy and a reckless indifferentism; afterwards came
governments changed in name and in form, but not in practice, nor in
spirit. The Church, trammelled by protection, her spiritual action faint
and paralyzed, could not penetrate the masses of the people, and bring
her salutary influence to bear upon them. She labored fervently; her
sons fought nobly for Christian freedom; thousands were saved; but for
eighty years the mass of men has grown up without God and without Christ
in the world. These outbursts of horror, strife, outrage, sacrilege,
bloodshed, are the harvest reaped from the rank soil in which such seed
was cast. All this is true. But how did souls created to the image of
God grow up in such a state? They were robbed: robbed before they were
born; robbed of their inheritance, and reared up in an education without
Christianity. Let this be a warning to ourselves! We are told that a
child may be taught to read, and to write, and to spell, and to sum,
without Christianity. Who denies it? But what does this make of them? To
what do they grow up? The formation of the will and heart and character,
the formation of a man, is education, and not the reading, and the
writing, and the spelling, and the summing. Physiology, astronomy,
chemistry, anatomy, and all other sciences with sounding names, and of
Greek etymology, will not teach our children the respect, love, and
obedience due to parents.