r religious education,
while, on the contrary, we remain accountable to God for those who, for
want of a Catholic education, suffer shipwreck in their faith and
morals, and are lost forever. In the sight of God, the above excuse will
avail us nothing.

Some, even most of our schools, may have been more or less defective in
the beginning. Well, what was the Church at the time of the Apostles?
There were then no gorgeous cathedrals as nowadays. The Christians were
instructed and sanctified in the Catacombs, and in poor private
dwellings. So, in a country like ours, the kingdom of heaven is compared
to a mustard seed. Churches and schools are insignificant in the
beginning; but, by degrees, more life and splendor is infused into them,
and they grow up to perfection.

We honor and venerate the Apostles as the corner-stones of Christianity.
Happy, thrice happy, those pastors who lay solid foundations for future
Catholic life by establishing nurseries--Catholic schools--for its
maintenance and propagation. Their reward will be like unto that of the
Apostles. Our successors will bring our feeble beginnings to perfection.
This is the natural course of things. We may not have the happiness to
witness a plentiful harvest from the seed that we have sown with so much
toil and labor; but we should nevertheless bear in mind that those
bishops and priests who have the happiness of laying the foundations of
future Catholic life in our country, resemble our Lord Jesus Christ, Who
suffered His Apostles to perform even greater miracles than He Himself
had wrought.

I know the above objection is more frequently made in the New England
States than anywhere else. Now it is a well-known fact that the Yankee
race is fast dying out. They have either no children at all, or only one
or two. Hence it is that the larger portion of the Public School
children are the children of Catholic parents. These States foresee that
were the Catholic children to leave their schools, their Public School
buildings would soon be empty, and stand there as eloquent monuments to
tell on the folly of the States for having erected them. Now in order to
keep the Catholic children at their schools, and thus keep up their fine
lucrative establishments, they have, in several places, taken in the
Catholic priests as members of the School Boards. Truly, "the children
of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light."
These priests, by accepting the h