Secular
Literature as such; cut out from your class books all broad manifestations
of the natural man; and those manifestations are waiting for your pupil's
benefit at the very doors of your lecture room in living and breathing
substance. They will meet him there in all the charm of novelty, and all
the fascination of genius or of amiableness. To-day a pupil, to-morrow a
member of the great world: to-day confined to the Lives of the Saints,
to-morrow thrown upon Babel;--thrown on Babel, without the honest
indulgence of wit and humour and imagination having ever been permitted to
him, without any fastidiousness of taste wrought into him, without any
rule given him for discriminating "the precious from the vile," beauty
from sin, the truth from the sophistry of nature, what is innocent from
what is poison. You have refused him the masters of human thought, who
would in some sense have educated him, because of their incidental
corruption: you have shut up from him those whose thoughts strike home to
our hearts, whose words are proverbs, whose names are indigenous to all
the world, who are the standard of their mother tongue, and the pride and
boast of their countrymen, Homer, Ariosto, Cervantes, Shakespeare, because
the old Adam smelt rank in them; and for what have you reserved him? You
have given him "a liberty unto" the multitudinous blasphemy of his day;
you have made him free of its newspapers, its reviews, its magazines, its
novels, its controversial pamphlets, of its Parliamentary debates, its law
proceedings, its platform speeches, its songs, its drama, its theatre, of
its enveloping, stifling atmosphere of death. You have succeeded but in
this,--in making the world his University.

Difficult then as the question may be, and much as it may try the
judgments and even divide the opinions of zealous and religious Catholics,
I cannot feel any doubt myself, Gentlemen, that the Church's true policy
is not to aim at the exclusion of Literature from Secular Schools, but at
her own admission into them. Let her do for Literature in one way what she
does for Science in another; each has its imperfection, and she has her
remedy for each. She fears no knowledge, but she purifies all; she
represses no element of our nature, but cultivates the whole. Science is
grave, methodical, logical; with Science then she argues, and opposes
reason to reason. Literature does not argue, but declaims and insinuates;
it is multiform and versati