petitioner has received a certificate, an examination for promotion must take place before the same authorities to whom the examination for appointment is intrusted. Where the competency is notorious, examination may, by the ratifying power, be dispensed with. The departmental authority must, at the end of each year, transmit to the ministry a list of all masters newly placed or promoted, with a statement of the value of the several appointments; and this authority is never excusable if it leave personal merit without employment and recompense, or the smallest service unacknowledged."

Several correspondents in the July numbers of the London Weekly Register proposed the formation of an association of the Catholic teachers of England, for the purpose of holding conferences on school matters, establishing courses of lectures, promoting social intercourse among the members of the same profession and the same religion, and last, though not least, providing for aged and infirm teachers. The project is excellent, and we hope that it will meet with the success it deserves. Why cannot a club of this kind be formed among our own teachers? Why can there not be an interchange of kind offices, of thoughts and suggestions on educational subjects, between college professors, between the instructresses in the higher branches in the conventual academics? Each may contribute only a mite of information, but mites have, before this, brought down the blessing of heaven; mite societies have, before this, wrought miracles. Mental intercourse is a necessary element of education, of intellectual life. Thought generates thought, enthusiasm spreads from its shrine in one noble heart like wild-fire. The intercommunion of many minds on the same subject creates similarity of views, harmony, and unity, and these together form l'esprit de corps. The soldier is a soldier because he is, day and night, surrounded by soldiers in camp and garrison; let him live amid civilians for any length of time, away from the mess-room and the parade, the music of fife and drum, and his military ardor will insensibly cool. Intercourse with those of our own profession is necessary to the preservation of a proper professional spirit.

If a society of the kind were established and supported, one or two members might be delegated to visit and report on the educational establishments of foreign countries. This is what Protestants do. Many of the reforms introduced into our Common School system are importations from abroad. If our memory serve us, Horace Mann, late President of Antioch College, Ohio, a man deservedly celebrated in the annals of education, visited the English and continental schools and universities, and many of the suggestions with which his addresses and reports abound, are fruits of his travels. Etiam ab hoste doceri fas est. But in this as in other matters we are too fond of talking and too slow in acting. "What good can come from Nazareth," cry out some Catholics; "what is

there intellectual or moral in Protestantism worth copying?" We answer in the words of our Lord: "the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light."

We proceed to the second class of teachers,-ecclesiastics. There is no incompatibility between the clerical and professional states, as some of the newspaper critics have charged us with holding The clergy have given as many distinguished men to science and literature as the laity. The majority of chairs in Catholic colleges and universities in this country and in Europe are held by ecclesiastics. All that we asserted was the impossibility of uniting the missionary and the professorial life. If the priest is to be a teacher, then remove him entirely from the out-door work of the ministry. Give him time for study, for thought, for writing, and then, if he has a vocation for the school-room or the lecture-hall, he will succeed as well as a layman. But for heaven's sake do not impose on him sacerdotal duties which interfere with his academic pursuits. Do not require of him, as we know of places where it was required, to take care of a parish of between five hundred and one thousand people, and lecture besides to two or three classes a day. An overworked professor cannot discharge his duties with satisfaction, either to himself or his students. In the case of an ecclesiastical professor we must always sharply distinguish between his clerical character and his academic character. The latter is open to the criticisms of the public, the former they are always bound to respect. Yet we are disposed, at times, to let the sanctuary encroach on the lecture-room, and to judge of the clerical professor as we would judge of the priest at the altar or in the palpit. In the latter case he speaks with authority as God's representative, in the former his academic opinions and acts are to be weighed in the same scales as those of a lay professor.

The evils that result from employing seminarians as teachers in colleges were briefly pointed out in our last article. Not one in twenty has a vocation for the work, and they necessarily injure both themselves and their pupils. If a young ecclesiastic shows decided talent and inclination for instruction, let him be set aside and trained up for a professorship. He will succeed in a college, because there lies his vocation, though he might cut a very sorry figure at the head of a parish. The indiscriminate employment, as teachers, of young men preparing for the priesthood has, we admit, advantages. They are not a burden to the diocese for which they are studying, as their labors in the school-room cover the expenses of their tuition. They acquire some knowledge of boy-nature, and consequently of man-nature. But these advantages are dearly purchased at the sacrifice of time that ought to be devoted to the wide circle of ecclesiastical science; at the sacrifice of the true seminary spirit; at the sacrifice of the pupil's correct mental training. Talk as you please about the energy and activity that a

Some

college professorship or tutorship infuses into a young man; what is it worth in the supernatural order, if the interior spirit be gone? Give us the man thoroughly conversant with ecclesiastical literature, the man of God, the holy man; he is the priest that will save souls and edify the Church.

In a letter dated July 10th, 1860, addressed by the Rt. Rev. Dr. Ullathorne, Bishop of Birmingham, England, to the patrons of St. Mary's College, Oscott, the venerable prelate, alluding to the system followed in that institution, says: "The divinity students are called upon, to the detriment of their proper pursuits, to supply for the deficiencies of older professors." He then proceeds to give notice of a change to be introduced: "A complete body of professors will be appointed and exclusively devoted to the work of teaching; and the old plan of largely employing divinity students as teachers, will be gradually abandoned. Not only the efficiency of the lay department, but equally that of the ecclesiastical, demands this reform."

The very large majority of our instructors, male and female, are religious; of the hundred or more colleges and academies in this country, more than eighty are under their direction. They are, or ought to be, at home in the class-room, because they belong to orders which make education one of their chief objects. The Benedictines, the Dominicans, the Franciscans, and the Jesuits, wear the academic laurels of centuries of successful teaching. The traditions of the learning and civilization of the ancient world were preserved for us by the disciples of St. Benedict; the Dominicans and the Franciscans triumphed, by the splendor of their talents and the vastness of their erudition, over the heresies and extravagances that were rampant in the schools and universities of the Middle Ages; they became the mouth-pieces of science and literature, and adorned the stately fabric of scholastic theology with the wealth and the beauty of human learning. We need not speak of the Society of Jesus. Its fame is world-wide, its praise is in all the churches; it has been to the army of Christ and St. Peter what the Tenth Legion was to Cæsar, the Janizaries to the Sultans, the Old Guard to Napoleon I., and the Zouaves to the Nephew of his Uncle. Wherever the battle rages fiercest, there waves the banner of Loyola, with the immortal motto, Ad majorem Dei gloriam. That banner has gone down in many disastrous fight only to be raised again in loftier triumph, dripping red with the blood of Jesuit martyrs. Far be it from us to say aught against one of the noblest bodies of men who have adorned the annals of the Church with the record of their virtues and their genius, their struggles and their victories. We but proposed in our last article the question: Is the system of education adopted by the colleges of the Society in the sixteenth century, fitted to answer the wants of Catholic youth in the nineteenth ? There seemed to us a disposition, in some

in none

quarters, to adhere too rigidly to an antiquated system. Conservatism, when it reaches a certain limit, becomes old fogyism, as readily as progress, when not rightly controlled, may run into license and rebellion. There is a pliability in the religious orders, more than in the Society of Jesus, by which they can make themselves at home everywhere, in every variety of time, place, and circumstance. The saints who founded them did not mean them to fossilize, but to advance with the age, to change their weapons and modes of attack in accordance with the shifting tactics of the world and the devil. Important reforms have been lately introduced into some of our orders. Schools and colleges have been discontinued in order to concentrate numbers and talent on a few leading institutions. This move is worthy of all praise, and we hope that it will be imitated by seculars, and that some of the colleges and academies that spring up after each vacation like mushrooms after rain, will soon be numbered among the things

that were.

The mere fact of entering the novitiate of a religious order, will not qualify man or woman to be a teacher. A religious vocation is not necessarily a professional vocation. Many a monk can sanctify himself by prayer and fasting, and sanctify others by his missionary labors; many a good sister can emulate St. Vincent of Paul in love of the poor and orphans, and St. Camillus of Lelli in tender care of the sick, and yet both monk and nun may egregiously fail

if they attempt to instruct in grammar or history, in mathematics

or theology. when they install themselves in a school-room. Even the contemThey leave the sphere of God's special providence plative orders, and those destined for out-door works of charity, have been compelled to resort, in this country, to education as a

means of

desirable that there should be religious communities of men and support. Necessity knows no rule, and though it were women, for the sole exclusive object of education-communities which should admit none into their ranks but such as have all the requisites of mind and body to make good teachers,-yet we may trust that God will not entirely refuse to bless the educational efforts of orders whose vocation is rather to the spiritual than the intellectual, who are distracted from the duties of the school-room by a thousand other calls, provided these orders energetically labor to fit themselves for their newly-assumed work. Instructions on the method of teaching should enter into the novitiate training of young religious destined for the school-room. Intellectual life must exist in the colleges and academies of religious as well as in those of seculars. Even nuns and sisters, if they are to be teachers, must be ladies of cultivated minds, fond of study and of reading. God defend us from strong-minded women; God

forbid that

any

Vincent, should become an imitator of Fanny Wright or Rev. An

daughter of St. Angela, St. Francis of Sales, or St.

toinette Brown; should merge her womanhood, the modesty and humility of her religious character in the rough obstreperousness of an intellectual Amazon. Yet the same obligation lies on nuns and sisters of being living women, that lies on college professors of being living men. They, as well as men, must learn how to think and reason, if they would teach young ladies to think and reason.

The cultivation of mind necessary for a teacher is the result of proper training in youth, and of a general acquaintance with literature in maturer age. Modern literature is, we will not say antiCatholic, but un-Catholic, and yet it must be mastered by Catholic teachers, if they would keep pace with the age, and discharge their duties to their pupils. Literary pursuits make sad inroads on the domain of spirituality; they often take off the bloom of tender piety, and dry up the fountains of unction. When, however, the requirements of one's state of life demand literary tastes, then duty and conscience bid us apply to study and miscellaneous reading, and God will take care that no harm comes of it. Religious, especially in the female orders, may fall into the mistake of attaching too much importance to mere emotion or sentiment, and may feel very scrupulous about reading a Protestant historian like Ranke or Prescott; and, as for a Protestant novelist, like Scott or D'Israeli, the mention of the names would scandalize them. Let us not be misunderstood. Nuns or sisters not engaged in education, have no business with secular literature; for them all history, all poetry, all science, all art, are summed up in the crucifix. But for those engaged in tuition, particularly in the higher classes of conventual academies, literature is necessary; and we see not how they can do the task set them, if their rule absolutely debars them from a large, well-selected library of poetry and standard works, in history, biography, natural science, poetry, and romance. If they are to teach, they must have the means. The attention of convent authorities has not, we are certain, been drawn to this want and the necessity of supplying it. Only educated women can infuse a love of learning into girls, and educated women you cannot have if the schoolsister is allowed only Thomas á Kempis and Butler's Lives of the Saints. Newspapers and reviews cannot be dispensed with any more than books. They are the chroniclers of the time, of its changes, religious, social, and political. What a shame to have Catholic school-girls answer an examiner that Lombardy belongs to Austria, because a geography printed in 1858 says so; or that Parry and Franklin made the nearest approach to the north pole, on the authority of atlases ten years old. Their pious teachers never heard of Victor Emanuel and the peace of Villafranca, nor of Dr. Kane and the open Polar Sea. If the rule of existing orders requires the exclusion of literature, and forbids sisters and nuns to exercise their intellects on any but purely ascetic subjects, then let us have a new order that will be exclusively devoted to education,