This is very generally recognized and deplored, but except within the Church, which has kept the key to these questions, the remedy is hard to find.  Inspectors of elementary schools have been heard to say that, even in districts where the Catholic school was composed of the poorest and roughest elements, the manners were better than those of the well-to-do children in the neighbouring Council schools.  They could not account for it, but we can; the precious hour of religious teaching for which we have had to fight so hard, influences the whole day and helps to create the “Catholic atmosphere” which in its own way tells perhaps more widely than the teaching.  Faith tells of the presence of God and this underlies the rest, while the sense of friendly protection, the love of Our Lady, the angels, and saints, the love of the priest who administers all that Catholic children most value, who blesses and absolves them in God’s name, all these carry them out of what is wretched and depressing in their surroundings to a different world in which they give and receive love and respect as children of God.  No wonder their manners are gentler and their intercourse more disposed to friendliness, there is something to appeal to and uphold, something to love.

The Protestant Reformation breaking up these relations and all the ceremonial observance in which they found expression, necessarily produced deterioration of manners.  As soon as anyone, especially a child, becomes—­not rightly but aggressively—­independent, argumentatively preoccupied in asserting that “I am as good as you are, and I can do without you”—­he falls from the right proportion of things, becomes less instead of greater, because he stands alone, and from this to warfare against all order and control the step is short.  So it has proved.  The principles of Protestantism worked out to the principles of the Revolution, and to their natural outcome, seen at its worst in the Reign of Terror and the Commune of 1871 in Paris.

Again the influence of the Church on manners was dominant in the age of chivalry.  At that time religion and manners were known to be inseparable, and it was the Church that handled the rough vigour of her sons to make them gentle as knights.  This is so well known that it needs no more than calling to mind, and, turning attention to the fact that all the handling was fundamental, it is handling that makes manners.  Even the derivation of the word does not let us forget this—­manners from manieres, from manier, from main, from manus, the touch of the human hand upon the art of living worthily in human society, without offence and without contention, with the gentleness of a race, the gens, that owns a common origin, the urbanity of those who have learned to dwell in a city “compact together,” the respect of those who have some one to look to for approval and control, either above them in dignity, or beneath them in strength, and therefore to be considered with due reverence.