mental life by purely Catholic literature.  The more you read of secular works, the more urgent is your duty to give a sufficient place to those also, which will directly serve you in doing your duty to God and in saving your soul.  Assuredly one of the most pressing duties at the present day is to recognize fully our personal and individual responsibility in this matter of reading, and to examine our conscience closely to see how we are acquitting ourselves of it.

Before we leave this subject, we wish to ask all those among you dear children in Jesus Christ, who, whether as fathers and mothers, or as members of religious institutes, or masters and mistresses in schools, are charged with the education of the young, to do all in your power to train those committed to you to a wise and full understanding of this matter of reading, and to a realization of its enormous power for good and harm, and, therefore, to a sense of the extreme responsibility attaching to it.  Make them understand that, while all are able to read, all things are not to be read by all; that this power, like every power, may be abused, and that we have to learn how to use it with due restraint.  While they are with you and gladly subject to your influence, train their judgment and their taste in reading, so that they may know what is good and true, and know how to turn from what is evil and false.  Such a trained and cultivated judgment is the best protection that you can bestow upon them.  Some dangers must be overcome by flight, but there are far more, especially at the present day, which must be faced, and then overcome.  It is part of your great vocation to prepare and equip these children to be brave and to conquer in this fight.  Gradually, therefore, accustom them to the dangers they may meet in reading.  Train their judgment, strengthen their wills, make them loyal to conscience, and then, trusting in God’s grace, give them to their work in life.

INDEX.

Abbesses, the great, 224. 
Accent and pronunciation, 154. 
Adolescence, impressionability of children in, 173. 
Aesthetics, 68; principles of, 71-2; teaching of, 187. 
Agnesi, Maria Gaetana, 222. 
Aids to study, 103-4. 
A Kempls on self-seeking, 197. 
America:  educational experiments in, 84; text-books in, 180. 
American view on character, 22.
  —­expressive phrases, 128,155. 
Ampere, Catholic scientist, 115. 
Amusements and lessons, 100. 
Animals, care of, in education of children, 125. 
Answers, irrelevancy in girls’, 74. 
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 72. 
Architecture, Gothic, inferences from, 189. 
Arnold, Matthew, quoted, 48. 
Art, character and, 186-7; Christian, 188, 189, 197; for children,
   191-2; contrasts in works of, 189-90; in education of girls, 72, 187;
   French art, 187; history of, 188-9; study of, 190-1; aims of study in
   early education, 185, 196. 
Assenting mind, the, 25. 
Assentors, great, 26. 
Athletic craze, the, 111.
  —­girl, the, 219. 
Atmosphere in education, 321-2. 
Audience, English and German, contrasted, 193. 
“Aurora Leigh,” 216. 
Average person, the, 64-6.