But to give right thoughts of hell and heaven taxes the best resources of those who wish to lay foundations well, for they are to be foundations for life, and the two lessons belong together, corner-stones of the building, to stand in view as long as it shall stand and never to be forgotten.

The two lessons belong together as the final destiny of man, fixed by his own act, this or that.  And they have to be taught with all the force and gravity and dignity which befits the subject, and in such a way that after years will find nothing to smile at and nothing to unlearn.  They have to be taught as the mind of the present time can best apprehend them, not according to the portraiture of mediaeval pictures, but in a language perhaps not more true and adequate in itself but less boisterous and more comprehensible to our self-conscious and introspective moods.  Father Faber’s treatment of these last things, hell and heaven, would furnish matter for instruction not beyond the understanding of those in their last years at school, and of a kind which if understood must leave a mark upon the mind for life. [1 See Appendix I.]

5.  Eight views of Jesus Christ and His mother.  For Catholic children this relationship is not a thing far off, but the faith which teaches them of God Incarnate bids them also understand that He is their own “God who gives joy to their youth”—­and that His mother is also theirs.  There are many incomprehensible things in which children are taught to affirm their belief, and the acts of faith in which they recite these truths are far beyond their understanding.  But they can and do understand if we take pains to teach them that they are loved by Our Lord each one alone, intimately and personally, and asked to love in return.  “Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not,” is not for them a distant echo of what was heard long ago in the Holy Land, it is no story, but a living reality of to day.  They are themselves the children who are invited to come to Him, better off indeed than those first called, since they are not now rebuked or kept off by the Apostles but brought to the front and given the first places, invited by order of His Vicar from their earliest years to receive the Bread of Heaven, and giving delight to His representatives on earth by accepting the invitation.

It is the reality as contrasted with the story that is the prerogative of the Catholic child.  Jesus and Mary are real, and are its own closest kin, all but visible, at moments intensely felt as present.  They are there in joy and in trouble, when every one else fails in understanding or looks displeased there is this refuge, there is this love which always forgives, and sets things right, and to whom nothing is unimportant or without interest.  Companionship in loneliness, comfort in trouble, relief in distress, endurance in pain are all to be found in them.  With Jesus and Mary what is there in the whole world of which a Catholic child should be afraid.  And this glorious strength of theirs made perfect in child-martyrs in many ages will make them again child-martyrs now if need be, or confessors of the holy faith as they are not seldom called upon, even now, to show themselves.