In conclusion, the question of play, and playtime and recreation is absorbing more and more attention in grown-up life.  We have heard it said over and over again of late years that we tire a nation at play, and that “the athletic craze” has gone beyond all bounds.  Many facts are brought forward in support of this criticism from schools, from newspapers, from general surveys of our national life at present.  And those who study more closely the Catholic body say that we too are sharing in this extreme, and that the Catholic body though small in number is more responsible and more deserving of reproof if it falls from its ideals, for it has ideals.  It is only Catholic girls who concern us here, but our girls among other girls, and Catholic women among other women have the privilege as well as the duty of upholding what is highest.  We belong by right to the graver side of the human race, for those who know must be in an emergency graver, less reckless on the one hand, less panic-stricken on the other, than those who do not know.  We can never be entirely “at play.”  And if some of us should be for a time carried away by the current, and momentarily completely “at play,” it must be in a wave of reaction from the long grinding of endurance under the penal times.  Cardinal Newman’s reminiscences of the life and ways of “the Roman Catholics” in his youth showy the temper of mind against which our present excess of play is a reaction.

“A few adherents of the Old Religion, moving silently and sorrowfully about, as memorials of what had been.  ’The Roman Catholics’—­not a sect, not even an interest, as men conceived of it—­not a body, however small, representative of the Great Communion abroad, but a mere handful of individuals, who might be counted, like the pebbles and detritus of the great deluge, and who, forsooth, merely happened to retain a creed which, in its day indeed, was the profession of a Church.  Here a set of poor Irishmen, coining and going at harvest time, or a colony of them lodged in a miserable quarter of the vast metropolis.  There, perhaps, an elderly person, seen walking in the streets, grave and solitary, and strange, though noble in bearing, and said to be of good family, and ’a Roman Catholic.’  An old-fashioned house of gloomy appearance, closed in with high walls, with an iron gate, and yews, and the report attaching to it that ‘Roman Catholics’ lived there; but who they were, or what they did, or what was meant by calling them Roman Catholics, no one could tell, though it had an unpleasant sound, and told of form and superstition.  And then, perhaps, as we went to and fro, looking with a boy’s curious eyes through the great city, we might come to-day upon some Moravian chapel, or Quaker’s meeting-house, and to-morrow on a chapel of the ‘Roman Catholics’:  but nothing was to be gathered from it, except that there were lights burning there, and some boys in white, swinging censers:  and what it all meant could only be learned from books,