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artists turn fiercely for relief in new production; but both are dissatisfied. The mood in question is not to be dispelled by the modern wiseacre's prescription of a change from book to book-that milk for babies: it is a mood to find impediment and disgust in mere literal reality: it hates the never-ending physical dull plodding through the resisting mass of a printed page that it knows can only end in shadows and surmises. Books are small indeed when measured starkly with a lonely human soul, and their help in moments of human anguish is seldom other than remote or accidental. The best of them cannot sustain consistently the demands of everyday human intercourse. The confession that our greatest books are weak and imperfect is oftenest a confession of love, but it is none the less a confession of real failure, and must be made by every reader not too dull to risk an aspiration.

The confession of failure in reading is a story as old as history. Plato, in the myth of the Phaedrus from which we have already quoted, would have us believe that the failure was foretold at the very invention of books:

"Theuth began, 'this invention, O King, will make the Egyptians wiser and better able to remember, it being a medicine I have discovered both for memory and wisdom.' The King replied: 'Most ingenious Theuth, one man is capable of giving birth to an art, another of estimating the amount of good or harm it will do in to those who use it. Now you, as the father of letters, have ascribed to them, in your fondness, exactly the reverse of their real effects. For this invention of yours will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who use it, by causing them to neglect their memory, inasmuch as from their confidence in writing they will recollect by the aid of foreign symbols, and not by the natural use of their own faculties. Your discovery, therefore, is a medicine not for memory, but for recollection; for recalling, not

for keeping in mind. And you are providing for your disciples a show of wisdom without the reality. For acquiring by your means much knowledge, while in fact they will, for the most part, know nothing at all; and moreover will be disagreeable persons to deal with, as having become wise in their own conceit."

The same confession is made for every generation of readers, in one form or another, by men who like Plato, think nobly of the soul. Petrarch, at the very summit of the vaunting Renaiscence, confesses that "Books have brought some men to knowledge, and some to madness." The long quotation from Plato would lose much of its pertinence for us if we were ignorant of its date. When Socrates, continuing the dialogue with Phaedrus, applies the lesson to "you moderns," it is difficult to remember that he is not speaking to the graduates of twentieth century normal schools and reading circles, but to the pupils of the Athenian Sophists, four hundred years before the Christian era.

With all their limitations books are full of marvelous possibilities. Under God's providence they help to shape at once the vast epochal changes of the world, and the most intimate hidden moments of personality. For wisdom and virtue, for solace and enjoyment, they are indeed a medicine, in spite of Plato's fabling. And yet, of themselves, they are nothing-as Plato wished to warn us. One human mind lends them a meaning, and another human mind must color and enlarge that meaning into life. That which a man's own habit of life and thinking dispose him to look for in a book, that he will almost certainly find-if not by attraction or imitation, then by mere repulsion. Not our books, then, but "our acts, our angels are, or good or ill" and "these fatal shadows" which walk by us even in our reading determine for us what we shall take from our books. Insistent deference

to books as books is hence an insult to the human will. It is a denying of personal responsibility. Man cannot afford to look directly at books for themselves, but only as Thoreau said he looked at nature, "with the side of his eye." Or, rather, man must look boldly through and beyond books to the religion and humanity which they serve. He must come to his books full charged with high personal convictions, with assured hope, with sweetness. and light within him, with heroic passion and beauty and joyousness in his own life-or he will find none of these things in his reading. Or, at least, he must come with the humble desire of these things, that he may even see their brightness from afar. And so, in any case, his study must be first and chiefly in the book of charity-"for that teaches everything."

The most immoderately worded praise of books probably falls far short of bringing any reader to a fitting appreciation of the best that has been written. No praise that inspired readers with a noble, happy purpose could be immediate. It is well to assure the world again and again, even the book-ridden world of today, that good reading is worth while. But it is never well to throw the praise of books into terms of life, and to depreciate life in order that books may be more highly valued. Life, to be respected, must be free to rise above its accidents. And pessimism, the lack of respect for life, is already a crying evil of our age. An age of pessimism may praise books, but it cannot value or use them; for books as the interpreters of life, can be for such an age no more than mirrors of nothing.

South Boston, Mass.

JAMES A. HARTIGAN.

DE LA SALLE, FRANCKE'S PROTOTYPE

In the leading article of the REVIEW for March, the Reverend William Turner, S. T. D., while making an opportune and forcible plea for a more thorough exploitation of the original sources of educational history,1 adduces many reasons why we should have a history of education from the pen of a Catholic. Existing treatises on the history of education are shown by Dr. Turner to be inadequate, deficient, and, in some instances, false. The exceptions taken by the reviewer to Painter's History of Education are particularly to the purpose. In that volume of the International Education Series, there is another lacuna which should not be permitted to go unnoticed; it is the omission of all reference to St. John Baptist De La Salle. This hiatus in "A History of Education" is all the more amazing, as Mr. Painter lavishes unstinted commendation on A. H. Francke for a line of endeavor which had been originated, and even more completely followed, by St. De La Salle.

In the account Painter gives of Francke, we read: "In 1691 the University of Halle was founded, and the following year, through the influence of Spener, Francke was appointed Professor of Greek and Oriental Languages, and at the same time pastor of a suburban church. Here in Halle he accomplished a great work, which stands in educational history almost without a parallel. The beginning was very humble. The poor were accustomed to assemble on Thursday before the parsonage to receive alms. The thought occurred to Francke that the occasion might be improved for religious instruction. He invited the crowd of old and young into his house, and along with bread administered spiritual food. He learned

1 "Sources of the History of Education," by William Turner, The Catholic Educational Review, March, 1911, pp. 199-211.

the condtions of the poorer classes, and his heart was touched by their ignorance and need. He deprived himself of comforts to administer to their necessities."'2

In connection with this excerpt from Painter's History of Education, published in 1886, consider the extract below, taken from Canon Blain's Life of St. John Baptist De La Salle, first published at Rouen in 1733.

"1684 was a year of famine in and around the city of Rheims. The starving poor from the country round about flocked into the capital of the province and, together with the indigent of the town, made of Rheims a veritable hospital. That year, so direful, was a year of heroic virtue and of extraordinary merit for John Baptist De La Salle; for it furnished him the occasion of practising the greatest of the corporal and of the spiritual works of mercy. He gave away a large patrimony and deprived himself even of the means of livelihood for the relief of those in distress. It was hard to say which was more pleasing to him; to become poor, or to be rich so that he might assist the poor.

**

He did not, however, distribute his wealth at hazard. The charitable priest, seeing assembled under his eyes so many destitute persons, studied their characters in order to give them suitable advice. By pious remonstrances, prudent corrections and heartfelt sympathy, he strove, while relieving their bodily wants, to heal their souls of the maladies to which they were a prey. A distribution of alms took place at his house every morning. Become poor in assisting the poor, he himself had later to go from door to door to beg the necessaries of life.""

Francke took up his residence in Halle in 1692. It was accordingly after that date that he dispensed bread and

2 "A History of Education," by F. V. N. Painter, pp. 258-9, reprint of 1904.

La Vie du Bienheureux Serviteur de Dieu, Jean-Baptiste De La Salle, Instituteur des Frères des Ecoles Chrétiennes, par M. l'Abbé Jean-Baptiste Blain, Pubilée en 1733, Rééditée à Paris en 1889, pp.

146-7.

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