ell-grounded Catholic education, and the need for them will be felt
more and more. They are wanted to balance on the one hand the
unthinking impulse of living for the day, which asks no questions so
long as the "fun" holds out, and on the other to meet the urgency of
problems which press upon the minds of the more thoughtful as they
grow up. When this teaching has been long established as part of an
educational plan it has been found to give steadiness and unity to the
whole; something to aim at from the beginning, and in the later years
of a girl's education something which will serve as foundation for all
branches of future study, so that each will find its place among the
first principles, not isolated from the others but as part of a whole.
The value of these elements for the practical guidance of life is
likewise very great. A hold is given in the mind to the teaching of
religion and conduct which welds into one defence the best wisdom of
this world and of the next. For instance, the connexion between reason
and faith being once established, the fear of permanent disagreement
between the two, which causes so much panic and disturbance of mind,
is set at rest.

There is a certain risk at the outset of these studies that girls
will take the pose of philosophical students, and talk logic and
metaphysics, to the confusion of their friends and of their own
feelings later on, when they come to years of discretion and realize
the absurdity of these "lively sallies," as they would have been
called in early Victorian times--the name alone might serve as
a warning to the incautious! They may perhaps go through an
argumentative period and trample severely upon the opinions of those
who are not ready to have their majors "distinguished" and their
minors "conceded," and, especially, their conclusions denied. But
these phases will be outlived and the hot-and-cold remembrance of them
will be sufficient expiation, with the realization that they did not
know much when they had taken in the "beggarly elements" which dazzled
them for a moment. The more thoughtful minds will escape the painful
phase altogether.

There are three special classes among girls whose difficulties of mind
call for attention. There are those who frisk playfully along, taking
the good things of life as they come--"the more the better"--whom, as
children, it is hard to call to account. They are lightly impressed
and only for a moment by the things they feel,