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, from Protestant histories and sermons; but they d