tells perhaps more widely
than the teaching. Faith tells of the presence of God and this underlies
the rest, while the sense of friendly protection, the love of Our Lady,
the angels, and saints, the love of the priest who administers all that
Catholic children most value, who blesses and absolves them in God's
name, all these carry them out of what is wretched and depressing in
their surroundings to a different world in which they give and receive
love and respect as children of God. No wonder their manners are gentler
and their intercourse more disposed to friendliness, there is something
to appeal to and uphold, something to love.

The Protestant Reformation breaking up these relations and all the
ceremonial observance in which they found expression, necessarily
produced deterioration of manners. As soon as anyone, especially a
child, becomes--not rightly but aggressively--independent, argumentatively
preoccupied in asserting that "I am as good as you are, and I can do
without you"--he falls from the right proportion of things, becomes less
instead of greater, because he stands alone, and from this to warfare
against all order and control the step is short. So it has proved. The
principles of Protestantism worked out to the principles of the
Revolution, and to their natural outcome, seen at its worst in the Reign
of Terror and the Commune of 1871 in Paris.

Again the influence of the Church on manners was dominant in the age of
chivalry. At that time religion and manners were known to be
inseparable, and it was the Church that handled the rough vigour of her
sons to make them gentle as knights. This is so well known that it needs
no more than calling to mind, and, turning attention to the fact that
all the handling was fundamental, it is handling that makes manners.
Even the derivation of the word does not let us forget this--_manners_
from _manieres_, from _manier_, from _main_, from _manus_, the touch of
the human hand upon the art of living worthily in human society, without
offence and without contention, with the gentleness of a race, the
_gens_, that owns a common origin, the urbanity of those who have
learned to dwell in a city "compact together," the respect of those who
have some one to look to for approval and control, either above them in
dignity, or beneath them in strength, and therefore to be considered
with due reverence.

The handling began early in days of chivalry, no time was lost, because
there