at he was,
and try and be yourself like him.' This, as we saw lately, is what
Catholicism did. It had its one broad type of perfection, which in
countless thousands of instances was perpetually reproducing itself--a
type of character not especially belonging to any one profession; it was
a type to which priest and layman, knight or bishop, king or peasant,
might equally aspire: men of all sorts aspired to it, and men of all
sorts attained to it; and as fast as she had realised them (so to say),
the Church took them in her arms, and held them up before the world as
fresh and fresh examples of victory over the devil. This is what that
Church was able to do, and it is what we cannot do; and yet, till we can
learn to do it, no education which we can offer has any chance of
prospering. Perfection is not easy; it is of all things most difficult;
difficult to know and difficult to practise. Rules of life will not do;
even if our analysis of life in all its possible forms were as complete
as it is in fact rudimentary, they would still be inefficient. The
philosophy of the thing might be understood, but the practice would be
as far off as ever. In life, as in art, and as in mechanics, the only
profitable teaching is the teaching by example. Your mathematician, or
your man of science, may discourse excellently on the steam engine, yet
he cannot make one; he cannot make a bolt or a screw. The master workman
in the engine-room does not teach his apprentice the theory of
expansion, or of atmospheric pressure; he guides his hand upon the
turncock, he practises his eye upon the index, and he leaves the science
to follow when the practice has become mechanical. So it is with
everything which man learns to do; and yet for the art of arts, the
trade of trades, for _life_, we content ourselves with teaching our
children the catechism and the commandments; we preach them sermons on
the good of being good, and the evil of being evil; in our higher
education we advance to the theory of habit and the freedom of the will;
and then, when failure follows failure, _ipsa experientia reclamante_,
we hug ourselves with a complacent self-satisfied reflection that the
fault is not ours, that all which men could do we have done. The freedom
of the will!--as if a blacksmith would ever teach a boy to make a
horseshoe, by telling him he could make one if he chose.

In setting out on our journey through life, we are like strangers set to
find their way acr