can help the spiritual progress of the Church by meditating upon the
life of Blessed Mary and fashioning their lives upon her example. We are
all tremendously affected by example, and that is especially true of
young girls. Their supreme terror seems to be that they should be caught
doing or saying something different from what all other girls say or do
or wear. Their opinions are as imitative as their clothes. Hence the
need of the pressure of a strong Christian example, which would result
most readily in the union of Christian women in a single ideal. Our
present difficulty is that so many of our women who are devout members
of the Church in their private capacity, so far succumb to the
group-mind in their social relations that they are possessed by the same
terror as the young girl in the face of the possibility of being
different. Therefore are they careful to hide their real feeling for
religion and their devotion to spiritual things under the mask of
worldly conformity which evacuates their example of much of the power
that it might have. I am quite convinced that fear of the world is about
as strong an impulse toward evil as love of the world.

We need that women should clear their ideals and realise their public
responsibility for the presentation of them. We need terribly at this
moment insistence on the purity and simplicity of the Holy Mother of
God. One is stunned at the abandonment of the ideal of reserve and
modesty that the last few years have seen. Women seem to take it quite
gaily: men, one notes, take it much more seriously. I have been
consulted by more than one father during the past year as to the
possibility of sending a boy to a school where he would be kept out of
the society of half-naked girls. Have mothers no longer any sense of the
value of purity? Or have they simply abandoned all responsibility that
normally goes with being a mother? One recognises how helpless a man is
under the circumstances, that his intervention in such matters simply
casts him for the part of family tyrant; but why should a mother abandon
her duty simply because her daughter says: "You don't understand. Girls
are not as they were when you were young. All the girls do this. No
other mother takes the line that you do. You are not modern."

One knows, of course, that the whole matter of decline in manners and
morals is but a part of the world-wide revolt against the morality of
Jesus Christ that we are witnessing everyw