^ 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 
 ] 
 
 SAN DIEGO
 
 The Choosing of the Apostles
 
 YOUR NEIGHBOR 
 
 ^ 
 
 AND YOU 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. EDWARD F. GARESCHE, S.J. 
 
 " If then you fulfil the royal law, according 
 to the Scriptures, Thou shall love'thy neighbor 
 as thusclf; you do well." St. James, II.. 8. 
 
 THE QUEEN'S WORK PRESS 
 
 ST. LoT7is, Mo. 
 
 SECOND EDITION
 
 Smprimt pot(0i. 
 
 ALEXANDER J. BURROWES, SJ. 
 
 Vice Proolnclolii Praeft. Proo. Missourianoe. 
 
 Niljtt 0J0tat. 
 
 REMIGIUS LAFORT, S.T.D., 
 
 Censor. 
 
 3fraprimattur. 
 
 JOANNES CARDINALIS FARLEY, 
 
 A rcbiepiscopus Neo-Eboracemii. 
 
 NKO-EBORACI, 
 die 9 Decembris, 1912
 
 TO 
 MY FATHER AND MOTHER
 
 PREFACE 
 
 These ailicles have for the most part ap- 
 peared in the pages of the Messenger of the 
 Sacred Heart. Some have been published in 
 America, The Sacred Heart Review, The 
 Magnificat, Extension, Men and Women, and 
 the Rosary. Though written at different times, 
 they group themselves and by design 
 around one central theme, for they deal with 
 those two greatest of all realities after God 
 Himself, to wit: your neighbor and you. 
 
 Their appeal is meant to be a wide one, 
 indeed, the thoughts they dwell on are for all 
 earnest and sincere Catholic men and women. 
 Desires often come to all of us to rise to 
 nobler and better ways of living, to make more 
 of our lives both for our neighbor and our- 
 selves. But when, and where, and how to 
 begin our efforts often seems difficult and 
 obscure. For Religious, there are many 
 manuals of holy living, for the layman there 
 are comparatively few; fewer still deal with 
 life as it is lived at our present time. These 
 papers are only a partial and feeble effort to 
 supply this want and to suggest to Catholics 
 some at least of the everyday and easy ways
 
 in which they may aid both themselves and 
 their fellow-men. 
 
 Certain questions and issues otherwise very 
 timely and important such as political activ- 
 ity, the wide fields of social work, and all the 
 rest are only hinted at in passing. In a 
 larger and more pretentious book they would 
 be indispensable, but their absence will readily 
 be pardoned here. 
 
 Finally, if something has been sacrificed to 
 emphasis, to interest, and clearness ; if there 
 is a dwelling on the obvious with many repeti- 
 tions, and a touch of old-fashioned familiarity 
 towards the gentle Reader, all these things 
 will be condoned, we trust, in view of the 
 humble and practical purpose of this little 
 book. It was written (a labor of love) in the 
 between-whiles of busy days; and it is meant 
 to be read in like manner, little by little, in 
 quiet moments, or in your weary or your 
 leisure hours.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 THE APOSTLESHIP OF SPEECH 1 
 
 THE APOSTLESHIP OF CONSISTENCY 12 
 
 "Nor RIGGED TO DO IT" 21 
 
 OUR TALK AT HOME 30 
 
 THE COMMON CATHOLIC 42 
 
 THE APOSTLESHIP OF ENCOURAGEMENT .... 56 
 
 THE POWER OF PRAISE 71 
 
 OUR TALK IN BUSINESS 87 
 
 WEARING A CATHOLIC FACE 97 
 
 FOOLS' GOLD 109 
 
 X 
 
 THE ETHICS OF SATURDAY NIGHT 121 
 
 THE POOR OUR CREDITORS 128 
 
 OUR HOLIER SELVES 135 
 
 THE BURNING QUESTION 142 
 
 LAYMEN'S RETREATS 147 
 
 A COMMONPLACE WONDER 161 
 
 ONE ASPECT OF OUR PUBLIC LIBRARIES .... 165 
 A SUMMER OPPORTUNITY . .... 175
 
 THE APOSTLESHIP OF SPEECH 
 
 WE say a great deal now-a-days, and 
 very rightly, too, about the Apostle- 
 ship of the Press, but what of the 
 Apostleship of Speech? For the Press, 
 mighty and far-reaching as it is, has, we all 
 know, its own peculiar limitations and needs 
 a complement. Many of us can not write, 
 many lack the time or inclination, and even 
 when it is duly sent forth, the printed page 
 is never quite sure of its audience. This 
 man will not read except for amusement, 
 the other distrusts whatever savors of the 
 supernatural, a third is steeled beforehand 
 against anything which hints of Catholicity, 
 or the Church. 
 
 But the kindly, spontaneous speech of man 
 to man is easy and common to us all. It 
 murmurs everywhere, on the car, on the 
 street, in offices and homes, kindling its own 
 interest, winning attention, appealing to 
 everyone, in spite of his prejudices and his 
 inclinations. It opens an easy way for that 
 genial interchange of personal opinion, of 
 question and answer, of objection and reply, 
 which clears and recommends as nothing 
 1
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 else can, one's true beliefs, and principles 
 and points of view. 
 
 Of course, no one now-a-days would 
 praise mere controversy, or polemics. Heaven 
 forbid ! That odious and ugly wrangling 
 over sacred truths, which only adds stub- 
 bornness to each man's conviction, is happily 
 out of mode. But we are in danger of going 
 to the other extreme and following the 
 indifferentism of the age so far that we 
 carefully avoid every mention of sacred 
 things. 
 
 This cruel kindness and complaisance we 
 are guilty of sometimes even to our dearest 
 and nearest friends. Cruel one must call it, 
 because we are keeping from them, by our 
 silence, the very truths and principles which 
 we hold as our dearest and most precious 
 possession in this world. If a readiness to 
 share one's money and influence and oppor- 
 tunities is looked for between friends, how 
 much more should there be a frank and 
 willing communication of those eternal truths 
 which enrich and ennoble a man's immortal 
 soul. Yet, if we treated one another in 
 matters of dollars and cents as we do in 
 issues of the soul's salvation, some of us 
 would have few friends left in the world. 
 2
 
 The Apostleship of Speech 
 
 Once, in the murmur and clatter of a 
 crowded street-car, an angry voice rose over 
 the hum of city noises: "You knew the firm 
 was going under," it shouted in ungovernable 
 fury, "and let me go ahead with the deal." 
 A moment's pause followed, in which one 
 might imagine a murmured reply. "You 
 knew I was in for losing, and you were on 
 the right side, and you didn't say a word!" 
 cried the voice again. "You cur! That may 
 be your idea of friendship, but it isn't mine ; 
 don't talk to me again!" 
 
 The angry man was right. That was no 
 true friend who let him stake his money on 
 a rotten venture and never said a word. 
 Heaven grant that our own friends may not 
 have cause to hurl a like reproach at us on 
 the Judgment Day! 
 
 I remember still the regretful pathos with 
 which a dear old gentleman, who in the 
 thoughtlessness of youth had entered into 
 associations which kept him from his religious 
 duties, told me of the strange silence which 
 everyone kept towards him on that one 
 subject of which he had most need to hear. 
 "There was So-and-so," said he, "a good 
 Catholic, and a firm friend of mine, but he 
 never said the word. And there was Father 
 3
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 N ; many a time I laughed and chatted 
 
 with him, but he never said the word. And 
 
 there's X, and Y, and Z Ah!" the old 
 
 man would finish, "and now that I'm back in 
 the Church of God, it seems to me I've lost 
 the most of my life!" All for want of the 
 word! 
 
 No man of us all can plead a lack of such 
 occasions. Many a Catholic, now-a-days, is 
 almost solitary in a circle of unbelieving 
 associates. Is silence friendly then? The 
 man who drops into a seat beside you and 
 wishes you a cheery good-morning, may be 
 as starved and stinted of all knowledge of 
 things divine as a tribesman of the Moros. 
 More than possibly, as things stand now in 
 the United States, he has never said a childish 
 prayer by his mother's knee; never learned 
 to reverence the Sacred Name; never heard, 
 at home or at school, the saving truths of 
 Christ; never once been brought face to face 
 with the stupendous truths that there is an 
 Infinite God, and that man has an immortal 
 soul ! It is not malice with him, this dense- 
 ness to sacred truth; it is ignorance, it is 
 preoccupation. 
 
 This is a distracted age; we live fast, we 
 notice only what is thrust upon us. All that 
 4
 
 The Apostleship of Speech 
 
 he has heard of God's Holy Name may have 
 been (dreadful thought) when it was used 
 in blasphemy, or as the nice ornament of 
 some well-turned phrase; or at the best, as 
 a vague symbol of nature or human-kind, 
 lacking personality and dim of definition. 
 Ask the missionary, or. him who has care of 
 the instruction of converts, whether this 
 picture be too darkly drawn. Religion to 
 this man may be only the queer fancy some 
 men have to while away a Sunday morning. 
 That God is a person, even as himself ; that 
 the soul has ages of endless life before it; 
 that the world is only a trying-out place for 
 the brightest or darkest hereafter; that there 
 is a hell, the blaze of the anger of God, and 
 a Heaven, the smile of His tenderness; that 
 every man and woman is sacred, is of God's 
 own kindred ; that what seems blind chance 
 is only a bit, ill-seen, of the vast schemes of 
 Infinite Prevision what does he know, what 
 has he ever dreamed of all these things? 
 
 But you are his friend. He will listen to 
 you, if you are ready for a kindly explana- 
 tion. He is interested, after all, in most 
 things human, in your affairs particularly. 
 What a revelation to his ignorance, and what 
 a stimulus from his dangerous preoccupa- 
 5
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 tion with merely earthly and temporal things, 
 if you were sometimes to take occasion from 
 current themes to explain those lovely and 
 satisfying doctrines of the Church, which 
 please and thrill by their beauty and saneness 
 even where faith does not enter in and beget 
 acceptance of their truth! 
 
 If it were golf you were interested in, or 
 stocks, or futures, or horses, or a new brand 
 of goods, or a coming marriage, it would go 
 hard, but he would have to listen all the way 
 down town, and that right cheerfully. Well, 
 try him sometimes, with kindly tact, and 
 opportunely, on some Catholic theme. 
 
 I say opportunely, but fit occasions arc 
 legion now-a-days. With almost every ques- 
 tion of the day there is bound up some point 
 of Catholic principle or belief. The labor 
 questions of the times call up, with their 
 multifarious perplexities, those sanest show- 
 ings-forth of the mind of Christendom, the 
 masterly Encyclicals of Leo XIII. In this 
 connection one will naturally think of the 
 vast influence for good of the Papacy on the 
 world; of the true nature of that spiritual 
 leadership, by which Christ made Peter and 
 his successors not sinless indeed but infallible, 
 when they teach us in His name. Thence 
 6
 
 The Apostleship of Speech 
 
 opens wide the whole question of the 
 Apostolic Succession, then one may speak of 
 the Roman Curia, and all the admirable 
 government of the Church, so much misrep- 
 resented because so little understood. One 
 may fall to explaining, also, the history of 
 the Papacy; why, for instance, some great 
 ecclesiastics may have been great rascals, 
 without their unprincipled lives reflecting 
 either on the doctrine or discipline of the 
 eternal Church. 
 
 Or it may be that the sad state of unhappy 
 France comes up for discussion, and one is 
 naturally moved to explain the true relation 
 of the Church and State; or the reasons and 
 policy of the Church's prohibition of Secret 
 Societies not always for what they are, but 
 sometimes also for what they may come to 
 be; or the Parochial School question, and 
 why the Church so stoutly demands Catholic 
 teaching for Catholic children. 
 
 Again, the questions which turn upon 
 Marriage and Divorce are forever bobbing 
 up in our speech now-a-days. The uncom- 
 promising stand of the Church on such 
 matters, her watchful guarding of the 
 sanctity of marriage, and her reasons for it, 
 how natural to dwell on these!
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 Or Socialism how many topics does it 
 not suggest? The reason for the necessary 
 and unrelenting hostility of the Church, 
 which stands for piety and justice, against a 
 creed which in the concrete is both irreligious 
 and unjust; and so on, to subjects without 
 number. 
 
 "But how in the name of goodness," 1 
 seem to hear some one cry out sadly, "is one 
 to be ready to give good explanations on such 
 subjects as these?" 
 
 A proper question, and one which calls for 
 a whole treatise by itself. But one can 
 condense after the manner of the testy 
 gentleman who cried out in answer to a 
 similar inquiry: "God bless you, sir! Why 
 not go and read ?" 
 
 Naturally, to be a proper Catholic, one 
 must glance now and then over Catholic 
 papers and have some acquaintance with 
 Catholic magazines and books. But "why 
 not," to be sure? If the followers of 
 Christian Science and its airy inconsistencies 
 can toil to be letter-perfect in "Mother 
 Eddy's" clueless mystifications, so as to have 
 at least a quotation ready for every need ; 
 and if the Spencerian agnostic can bear to 
 trace out his leader's maunderings to the 
 8
 
 Christ Instructing the People
 
 The Apostleship of Speech 
 
 dusty end, surely we Catholics can all endure 
 to become prompt and ready with the warm 
 and human, yet Divine and Heavenly, truths 
 and principles of Christ. 
 
 Wrong-headed folk, with flimsy theories, 
 have often a dreadful gift of voluble exposi- 
 tion, which puts us children of the light to 
 shame. In season and out of season they 
 din away at their pet theory, until by mere 
 repetition they wear it a place in men's 
 thoughts, or even a standing in their esteem. 
 We must not imitate their fanatical excesses 
 indeed there is little danger as things go 
 with us now; but the temper of the times is 
 such that even the truth cannot dispense 
 with some of this emphasis of repetition and 
 ready reply. The age is crowded with 
 clamoring teachers ; if even truth is silent it 
 will be unregarded as well. On the other 
 hand, by kindly explanation, timely comment 
 and friendly expostulation and reply, one's 
 beliefs and views are sure to gain a hearing, 
 and a hearing is all that Catholic Truth need 
 ask. 
 
 In fine, look on this picture, and on this. 
 Our friend Dick has a fearfully keen nose 
 for controversy. His type, I own, is some- 
 what rare in these days. Give him but a 
 9
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 little opening and he will argue away for 
 hours, with the slightest encouragement, nay, 
 in spite of the most evident distaste and 
 disgust on the part of his unwilling victim. 
 Dick means well, to be sure (his selfishness 
 is half unconscious) ; he knows a great deal, 
 his speech is fluent and sincere ; he only lacks 
 the heavenly gift of tact and opportuneness, 
 but lacking this, his acrid fluency has made 
 many a helpless fellow sore on religion and 
 savage against pious talk for all after days. 
 
 Tom, on the other hand, and his name is 
 many, runs quite to the other extreme. He 
 is the discreetest fellow in the world, and 
 sheers off from questions of belief and 
 principles like a timid hare at the hunter's 
 halloo! He seldom breathes a word that 
 can benefit anyone, his talk is all remote 
 from religious issues, and most of his friends 
 scarcely know whether he is a Catholic or a 
 fellow of Huxley, or of the German vision- 
 aries. He breaks a commandment. His 
 light never shines at all ! 
 
 Harry, on the other hand God bless him ! 
 holds the difficult mean. When he speaks 
 of religious matters he does it in as easy, 
 interested a way as when he talks politics or 
 business. His mind runs naturally on the 
 10
 
 The Apostleship of Speech 
 
 theme, and his interest carries you with him. 
 He knows, and he thinks on what he knows, 
 and remembers it readily and in opportune 
 connections. There is neither false shame, 
 nor harsh self-assertiveness in his tone. You 
 see earnest-faced men listening to his quiet 
 explanations with a sort of steady wonder; 
 and when he pauses you notice that they sink 
 back and murmur: "By Jove! that sounds 
 sensible. I never could understand just what 
 you Catholics thought on that point bef jre." 
 Ah, if there were only more Harrys now 
 amongst us! 
 
 11
 
 THE APOSTLESHIP OF CONSISTENCY 
 
 HERE is the sincere and thoughtful 
 Catholic who has not strongly 
 wished at times that he could make some 
 converts to the one true Faith? All of us 
 know so deeply, from our every-day experi- 
 ence, the sweetness and the strength, the 
 beauty, tenderness and power of our holy 
 religion, and the cheer and guidance which it 
 gives us on our way towards Heaven, that we 
 should be dull clods indeed not to desire to 
 share these amazing and neglected treasures 
 with our fellow-men. 
 
 It is true, of course, that a sincere and God- 
 fearing non-Catholic may hope to save his 
 soul. True, also, that there is many such a 
 one who puts half-hearted Catholics utterly 
 to shame by the earnestness, uprightness and 
 goodness of his life. But if such men walk 
 so well in the twilight, how gloriously, we 
 think, they would run onward in the noonday 
 splendor! If they fight so valiantly, nour- 
 ished with the crumbs that have fallen from 
 the children's table, what heroes they would 
 become if they were fed on the strong Bread 
 of Angels, and given to drink of the sweet 
 12
 
 The Apostleship of Consistency 
 
 waters of God's full and satisfying Truth? 
 The fervor and earnestness we have remarked 
 in so many converts confirms this view and 
 urges us the more to the work of conversion. 
 How ardently they leap forward in the ways 
 of sanctity, when first they feel the mighty 
 aid of the Sacraments and of Holy Mass! 
 How eagerly they receive the rich teachings 
 of Catholic tradition and embrace the 
 thousand helps and stays which God's 
 Church alone can give ! 
 
 He would be an ungenerous and selfish 
 man or, at least, a very thoughtless one 
 who had never wished to make a convert to 
 Catholic truth. But when it comes to choos- 
 ing out the means, the average Catholic man 
 or woman may well be perplexed to know 
 just how the good work is to be begun. 
 
 "Arguing is no use," they say; "it only 
 makes people stubborn and angry. To ex- 
 plain the truths of Faith is all very well, but 
 how am I to get people to listen and how 
 am I to answer the awkward questions they 
 will be sure to ask? I cannot write books 
 nor give lectures, nor preach sermons; it 
 isn't my business, and, besides, I haven't the 
 talent nor the time. So what in the world 
 am I to do?" 
 
 13
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 This may be all very natural and true, and 
 if these were indeed the only ways of making 
 converts to the Faith, many Catholics might 
 be pardoned for shrinking from the task. 
 Happily, these are not the only ways. There 
 is an argument stronger with most men than 
 any logic a way of preaching open to every 
 one, and to which no living soul can choose 
 but listen, the argument of steadfast good 
 example, of a consistent living-up to our 
 Catholic principles and our Catholic beliefs. 
 
 We walk about in this world very 
 obscurely, it may be. We do not seem 
 prominent persons in the scheme of things ; 
 nor apt to draw men's eyes to look at us. 
 Yet every day of our lives, almost at every 
 hour of our days, at home and in the street, 
 in the busy hours or when we are taking our 
 ease and our pleasure, careless and free and 
 unconscious of the world's remark, we are 
 being watched, studied, thought ef, imitated 
 it may be, by the restless, eager spirits of our 
 fellow-men. What is a man so interested in 
 as in his neighbor? What does he talk of 
 more often; what does he speculate upon so 
 eagerly; by what is he so deeply moved, as 
 by the sayings and doings, the character and 
 principles of other men? 
 14
 
 The Apostleship of Consistency 
 
 Blind and deluded though men often are 
 as to their own proper vices and virtues, they 
 have a wonderful shrewdness in searching 
 out and summing up the genuine character 
 of another. It is no use, in the matter of 
 religious principle especially, to try and play 
 the saint and be the sinner. Nothing but 
 sincere and practical fidelity, the pure gold 
 of honesty, seven times tried, will wear well 
 and shine well for long against the rough 
 usage and trying ways of this hurly-burly 
 world ! 
 
 These are truisms, as we all know; but 
 apply them to yourself, to the individual 
 Catholic, moving about in the highways of 
 life and dealing with your fellows. Though 
 they know that you are "a Catholic," many 
 of them realize only vaguely what the name 
 implies. But if they recognize in you a man 
 apart from and distinguished above his 
 fellow-men by reason of his honesty, industry, 
 kindness to his neighbors, by his truth, honor 
 and good faith, they will grow a bit curious 
 to learn more of what Catholics think, and 
 strive for, and believe. Your courage, your 
 consistency and modest faithfulness to your 
 principles will make you stand out in noble 
 relief, against the general carelessness and 
 15
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 self-indulgence of the times. They will con- 
 ceive~a huge respect for the Faith which can 
 so lift a man above the common lust and 
 avarice of the world; they will inquire into 
 the Church's teachings, open their hearts to 
 her appeal, and God's grace will have an 
 entrance to win them over to the truth. 
 
 And you, sincere, simple and consistent to 
 your Catholic principles, without any noise 
 of argument, or any array of lectures or of 
 books, you will truly have converted them, 
 you will have convinced and persuaded them 
 by the most convincing, most persuasive of 
 all arguments, by the solid and practical proof 
 of a life consistent with your holy faith. 
 
 There is another body of non-Catholics 
 who do know very well what a Catholic is 
 supposed to profess and practise and believe. 
 They are in need, not of information, but of 
 conviction. They see the beauty of the Faith, 
 but are not yet quite sure of its truth, and 
 so they waver in that dim borderland which 
 lies between "I doubt" and "1 believe." Your 
 actions, far, far more than your words, have 
 a keen, almost an agonizing interest for such 
 men as these. From the actions of Catholics 
 they seek to judge, alas! of the truth or false- 
 hood of the Catholic Faith. They do not 
 16
 
 The Apostleship of Consistency 
 
 stop to argue that a man may be convinced, 
 but inconsistent, professing high ideals, and 
 practising unworthy ones. They merely say 
 to themselves : 
 
 "There is So-and-so. He is a Catholic. 
 See how he acts ! In business he is no better 
 than the rest of us. In his family circle he 
 is no angel; in his recreations he is no saint. 
 Yet he is a Catholic. These Catholics do not 
 practise what they preach. No Catholicity 
 for me!" 
 
 Who has balked his conversion, and helped 
 the powers of darkness to keep him from the 
 light? Sad to say, one of the hardest to 
 answer of all arguments against the Faith, is 
 the evil behavior of men who profess to 
 believe. 
 
 Or, again, more happily, we may hear some 
 non-Catholic remark : "There is So-and-so 
 a clean, upright, noble fellow if there ever 
 was one. He seems to have some secret 
 which the rest of us lack. He uses the world 
 as if he used it not. Industrious, brisk, busi- 
 nesslike, capable yes! But he seems all the 
 while to have his heart set on something 
 above and beyond. He believes in a here- 
 after, and lives for it. His family is holy. 
 His home is a sanctuary bright, clean, 
 17
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 cheery, loving with an atmosphere of peace 
 and joy which are not quite of this world. 
 He is a knight that's what he is a Bayard, 
 without base fear and without reproach. I'd 
 like to know his secret, and I believe it is his 
 Faith ! If it is, then the Catholic religion is 
 the religion for me !" Who has been the chief 
 instrument under God to bring this waver- 
 ing soul into the light of His Father's house? 
 
 Not many weeks ago, at Sunday Mass in 
 one of our great cities, a poor serving-maid 
 was going to Communion. Her faith was 
 pure and deep, and the reverence and love 
 of her soul were strikingly expressed in every 
 look and gesture. How little she dreamed 
 of preaching or giving edification ! But one 
 who was not a Catholic, who was hesitating 
 at the very threshold of the Faith, had come 
 to the church that morning, and was quietly 
 watching the faithful as they walked up to 
 the Holy Table. 
 
 "How wonderful the fervor and recollec- 
 tion of that poor girl was!" said she after- 
 ward. "One can see how truly she believes 
 that Christ is present in the Sacrament." 
 
 So it is with us all. Will we, nill we, our 
 daily actions blaze out a message and token 
 to the watchful eyes of men. 
 18
 
 The Apostleship of Consistency 
 
 "If we but knew when we were under 
 observation we would be doubly careful and 
 consistent then!" Well, we are under obser- 
 vation always and everywhere, in the eyes of 
 a critical and watchful age. In the old days 
 the Church had need of martyrs, which means 
 "witnesses" to give bloody evidence of her 
 truth to a cold and unbelieving world. She 
 has need of martyrs still, not bloody martyrs 
 now, but martyrs to duty, to sincerity, to 
 faith, to the consistent practice of the Chris- 
 tian creed. Who will credit that we believe 
 in the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, believe 
 that this life-giving Bread is Christ Himself, 
 fearfully humiliated for our love, if we avoid 
 the Tabernacle where He dwells until we are 
 driven thither on Sunday morning by the 
 threat of mortal sin? Who will credit us 
 with a faith in the last great judgment if we 
 do not act as though we looked forward to 
 being one day brought to judgment? 
 
 Ah, if we took all this to heart, and acted 
 out in every word and deed the faith that is 
 in us, what noble and effective apostles we 
 should be to bring our friends and fellows 
 into the fold of Christ ! Writing is an excel- 
 lent means to make conversions; kind and 
 tactful conversation is a powerful aid ; so is 
 19
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 prayer ; so is timely comment and explanation. 
 But how the good work done towards con- 
 verting the world would double and treble 
 and go on doubling and trebling by leaps and 
 bounds if only the great body of Catholic 
 men and women would bestir themselves to 
 spread the truth abroad, and shine it, so to 
 speak, in their neighbors' eyes by the strong, 
 direct, appealing, irresistible means of living 
 up steadfastly to the Faith which is in them 
 by the exercise of the great Apostleship 
 of Consistency! 
 
 20
 
 "NOT RIGGED TO DO IT" 
 
 I ONCE knew an amiable old gentleman, 
 not so very old either, but in that 
 mellow way of life where one's little ways 
 are set forevermore, who had a gift for 
 many useful things. He could make you 
 anything you liked in wood, and make it 
 beautifully, with a trim, old-fashioned com- 
 pleteness few modern carvers or joiners can 
 attain. He could make relishes, old-world 
 relishes, full of piquant savors that made 
 simple fare a feast for kings. He could 
 mend precious broken things, old china, err 
 trinkets, that you mourned over, so that their 
 last state was prettier than the first. Tn a 
 word, there was no end to the neat and useful 
 things this much-accomplished man could do. 
 "What a convenient person to have about 
 one," you will straightway think to yourself. 
 So, to be sure, he was. Yet the full comfort 
 and usefulness of his varied talents was 
 hindered a bit by just a single oddity he had. 
 Whenever you approached him, as people 
 often did, to ask the exercise of some one 
 of his varied talents, he would give you a 
 rueful glance, and screwing up his forehead 
 21
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 in regret, would answer mournfully: "I'd 
 gladly fix it for you, so gladly, but, do you 
 know, I am not rigged to do it." That was 
 the haunting shadow that stalked his path. 
 He was never rigged ! 
 
 Let us hasten to add it was not laziness in 
 him, not in the least. Nor was it a cheap 
 excuse, nor any unwillingness to oblige and 
 serve you that made him say it. He was the 
 most serviceable of men, and as full of kind- 
 ness as summer is of sunshine. It was a real 
 and obstinate difficulty he always saw, crouch- 
 ing like a lion in his way. He was not rigged 
 to do it! Perhaps it was a tool which he 
 must absolutely have to polish off his work, 
 and which, he knew for certain, was nowhere 
 in the county. Perhaps it was some delicate 
 ingredient, if you spoke of relishes, without 
 which his best recipe was a mere mess and 
 silly failure, and which didn't grow, he was 
 sure, anywhere this side of salt water. Per- 
 haps oh, there were any number of per- 
 hapses, but the gist of them all was this: he 
 simply wasn't rigged to do it ! 
 
 Of course, with his kind heart, it was not 
 
 so hard to get him over this mountainous 
 
 objection. And when he had once set his 
 
 mind to do the thing you asked, rigged or 
 
 22
 
 "Not Rigged To Do It" 
 
 not rigged, his ingenuity was a match for 
 anything. He could use tools out of all 
 measure of their common purpose, and make 
 a penknife do for any tool. He could torture 
 allspice and onions till they breathed of 
 tarragon, and make a homely kitchen garden 
 yield all the savors of Gascony and Spain. 
 But despite these various resources of his 
 native genius, that thought forever haunted 
 him like an obsession and held his hand from 
 any trial of skill ; that sad refrain was ever 
 in his ears, "I am not rigged to do it!" 
 
 How I should like, if morals were not so 
 tedious, to cut a sheaf of serviceable com- 
 parisons from the amiable eccentricity of that 
 good man I knew ! You and I, my dear and 
 patient reader, have given the same excuse, 
 many a time, to save the doing of some golden 
 deed. Do you remember, when the good 
 thought came to you of what? some deed 
 of mercy and kindness, not easy, perhaps, to 
 do, but rich in promise of results. It came 
 like an inspiration. Who knows? Perhaps 
 it was truly a message from the Father of 
 lights, bidding you help your brother. You 
 were moved to do it generously, you planned 
 the ways and means. Then came chill Calcu- 
 lation, with its selfish breath and blew cold 
 23
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 on your generous fervor. You said, in effect 
 at least: "I am not rigged to do it. If I had 
 more time, if I had more talents, if I were in 
 a position to do the thing as it should be 
 done, if I were the proper person, if circum- 
 stances were other than they are, if this, if 
 that ah, then, then I would do it gladly, 
 nobly, effectively. But now, alas, I am not 
 rigged !" So the inspiration faded, the little 
 voice within you faltered and was still, the 
 opportunity escaped you. That credit stands 
 forever blank for you on the great ledgers 
 of the. Chancery of Heaven. 
 
 Or again, it was some work of zeal that 
 called upon us. Perhaps we were asked to 
 bear our share in aiding some noble charity. 
 Perhaps it was our personal effort that was 
 wanted to help a good cause on. How many 
 chances for unselfish effort have come to our 
 doors and knocked, perhaps tapped only 
 timidly, perhaps rapped long and loud ! And 
 we, opening a little chink lest they should 
 rush in upon us unawares and spoil our calm 
 seclusion, we have answered through the 
 cranny: "Pray excuse me; I am not rigged. 
 To tell the truth, I cannot see my way to aid 
 you. Another time, maybe, when this and 
 that and the other are off my hands. But 
 24
 
 "Not Rigged To Do It" 
 
 now, I really haven't got the time, the money. 
 I am not rigged to do it! I pray you, go 
 away; importunate or timid pleader, hold me 
 excused." 
 
 And the good deed went on to a neigh- 
 bor's door, far, far less rigged, perhaps, than 
 we, and it was welcomed and entered in and 
 blessed the dwelling. But our opportunity is 
 passed away. 
 
 Did you smile, dear reader, when you 
 thought of the queer persuasion of yonder 
 old friend of mine, that he was never 
 "rigged" to exercise his various crafts and 
 talents? So do the angels smile at us, for 
 so often thinking that we are not "rigged" to 
 do the good that comes to seek us. His 
 ingenuity and deftness were far more than a 
 match for any ordinary awkwardness of tools 
 or stuff; he was always "rigged" by his own 
 natural genius to do whatever he had a mind 
 to. So could we accomplish many a worthy 
 deed we balk at now, if only we were content 
 to use the homely means that lie about us 
 and within us. 
 
 Now, gentle reader, descend from general- 
 ities and look about you a bit, and see how 
 many good works lie ready to your hand. 
 Will you say : "I am not rigged to do them" ? 
 25
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 There are your own home-folk, the people of 
 your intimate acquaintance. Have you not 
 had many a thought of them? of good words 
 that you might speak to them, to cheer them 
 and guide them along better ways? of kind 
 encouragement and sympathy that you could 
 offer, to help them through dangerous passes 
 or hearten them along noble paths? Could 
 you not, many a time, instruct or admonish 
 or console them, as each one needs? If you 
 say, "I am not prepared," what does that 
 mean, to be sure? Merely that you are not 
 perfect, that you might be better fit. Who of 
 mortals could not say the same with regard 
 to any worthy undertaking whatever? Any 
 man or woman among us, with prudence and 
 right feeling, can give some worthy aid to 
 his own people, in his own circle of friends. 
 Then there is the wider sphere of your 
 acquaintances. We can give only the vaguest 
 outlines here, which everyone must sketch in 
 for himself. Have we not all of us some 
 friends who need a word of kindly instruc- 
 tion in matters of religious practice and 
 belief? Could we not say the word, and aid 
 them on towards Heaven? Ah, "I am not 
 ready," "I don't know enough myself," "I 
 hesitate to intrude, with my very scanty 
 26
 
 "Not Rigged To Do It" 
 
 qualifications"; in a word, "I am not rigged 
 to do it," and so God's work must go undone. 
 
 See how one could widen the application 
 of this little instance until it helped us to 
 account for half the ignorance, the folly and 
 the sin that blights the earth. The ignorant 
 are ignorant still; the foolish and the sinful 
 are unadmonished, because the men and 
 women who might tactfully and lovingly 
 step in and remedy the evil "are not pre- 
 pared, do not feel equal to the task, are not 
 quite fit just now" "they are not rigged to 
 do it!" 
 
 Does God mean us to act so, do you think? 
 Will He take this monotonous excuse of ours 
 for leaving His work so sadly undone, and 
 for failing so mournfully to help our sisters 
 and our brothers towards His knowledge and 
 His service and His love? For and here is 
 a very serious thought indeed we sometimes 
 seem to throw the blame on God with this 
 sorry excuse of ours. He gives to us these 
 duties, these opportunities, these suggestions 
 of His grace, to us and to no others, no 
 angel and no Saint. He gives them to us 
 as we are, not as we might, or could, or 
 would, or should have been. It is to us with 
 our imperfections, our shortcomings, our 
 27
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 insufficiencies, our ignorances and our little 
 worth, that He has given in charge the wel- 
 fare of our brother's soul, perhaps even his 
 soul's salvation. For the one word that he 
 will take may be one that only we could give 
 him. He may be waiting for our word of 
 counsel, teaching, admonition. We, and we 
 only, may have the key to fit the rusty wards 
 of his poor heart. How melancholy if we 
 should hold back and fail to say the word, 
 because, forsooth, "we are not rigged." 
 
 One may say as much about the many 
 other avenues of effort in behalf of God, of 
 the Church, of Catholic charities, which 
 stretch away before each Catholic's feet. If 
 you have leisure, there are the many works 
 of social charity helping the poor, housing 
 the homeless child, teaching the ignorant, 
 visiting the prisoner, nursing the sick, com- 
 forting the sorrowful and the unhappy all, 
 in a word, of the various and the precious 
 works which we call "corporal works of 
 mercy." Then there are the spiritual works 
 of mercy, too, which each one of us learned 
 by rote from his catechism. Surely all of us 
 are fit and equal and able for some of these. 
 
 Let us go back again to our kindly old 
 friend of the beginning and from his memory 
 28
 
 "Not Rigged To Do It" 
 
 draw a happy omen. He, you will remember, 
 though he was always haunted by that dark 
 apprehension of "not being rigged to do it," 
 got over it bravely at a few words of affec- 
 tionate persuasion, and turned his skilful 
 hand right manfully to the work he was 
 besought to do. Are not you and I, dear 
 reader, equally good-natured, and will we not, 
 in our weightier tasks of Christian love and 
 charity, copy his hearty compliance, no less 
 thai} we have copied his quaint excuse? 
 When hereafter a wise and prudent and 
 fruitful thought of doing some good work 
 for God or our neighbor pops into our head, 
 we shall say to ourselves rig'.it manfully, not 
 hearing our lower self's denial : "Now do 
 be good, and set to work at it, and don't be 
 offering that tiresome old excuse again : 
 'Really, you know, I'd like to, but I'm not 
 just rigged to do it!' " 
 
 29
 
 OUR TALK AT HOME 
 
 IO love and do good to one another, that 
 is, after all, a very great part of what 
 we are to accomplish here in this world. And 
 to do us justice, we are usually willing enough 
 to help and benefit our neighbor, if only we 
 see a practicable and present way. Half of 
 those w r ho do next to nothing for other folk, 
 act so because they think of nothing to do. 
 But tell us what is to be done and how to 
 go about it, and you shall see some hearty 
 workers indeed. 
 
 Now there is a great deal of very useful 
 talk now-a-days about various apostleships, 
 and the word "Apostleship" in this 
 connection, usually means nothing else 
 than a way of doing to our neighbor 
 some spiritual good. Some of these 
 are for the rich, like the Apostleship of 
 Endowment ; some for the learned or the 
 talented, like the Apostleship of the Written 
 Word; others (and those the most interest- 
 ing), are for any one and every one among 
 us, like the Apostleship of Prayer, or the 
 Apostleship of Speech. 
 
 We have said something already, very 
 30
 
 Our Talk at Home 
 
 briefly, about the second of these apostle- 
 ships, that of frank, kindly and familiar 
 speech upon Catholic subjects and Catholic 
 views and beliefs, with those who come 
 within our everyday circle of influence and 
 appeal. We are all of us constantly talking 
 to one another, discussing, inquiring, reply- 
 ing, exchanging opinions and ideas. And so, 
 we said, any one of us needs only to throw 
 into his daily talk some genial, honest, 
 interesting words of Catholic truth, to become 
 at once a real apostle, that is to say, a 
 messenger, a herald of Catholic Ethics and 
 Faith. 
 
 Now let us descend a little into some of 
 the special forms which this Apostleship -of 
 Speech may assume and some of the special 
 opportunities it may offer us, and it would 
 be well to begin, where charity does in the 
 proverb, right at home. Fathers and mothers, 
 big brothers and big sisters, I wonder how 
 many of us realize the power we are con- 
 stantly using for good or ill, the influence of 
 our daily speech at home. 
 
 We boast sometimes that "home" is one 
 
 of the most tender and meaning words in 
 
 our English tongue. We declare that many 
 
 other languages have no real equivalent to 
 
 31
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 convey all the wealth and warmth of loving 
 thought and memory, of kindly, generous 
 feeling which stirs in us at this holy syllable 
 "home." To have a happy home is, we 
 rightly think, an unspeakable blessing. To 
 lack a home, for man or woman or child, is 
 a capital and dire misfortune. "A man's 
 home," according to the old English saying 
 which we have made our own, "is his castle," 
 his secure retreat, a kingdom of comfort and 
 of cheer, a little stronghold of affection and 
 interest and kindly sympathy against the rude 
 buffets of this selfish and unfeeling world. 
 
 We know, too, when we reflect on the 
 matter, that home is a little commonwealth, 
 where each one has his part to play for the 
 well-being of the whole. Mother and father 
 have, to be sure, a paramount influence; but 
 every one down to the youngest child has his 
 share in making or unmaking the peacefulness 
 and holiness of home. 
 
 In what way is this influence most often 
 and most effectively exerted? To be sure, 
 by our daily and common speech! What is 
 hastily said at breakfast, or slips from us as 
 we pass about the house, or is discussed at 
 the family dinner, or chatted about around 
 the evening lamp, or mooted in the parlor, 
 32
 
 Our Talk at Home 
 
 this most perhaps of all, makes or mars the 
 peace and happiness and holiness of our home. 
 For in these chance remarks, these off-hand 
 conversations and familiar, cosy talks, we 
 throw off countless little hints and corusca- 
 tions, so to speak, of our most inward and 
 intimate selves. We reveal our sudden 
 thoughts and impulses, we show our desires, 
 our principles, our aims, all, whether it be 
 good or ill, that we have been cherishing and 
 fostering and brooding over for years and 
 years. These things leap out, sometimes in 
 a tiny sentence, sometimes in a single word 
 like little sparks of goodness or of wicked- 
 ness, and kindle fires of good or evil in our 
 hearer's inmost heart. The doors and win- 
 dows of their hearts are all thrown open in 
 the summer air of trustfulness and love, and 
 our flying words blow in easily for weal or 
 woe. And this goes on, not for an hour or 
 a day, but for all the long months and years 
 of the familiar intercourse of home. No 
 wonder then that we influence one another 
 by our daily speech of words and actions ; 
 for actions, too, are a sort of speech and 
 often carry our meaning very much better 
 and more easily than words. 
 
 Parents sometimes feel deeply distressed 
 33
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 when they see, growing in their tender chil- 
 dren, the lineaments of their own short- 
 comings and sins. They will put on a very 
 serious expression and take Mary or Tom 
 aside to warn him earnestly against letting 
 that evil habit gain upon him. Do they hope 
 that one official warning so ceremoniously 
 given will stand for a moment against the 
 long, quiet talk and action of so many years? 
 "Don't, for Heaven's sake," they will say, 
 "get into that ugly way of criticizing people !" 
 But has not the lad heard you for years 
 dwelling on the faults of your friends? Can 
 one brief gust of studied sermonizing avail 
 to sweep away that heavy and brooding cloud 
 of innumerable and daily acts and words? 
 
 It is worth while, then, very, very much 
 worth while, to give some care and thought 
 to how we may carry on this Apostleship of 
 the Home. And this should weigh on us all 
 the more because of the circumstance that 
 we must all be either apostles or perverters 
 there. Abroad, one can fight shy of com- 
 pany and keep pretty much to himself, not 
 doing any one so very much good or harm. 
 But it is not so at home. Here we must all 
 be constantly taking sides and influencing 
 our little sphere for good or ill. Talk we 
 34
 
 Our Talk at Home 
 
 must, act we must in the presence of every 
 one, and not to talk and act properly and 
 holily and well, is to be talking and acting 
 badly, doing our share to mar the sanctities 
 of our home. 
 
 Of course, no one will here understand me 
 to mean to commend anything like a sancti- 
 monious way of acting, or a forcedly religious 
 style of talk. The only good purpose that 
 these would serve at home would be to start 
 some merry laughter that w 7 ould bring us to 
 our senses again. But I do most heartily 
 mean that we should particularly and ear- 
 nestly try always to speak and to act worthily 
 and holily among our own people, by our 
 own fireside. 
 
 First of all, there are the things we should 
 not speak of at all. Here one might mention 
 a very host of harmful and ugly subjects 
 which too often, alas, creep into our talk to 
 poison the quiet air of home. The bitter, 
 and open word of slander and rash judgment, 
 we need not pause to censure, but there is a 
 subtler way of hurting our neighbor by little 
 sneers, discreditable anecdotes, left-handed 
 compliments, which begin : "So-and-so is a 
 good fellow ; I always liked the chap, but " 
 and here follows an unkindly stab. There is 
 35
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 a way of speaking of one's Pastor, one's 
 Bishop, and what not, which some good folk 
 fall into from very thoughtlessness, but which 
 sadly hurts the holiness of home. You know 
 quite well that Father X is a good, fervent 
 man. But he has his faults (as who has 
 not?), and you make free to point them out 
 quite emphatically, over the roast. "Who is 
 the worse, pray, for that? The grown-ups 
 will understand, and the children don't take 
 any harm!" Are you so sure that they will 
 understand? Has not a light word of dis- 
 paragement, carelessly spoken, sometimes 
 tarnished your respect and esteem for a 
 friend? Again, there is little Tom or Jerry, 
 who listens with wide eyes to everything papa 
 or mamma or big brother is saying. Can he 
 make excuses or allowances? No, but he can 
 comprehend quite well that after all there is 
 something wrong with Father X, to whom 
 the good Sisters always tell him to be so 
 respectful. Do you remember when you 
 were young yourself, and made your first 
 discoveries as to the faults of your youthful 
 heroes? How long the memory of such 
 disillusionments remains ! 
 
 It is a pitiful thing to see the atmosphere 
 of the world creep in and taint the holiness 
 36
 
 Our Talk at Home 
 
 of home. To be forever praising men whose 
 only claim to praise is that they have suc- 
 ceeded in getting name and fame, or lands 
 and gold, is pitiful in us travellers towards 
 the Eternal Sunrise; but it is a crime to let 
 the little ones hear us singing our psalms to 
 Mammon day after day, day after day, as 
 though worldly fortune were the last end of 
 man. Will not they, too, become little idol- 
 aters, and give incense to the god of gold? 
 Do we not sometimes forget that what we 
 most praise will be what our sons and 
 daughters will very likely most desire in the 
 days to be? 
 
 We have dwelt upon our duties to the 
 children especially, in this matter of our daily 
 speech at home, because they are most 
 impressionable and confiding, and will catch 
 most readily the trend and color of their 
 elders' thought. They listen most when we 
 least suspect it, and are more interested some- 
 times in what we say to each other than in 
 what is directly spoken to themselves. But 
 we have a duty to the grown-ups no less. 
 Who can dwell in an atmosphere of pure and 
 worthy speech and not be the better for it? 
 Who can hear unworthy words for long and 
 not run a risk of being himself defiled? 
 37
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 A meaner sort of conversation still is the 
 foolish cackling of the snob. Society and 
 exclusiveness, and the delicate and senseless 
 distinctions between Mr. and Mrs. Tweedle- 
 dum and the Tweedledees are no fit subjects 
 for the family circle, where should breathe 
 honesty, simplicity and peace. To worship 
 gold and lands is bad enough in all con- 
 science, but it is hardly so base as to worship 
 social distinctions, airy nothings, too often 
 founded on no solid reasons whatever. 
 
 "But what is one to talk of?" An easy 
 answer would be to borrow the words of St. 
 Paul which he wrote to the Philippians in a 
 somewhat different meaning indeed, but 
 which come in very aptly here: "Whatsoever 
 things are true, whatsoever modest, what- 
 soever just, whatsoever holy, whatsoever 
 lovely, whatsoever of good fame, if there be 
 any virtue, if any praise of discipline, think on 
 these things" (Phil, iv, 8.) and speak upon 
 them in the kind commerce of family talk. 
 
 Let us descend a bit more into particulars. 
 To put it all in a nutshell, one would like to 
 have more really Catholic talk at Catholic 
 firesides. By Catholic one does not mean 
 parish talk, nor Church talk, still less talk 
 merely about Catholic men and women, but 
 38
 
 Our Talk at Home 
 
 talk which is concerned with subjects of truly 
 Catholic interest, and inspired with Catholic 
 feelings and Catholic thought. Like it or not, 
 we Catholics are a people apart. We have 
 our own spiritual color, our own character- 
 istics, our own proper beliefs and view-points 
 and principles. Whatever savors of these 
 should not only be sacred to us, but interest- 
 ing also, and should make some matter of 
 our daily speech. We should know at least 
 the current history of Catholic interests, as a 
 good citizen knows the current history of his 
 native land. A Catholic who does not care to 
 speak of Catholic matters is a far worse 
 anomaly than an American who knows and 
 cares nothing for American interests and 
 affairs. In this regard, one fears, the talk 
 of our Catholic homes is far too colorless. 
 Mothers and fathers, big sisters and big 
 brothers, do the little ones at home gather 
 from your daily speech that deep loyalty and 
 intelligent interest, that steadfast earnestness 
 and wide-awake zeal with respect to things 
 Catholic, which you would wish them to 
 acquire now in the soft, impressionable days 
 of youth? 
 
 One might here mention a whole host of 
 subjects upon which Catholic folk should 
 39
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 sometimes think and speak at home, but one 
 would have to vary it a bit to suit every 
 reader, for we are not all of equal wit, nor 
 have we all the same interests, nor the same 
 cares, nor surroundings. But take up some 
 good Catholic paper and glance with interest 
 over the news it brings of Catholic affairs 
 and doings in this and in other lands. We 
 find there letters from the Holy See to the 
 faithful of Christendom, tidings of Catholic 
 enterprise in charitable and social work, in 
 politics, letters and art, the conquests of the 
 Church's missionaries, the achievements of 
 her religious orders and congregations, the 
 plans and doings of her lay-folk, a thousand 
 and one items of Catholic bearing and signif- 
 icance which Catholic readers should be glad 
 to see. 
 
 Truly, to most of us, a greater interest in 
 Catholic papers would give a finer, fuller 
 flow of Catholic speech and Catholic thought. 
 Does not the secular press feed our minds 
 with most of the matter for our casual talk? 
 If we would only read more Catholic books 
 and let the Catholic papers give us more food 
 for thought, our lips would blossom easily 
 enough into worthy and Catholic speech 
 abroad and at home. 
 
 40
 
 Our Talk at Home 
 
 I think I hear a strong cry of protest: 
 "Why, to do all this, we should have to begin 
 and educate ourselves all over again !" A 
 very wise observation ! Perhaps we should ; 
 but is it not worth while, for the sake of the 
 holiness and happiness of our own home 
 circle, to learn all over again, if need be, the 
 ways and topics of Catholic speech? It may 
 need some effort and watchfulness. We may 
 have at first often to repress the rising word, 
 or discipline the frivolous thought but 
 patience, courage! Every effort means an 
 easier victory next time. And when we have 
 thoroughly reformed and disciplined our 
 speech according to the sane and blessed lines 
 of Catholic principles, we shall, at the same 
 time, have formed our minds and souls 
 nearer to the high ideal of Christian virtue. 
 For, "if any man offend not in word, the 
 same is a perfect man." When we have 
 learned to speak as we should, to bear our 
 part bravely, kindly and tactfully in making 
 pure and holy the atmosphere of our homes, 
 we shall indeed have become true apostles, 
 mighty influences for good on all about us. 
 We shall have learned to practise one of the 
 noblest works which is given to man in this 
 world, the work of doing good to others. 
 41
 
 THE COMMON CATHOLIC 
 
 T is a weakness of our poor human hearts 
 to wish to be uncommon, unusual, 
 exceptional distinguished in some way or 
 other from the men around us, and so we 
 shrink from any term which links us all 
 together, all us poor sons and daughters of 
 Adam, upon one level of equality. Men 
 would rather be bizarre, extravagant or even 
 wicked, some of them, than be common, 
 ordinary and tamely usual. 
 
 So there is many a one who finds a cold 
 discouragement in the thought that he comes 
 under the head of the "common Catholics" 
 that the work to which God has called him 
 is the everyday apostleship of the common 
 man. We grow disheartened, most of us, 
 we are sore dispirited and listless, and lose 
 all hope of doing anything very much worth 
 while for God so soon as we remember that 
 we are, after all, only one of the great, 
 uncounted host of ordinary men, of common 
 Christians, of common soldiers of God. If 
 this listlessness, this despair of doing any- 
 thing truly great and worthy for God's 
 Church, is apt to chill the endeavor of all 
 42
 
 The Common Catholic 
 
 common Christians, who do not feel them- 
 selves called to serve God and His Church 
 in the priesthood or the religious life, it is 
 especially apt to discourage and deter the 
 lowly and simple folk among us, the man 
 and woman who feel that their talents, their 
 influence or their opportunities give them no 
 weight with men, and that they are, in the 
 full sense of the term, only very common, 
 obscure and uninfluential folk indeed. 
 
 Yet how wrong and foolish all this is! 
 For are not the common things the most 
 necessary and important. Are battles fought 
 and victories won without the aid of the 
 common soldier? Let us look with God's 
 eyes upon our lot, our talents and our 
 opportunities and we shall be wonderfully 
 cheered and encouraged we ordinary men 
 and heartened to do manfully and well the 
 great work which He has set before us, and 
 which He will have none do for Him but 
 us, ourselves. 
 
 "God must love the common people," quoth 
 shrewd old Abraham Lincoln, "He makes so 
 many of them." And in its way the saying 
 holds a deal of truth. For what God loves 
 in us is not our petty little talents or riches 
 or distinctions, unspeakably small and trivial 
 43
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 in His eyes ; what He loves in us is our 
 humanity, made to His image, and raised by 
 grace to be in a wonderful wav His very 
 image indeed! 
 
 He loves us as common men, gifted with 
 His grace, plodding through weary ways, 
 toward the glory of our common Heaven ! 
 Notice, in connections such as this, how that 
 poor word "common" loses all its low and 
 sorry meanings and becomes fit to describe 
 even the glory of the saints! 
 
 God loves us then, all of us, as common 
 men. Our differences and distinctions, each 
 from each, by which some of us seem to 
 tower mountain-high above the rest, are as 
 nothing to Him, who sees all things as they 
 are. It is our own poor selves, let us say it 
 once again, our body and our soul, and above 
 all, the sanctifying grace which He has given 
 us of His common bounty, that makes us 
 precious in the clear eyes of God. We must 
 realize this very deeply or we shall never 
 have the courage to do the work God wills. 
 Let us bring it home to ourselves by some 
 further thoughts. 
 
 Once on a time there lived about the lake 
 Genesareth, in the obscure land of Palestine, 
 twelve to all outward seeming very ordinary 
 44
 
 The Common Catholic 
 
 men. There was Simon, and Andrew his 
 brother, who were fishermen. So, too, were 
 John and James, the sons of Zebedee. There 
 was Nathaniel, of Cana in Galilee, an out- 
 of-the-way country place, and Philip and 
 Bartholomew and the rest, all very ordinary 
 men. Last of all there was one Levi, a 
 cursed publican, a pariah among his own 
 people, with whom perhaps none of the rest 
 had ever spoken, for he was beneath even 
 their social level, the lowliest of common 
 men. Now as we all know, it was these 
 twelve common men who evangelized the 
 world ! How did it happen ? We know the 
 story well. Jesus of Nazareth passed by, 
 and called them to be His disciples. He 
 taught them His heavenly doctrine. He bade 
 them go abroad over the earth and preach 
 His Kingdom to mankind. 
 
 Better men than they might well have been 
 pardoned for drawing back in fear; but 
 though they were ordinary men, His grace 
 made them humble, patient and obedient, and 
 they went forth simply and trustingly and 
 changed the world. 
 
 Of course, we other ordinary men and 
 women will straightway object, that these 
 Apostles touched and heard the Saviour, the 
 45
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 Light of the World, that they had their 
 mission from His very lips, that the Holy 
 Spirit of God descended on them, and that 
 they had high and superhuman powers of 
 miracles and prophecy. But so have you 
 heard Christ, from the lips of His priests, 
 His chosen envoys ; so have you touched Him 
 (ah, most sweetly and efficaciously!) in 
 Holy Communion; so has God given you a 
 mission to spread His word, if you will only 
 heed. 
 
 Your faith is your mission, which must be 
 made known among all men, among the 
 pagans of this day, as among the pagans of 
 that earlier time. Your hope is your mission 
 which gives you such earnest of a vast 
 reward for your brotherly toil for other men. 
 Above all, your charity is your mission, 
 which stirs you up to love God and your 
 neighbor with a sincere heart, diligent to 
 labor and suffer in bringing your neighbor to 
 the love of God. 
 
 And the Holy Ghost? He has been with 
 you from your Baptism unless you drove Him 
 from you. He came to you in greater 
 intimacy in Confirmation. He chose you 
 then with a solemn choice to be soldiers and 
 apostles of Christ. 
 
 46
 
 The Common Catholic 
 
 As for the miracles and the prophecies, 
 these were needful to the Apostles, because 
 they were to preach a new and a hard 
 doctrine to an incredulous world. But we, 
 Christ's lesser apostles, are to use instead of 
 these extraordinary arguments, the simple 
 persuasion of good lives, of simple charity, 
 of the light of holiness and virtue which our 
 deeds are to make to shine in the eyes of men 
 
 Let us go forth, then, you and I, common 
 men, ordinary men, what you will, as 
 God made us with all our limitations, 
 our faults, our weaknesses. Let us go 
 forth, honestly and simply, to the divine 
 and holy work which God has given 
 us to do in this world. Let us go forth and 
 quietly, earnestly, tenderly speak with our 
 brothers and sisters, common men and 
 women like ourselves. They are exceedingly 
 many, and very needy and blind and poor in 
 the goods of life eternal, and we have the 
 light and the doctrine, the wisdom and riches 
 of Christ's true Faith. We have that to give 
 them for want of which they languish in 
 darkness and we can so easily give it by our 
 everyday example, our words and our deeds. 
 
 Let us by our deeds no less than by our 
 words tell them of that Christ who, being 
 47
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 the serene and all-sufficient God, became, as 
 it were, a common man among us out of His 
 eternal tenderness and pity, having compas- 
 sion upon us all, upon us common men. Let 
 us tell them that He has come to rescue and 
 redeem our common humanity, to solve our 
 common problems, to show us the price and 
 value of our lives, and all the priceless 
 opportunities that lie about us in the world, 
 about us common men. 
 
 Indeed, as we have said before, if we push 
 the meaning of this term "common" a little 
 farther, perhaps one might bring all mankind 
 within its compass and might say that we are 
 all of us only this, in His vision, the best 
 and the worst of us alike, only common and 
 ordinary men. We may have genius to make 
 a tinkle in the ears of the world; but in His 
 ears our wit and our wisdom are all very 
 foolish and shallow indeed, the prattle of 
 babes. We may have wealth, station, power; 
 but in His sight we wither like grass. We 
 may even be prelates or princes, wise or holy 
 in men's esteem; but in His eyes we are but 
 poor, pitiful little ones, common men whom 
 He came to rescue from a common ruin that 
 would have swallowed us all. 
 
 So each one of us shall be saved by His 
 48
 
 The Common Catholic 
 
 mercy, not as great men, or rich, nor as poor 
 or little, but merely as what we are common 
 men ! It is our humanity that we take with 
 us to Heaven ; if we are not saved as common 
 men. vain indeed will have been all the 
 uncommon things we boasted of in this world ! 
 
 It was this thought that made the great 
 heart of St. Paul groan out, in the midst of 
 his labors, "lest perhaps having preached to 
 others, I myself should become a castaway !" 
 The seer, the prophet, the apostle, under the 
 robe of all these Heaven-sent dignities, there 
 lived and breathed, there prayed and suffered, 
 only a common man, solicitous for his soul ! 
 
 As we are to be saved as common men, so 
 must we serve God, so may we save other 
 men and bring them with ourselves to 
 Heaven. The appeal of our human kind- 
 ness, sincerity and love will win them over, 
 our homely and familiar talk will sink 
 conviction into their souls, the power of our 
 everyday example will bring them to believe 
 that Christian goodness is possible, will 
 move them to own that it is sweet and lovely 
 and holy, will make them yearn to bring it 
 into their own hearts and lives. The grasp 
 of our hands will cheer and reassure them ; 
 we shall win them by our common and 
 49
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 familiar words and deeds, of brotherliness, 
 faith and love. 
 
 Such reflections as these have served to 
 make great men humble, when they reflected 
 how small and ordinary they must seem in 
 the eyes of God. But they should have 
 power, too, to stir up and hearten to heroic 
 effort the man who knows that he is not 
 greatly gifted with power, talent and influence 
 to aid his fellow-men. 
 
 Not one of us, however lowly and undis- 
 tinguished, who dwells seriously on these 
 thoughts should fail to find in them encour- 
 agement and cheer to take up the work which 
 God has cut out for him, among the men 
 and women who make up the circle of his 
 little world, to enter boldly on his own 
 especial field of apostleship. If we could 
 only bring those great numbers of Catholic 
 men and women, who form the noble ranks 
 of the common faithful, to realize deeply 
 their opportunities and their powers, how 
 soon their valiant efforts could change the 
 face of the earth! 
 
 For only think of the numbers, the 
 
 influence, of all our countless multitudes of 
 
 plain and simple Catholics throughout the 
 
 world! They are everywhere; they speak to 
 
 50
 
 The Common Catholic 
 
 everyone; everyone is their acquaintance; 
 everyone is their friend. Wherever toilers 
 or feasters or players are gathered together, 
 wherever work is being done, or recreations 
 are afoot, or men are talking to one another; 
 in car or factory or office or club, the common 
 Catholic is there. He rubs shoulders with 
 all men; he is rich among the rich and poor 
 with the poor, simple with the simple and 
 learned among the learned ; in a word, he is, 
 by his very multiplicity and variety and 
 omnipresence what the great Apostle strove 
 ever to be, "all things to all men." How 
 endless, then, and how various are the 
 opportunities of his apostleship! Where the 
 priest may not enter unsuspected, he is 
 already there a familiar and a friend. His 
 common talk is listened to with interest and 
 without suspicion; his testimony is accepted, 
 his teaching will pass current as the word of 
 a friend. Without suspicion, without preju- 
 dice, he can, if he be prudent and tactful, 
 preach the saving truths of his Faith in a 
 thousand places, where the word of a priest 
 of God would be met only with anger, or 
 distrust, or disdain. 
 
 If we only can enlist, somehow, the aid of 
 the common man ! If we can only awaken 
 51
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 in him a sense of his high privileges and 
 noble opportunities, and set him in the way 
 of helping his fellow-men, what great good 
 we shall gain for the Church, and therefore 
 for the world ! 
 
 Yet, let us say it again in sadness, the 
 great pity is that most men who realize that 
 they come under the category of common 
 Christians, of ordinary Catholics, that they 
 are in no wise distinguished from the great 
 mass of the faithful, either in learning, or 
 influence, or authority, or position, or power 
 of any kind, are apt to be so very easily 
 discouraged and lose heart for any effort to 
 better the world. They go indeed, only too 
 often, to a sad extreme of what one may call 
 spiritual do-nothingness. Far from exer- 
 cising any apostleship among their fellow- 
 men, their only ambition seems to be to keep 
 as passive and as quiet as possible in matters 
 of religion, and to leave the whole burden of 
 spreading the knowledge of the faith, of 
 fighting truth's battles, and upholding the 
 honor of the Church "to those who are better 
 fit" by which they commonly mean the 
 priests ! 
 
 Others still, of the ordinary faithful, are 
 bewildered when they are told that they have 
 52
 
 The Common Catholic 
 
 a mission or an apostleship to this poor, 
 weak, wicked world ! What should they do ? 
 Where shall they begin? Who will listen to 
 them? Between these two attitudes of mind, 
 there are a hundred others, all the various 
 shades of discouragement, bewilderment, 
 indifference, and (shall we say it?) laziness 
 too; which keep our ordinary Catholics 
 from coming forward to take up the labors 
 of this great apostleship. Now and again 
 you do find one or another simple layman 
 who has been touched by God's grace and 
 stirred by some prudent counsel and sugges- 
 tion, to try his hand at spreading the Faith. 
 If such a one is wise, and tactful, and 
 persistent what a great deal he can do! He 
 grows surprised himself at his own accom- 
 plishment. He becomes a living proof of 
 what we said in the beginning about the 
 power of the common man. He penetrates 
 where God's priest could never find admit- 
 tance; he is heard and believed, trusted and 
 followed by men who would resent and 
 suspect the intrusion of any minister of 
 religion whatsoever, in their lives. 
 
 But these zealous, enlightened, prudent 
 apostles are still, alas, all too few among our 
 common Catholic men and women. The 
 53
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 great majority, with all their great powers 
 unrealized and unused, are waiting, discour- 
 aged and obscure, for the suggestion and 
 appeal which might launch them upon their 
 labors for God and for His Church and for 
 the world. 
 
 In conclusion, then, it is to you, dear 
 Catholic reader, whoever or wherever you 
 may be, that these thoughts should have a 
 poignant and urgent appeal. You are one of 
 that chosen people to whom Jesus Christ has 
 given the charge of letting your light shine 
 before men, that they may glorify your 
 Father who is in Heaven. You are one of 
 those to whom St. Peter's words are said, 
 ringing down the ages: "You are a chosen 
 generation, a kingly priesthood, a holy nation, 
 a purchased people : that you may declare His 
 virtues who hath called you out of darkness 
 into His marvelous light." You, whoever 
 you may be, are one of those everyday 
 apostles to whom is entrusted for good or ill 
 the soul's welfare of scores, perhaps of 
 hundreds and thousands of your fellow-men. 
 
 The field of your labors for God lies all 
 
 about you. It is the world you live in, the 
 
 men, women and children you meet every 
 
 day in familiar intercourse, at home, at your 
 
 54
 
 The Common Catholic 
 
 work, abroad. Their eyes are upon you. 
 Their ears are listening for your teaching. 
 You cannot help moving, teaching, leading 
 them, either for good or for evil. Be a 
 consistent, whole-hearted, faithful Catholic, 
 speak and act and think and love as your 
 faith and your conscience bid you, and you 
 lead them irresistibly toward the truth, 
 toward God and Heaven. Speak to them 
 tactfully and kindly of the Faith that is in 
 you, and your holy example will give your 
 words a weight they cannot resist or gainsay. 
 But lead a life like the rest of men, follow 
 their foolish ways, dissemble your lofty 
 principles, yield to hate and envy, and greed, 
 and lust because "everybody does," and 
 you quench a great light out of the world. 
 You are a lesser Judas, a traitor-apostle. 
 You preach to men, at least in action, that 
 Christ's doctrine is only a lovely theory, His 
 faith an amiable myth, His mission to men 
 a pleasant and impracticable dream. You 
 quench and smother, so far as in you lies, 
 the flame that should kindle the world! 
 
 55
 
 THE APOSTLESHIP OF 
 ENCOURAGEMENT 
 
 NEW YEAR, following as it does so 
 close upon the Christmas season, finds 
 /our hearts open and warm for all good 
 resolves and thoughts of Christian charity. 
 Christmas, which is above all the feast of 
 love, has filled us so full with kindliness and 
 good will that we look for some ready way 
 of showing to our neighbor our friendliness 
 and good feeling. Well, there is one way at 
 our hand, easy, practical and fruitful. Let us 
 spend a while thinking it over together, and 
 we shall call it for short the Apostlesbip of 
 Encouragement. 
 
 We mortals are all of us glad enough our- 
 selves for any bit of helpful, honest encour- 
 agement that comes our way, and we like 
 to have every one hearten us and cheer us 
 on. As to heartening other folk, and cheer- 
 ing them on, that's another matter. We 
 don't see our way to do it tactfully, or they 
 might not value our encouragement if it 
 were given, or it might seem an intrusion, 
 or perhaps it never even enters our heads 
 that they stand in need of any help or cheer 
 56
 
 On the Road to Emmaus
 
 The Apostleship of Encouragement 
 
 from us at all. These are, alas, the common 
 attitudes of mind towards this important 
 matter of lending hope and countenance to 
 other men; these are the reasons why there 
 is too little of this great good in the world. 
 
 If you go back a bit in your experience, 
 and grow meditative about yourself and the 
 people you have known, you will very shortly 
 realize, I think, that you and they have 
 suffered a great deal at certain portions of 
 your life from mere, downright discourage- 
 ment. You may not have been quite 
 conscious at the time of what it was that 
 leaded down your feet, or lay like a weight 
 above your heart. You were young, per- 
 haps, and great designs had been forming in 
 your fervid mind of doing worthy deeds and 
 greatly helping on your fellow-men. Possibly 
 your dreams had not much weight and w r ork- 
 a-day substance to them, but they were evi- 
 dence of a good will and a lofty purpose, 
 precious things which, when well directed, 
 do avail to uplift and purify the world. 
 
 But there came a day, perhaps it was after 
 you had tried some too ambitious flight and 
 fallen rudely, when your great resolves sud- 
 denly faltered and flagged. You woke to a 
 sorrowful and half despairing realization of 
 57
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 your own scant equipment for anything really 
 noble and great. You found out the height 
 and the distance of those delectable moun- 
 tains which had before seemed so easy and 
 so near. And so, seeing no way before you, 
 you bitterly cursed the mirage that bad led 
 you into this desert of discouragement, and 
 perhaps you turned your back in sullen dis- 
 illusionment on all the heroic aspirations and 
 settled down to lead a humdrum life of easy 
 mediocrity, like the greater part of the 
 unheroic world. 
 
 Oh, if there had been some one there, 
 some wise and patient and tender heart who 
 could have rallied and reassured you and 
 tided you over this first bitter stroke of 
 withering discouragement ! If some one had 
 only been there to remind you that the 
 greatest of men often failed miserably in 
 beginnings, and that battles are only won 
 with many bruises and blows! All you 
 required was a little cheerful encouragement, 
 a little elasticity of spirit, and there would 
 have been a new start with better plans and 
 securer guidance along the upward grade. 
 But, alas, no one spoke to any purpose, no 
 one vouchsafed the tiny word of wise encour- 
 agement and cheer which you needed to help 
 58
 
 The Apostleship of Encouragement 
 
 you over that perilous and critical pass, and 
 so you are what you are, instead of being the 
 noble thing you had meant and hoped and 
 planned. 
 
 This manner of tragedy is very common 
 in men's lives. Sometimes it is a purpose 
 and effort towards merely temporal honor 
 and service, that faints and fails for want 
 of due encouragement. How many a lad 
 who had hoped to be a doughty soldier or a 
 mighty statesman has given up and meekly 
 gone to keeping dusty ledgers, because he 
 found no help in his necessity when his soul 
 was sick and weary for the encouragement 
 of a friend ! 
 
 Over these merely temporal losses and 
 calamities we need not grieve so much. 
 Sometimes they are not really calamities or 
 losses at all; for they turn a man's eyes from 
 the things of time and set him gazing towards 
 eternity. It is the spiritual and eternal losses 
 we must deplore, and how many of these, 
 how very many indeed, come from a lack of 
 due encouragement ! 
 
 "We live by admiration, hope and love," 
 cries Wordsworth in a famous poem, and to 
 be sure a great part of our vigor, earnest- 
 ness and courage in entering on nobler lives 
 59
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 and living up to better resolutions comes 
 from the warm, bright hopes we cherish, 
 and our glowing anticipations of success to 
 be. This is all natural and proper and good. 
 It is so that God made us and it is so, too, 
 that intelligent beings, who act for an end, 
 must cheer themselves and be cheered on 
 past the trials and miseries that wait like 
 lions in the way. Holy contemplatives have 
 even loved to think that the angel who came 
 to comfort our Lord after His agony was 
 sent to bring vividly before His human soul 
 the immense and everlasting joy and glory 
 He was to win by His depths of suffering 
 and humiliation. If this is true, as they have 
 lovingly imagined, if He, the All-sufficient, 
 the All-strong, vouchsafed to let a creature 
 of His will minister to Him, and encourage 
 and console Him, is it any wonder that we, 
 who are pitifully weak and dependent, should 
 sometimes need the cheer and encouragement 
 of our fellow-men to help us on through our 
 small agonies? 
 
 Our neighbor's need in his discouragement 
 is, then, it is clear, our own golden opportu- 
 nity. It opens to us an easy and a glorious 
 apostleship which the simplest and the low- 
 liest of us all may practise very effectively, 
 60
 
 The Apostleship of Encouragement 
 
 and which tactfully and lovingly pursued, 
 will make us true ministering angels to our 
 fellow-men. How thick the opportunities for 
 this blessed apostleship lie round about us all ! 
 
 First of all let us look around us in our 
 own homes, at our own firesides, and see 
 whether some precious occasions for it are 
 not waiting ready to our hand. It may be, 
 for instance, that we have long been trying 
 to influence for good some brother or sister 
 of ours, some near relative or intimate friend. 
 
 Perhaps we may fancy to ourselves that 
 we have done everything that flesh and blood 
 can do, to work out our beneficent designs. 
 We have suggested, advised, exhorted, admon- 
 ished, even scolded, been friendly and severe 
 by turns, but all to no avail. We have tried 
 the direct ways and the round-about ways, 
 have used ingenuity and bluntness and finesse 
 and subtlety and persuasion, all the loving 
 means and all the hard ones, but still to no 
 avail ! Now let us ask ourselves one most 
 weighty question more. Have we, have we 
 ever, tried true and genuine encouragement? 
 To get any one to make a real effort towards 
 bettering himself, is it not clear that one of 
 the very first requisites is to get him to believe 
 strongly and hope vividly that he can sbme- 
 61
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 how be a better man? This seems a truism, 
 perhaps, but it is often overlooked by sage 
 admonitors. We are too likely to forget, in 
 our superior way, that it is mere downright 
 discouragement and dispiritedness about 
 themselves and their own possibilities of 
 reform which keeps many, many poor sinners 
 groveling in their sin. Once get a man into 
 a hopeful, eager spirit with himself, keen and 
 sanguine about his own chances of improve- 
 ment, and you have given him an immense 
 lift along the paths of righteousness and 
 perfection. 
 
 Try once more, then, with these friends of 
 yours, and try this time with the gentle, irre- 
 sistible means of cordial and tactful encour- 
 agement. Cordial and tactful we may well 
 dwell a while on these two words, for they 
 hold in themselves the essence of true encour- 
 aging. It must be cordial, full of heart. It 
 must spring from no other wish, desire or 
 impulse than genuine love. Love, and unself- 
 ish, Christian, patient, generous love, must 
 be its well-spring, its motive and inspiration. 
 Then it will not intrude nor offend nor defeat 
 its own purpose by ill-concealed arrogance or 
 assumed superiority. It will not wound 
 instead of healing, nor weary instead of
 
 The Apostleship of Encouragement 
 
 giving cheer. Secondly, it must be tactful; 
 not intrusive, nor ill-timed nor insistent, nor 
 self-important nor importunate, all of which 
 ugly things spring from, and smell of, the 
 musty soil of selfishness. 
 
 Now that we are speaking of the things 
 that encouragement does not mean, let us 
 put in just one word of caution more. 
 Encouragement does not mean flattery nor 
 insincere approval, nor even what is gener- 
 ally known as praise. To praise a man to 
 his face, even to flatter him, is indeed a sort 
 of encouragement, but it is too often not a 
 good sort at all. It is a great deal like those 
 narcotic stimulants, that can indeed heighten 
 the heart and screw up the courage for a 
 while, but soon fail and leave a sense of 
 weariness and languor and a fiercer craving 
 after more of the same unhealthy stimulus. 
 The encouragement we speak of is sensible, 
 homely and moderate, sincere and true, and 
 therefore effective and enduring. If it 
 praises, it praises modestly and truly, choos- 
 ing rather to praise the deed than the man 
 who does it, not drawing invidious compari- 
 sons. It consists in heartening our brother, 
 bringing him with word and deed to the true 
 and healthy optimism which is patient of toil 
 63
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 and failure, because by God's help it trusts 
 in victory at the end. Life as God sees it is 
 always encouraging a very field of glorious 
 opportunities, and therefore true Christian 
 encouragement is making the disheartened 
 and weary see the world through the ever- 
 cheerful eyes of its Creator and its Lord. 
 
 "But if one has to be so careful and cir- 
 cumspect about it, it might be a great deal 
 better not to try to encourage other folks at 
 all !" 
 
 Oh, no, dear interlocutor, it is always 
 better to try ! To twist a bit the saying of 
 St. Francis de Sales, it is better by far to 
 encourage with imperfection than not to 
 encourage at all. With good will and a little 
 prudent thinking over what we have done, 
 we shall soon come to have some skill in 
 this noble art of encouragement. What a day 
 that will be, when at our poor words and 
 looks we see cheeks flush and eyes brighten 
 with noble energy and courage, where there 
 was before only dull down-heartedness and a 
 sort of gloomy half-despair! 
 
 If we think that we are not any way fitted 
 
 to exercise this great apostleship, we should 
 
 make it a subject of our prayers to God and 
 
 beg Him to give us the heart and the tact and 
 
 64
 
 The Apostleship of Encouragement 
 
 the will to carry the work along all through 
 our lives. For in all the range of fruitful 
 apostleships there are few more blessed than 
 this. 
 
 It would be pleasant to descend to many 
 details and reflect a while on some particular 
 occasions for this Apostleship of Encourage- 
 ment, which come in the way of nearly all 
 of tts some time or other during our lives. 
 There are the young folk who seem so 
 abundantly blessed already with life, spirits 
 and hope, that many an elder man or woman 
 thinks sighingly that they at least are in very 
 little need of encouragement. But it is not 
 true. It is the young who need encourage- 
 ment most, perhaps, of all; for they are new 
 to themselves and to the world. They have 
 no memories of deeds well done to cheer and 
 hearten them and make them believe a little 
 in their own capacity and powers. They 
 have not settled station and footing among 
 men to give them strength. They need some 
 kindly voice, some friendly eye to reassure 
 and stir them to confidence and hope. A 
 word of encouragement, a little word of 
 appreciation, then, at the critical time in their 
 young fortunes may have a world of meaning 
 and value in their eyes, may make them your 
 65
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 debtors for life, and enshrine you in their 
 loving memories through all the changes of 
 after years. 
 
 Have the old no need of encouragement? 
 Be sure they have! Every one has, who is 
 plodding along through this world. It is true 
 that their discouragements are likely to be 
 quite different from those which chill and 
 depress the mercurial heart of youth. They 
 suffer from weariness, disillusionment and 
 regret. They can no longer stir themselves 
 to fresh endeavors and new virtues and holi- 
 ness, by thinking of the years to be; for 
 with them there are no years to be. All 
 their long days are spread behind them! 
 And they look back upon past years with 
 uneasiness and pain. The opportunities 
 they wasted, the good deeds they have left 
 undone and the evil they have never atoned 
 for, rise up and haunt them now, so that 
 they, too, like the young (though for different 
 reasons), often stand sorely in need of 
 encouragement and cheer. 
 
 The middle-aged stand on the great divide 
 of life facing the westering sun, midway 
 betwixt youth and old age, and the discour- 
 agement of both those times of life assails 
 them by turns, and so they are often in need 
 M
 
 The Apostleship of Encouragement 
 
 of some cheer and heartening too. To put 
 it all in a word, most of the world about us 
 and particularly when it comes to a ques- 
 tion of earnest and exceptional efforts 
 towards greater holiness and virtue, is plod- 
 ding along in a more or less chronic state of 
 mild discouragement. Many a careless-seem- 
 ing and loose-living man is really deeply con- 
 cerned down in his own heart about his 
 spiritual welfare and anxious, in a vague 
 and indefinite sort of way, to be a better 
 fellow and rise out of his sin. What keeps 
 him back from making some definite effort 
 to improve is a despondent feeling that all 
 he can do will be of small avail. Religion 
 seems to him a sombre thing, breathing only 
 punishment and gloom. To show him the 
 cheerful and consoling side of Christ's sweet 
 message is to lift him up and urge him on 
 most efficaciously to better things. 
 
 Let us set ourselves, then, steadfastly, 
 prudently and tenderly to take up this holy 
 apostleship of cheering on our fellow-men 
 in the ways of virtuous effort. Let us join 
 the ranks of those noble hearts, alas too few, 
 whose minds are forever busy in conjuring up 
 and putting to test ingenious and tender ways 
 to help and cheer along their neighbor in the
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 sometimes steep and arduous ways of God's 
 service and love. 
 
 There is one such man hid away in a large 
 city of this land of ours whose story may 
 well conclude our thoughts on the Apostleship 
 of Encouragement. He is an old man now 
 in years and experience. Men say that he 
 himself in his younger days was the victim 
 of a great discouragement which nearly 
 ruined him, but by a great effort and by 
 God's grace he overcame the sour poison in 
 his veins and turned it into sweetness. Now 
 his doorstep is worn by the feet of many men 
 and women, young men and women for the 
 most part, who have learned the way to that 
 humble threshold as to a door to cheeriness 
 and hope. One tells the other no man 
 knows how the good word passes but there 
 they come. And how he cheers and heartens 
 them, that simple little old man! He is 
 stricken now by a lingering malady. He sits 
 all day in an old arm-chair which his faithful 
 man wheels around to keep it in the sun- 
 shine. But for all the twinges of pain 'that 
 rack him, there is always a flute-like quality 
 to his voice that rings like cheerful music, 
 there is a contagious merriment in his eye 
 that turns the blue devils out of windows 
 68
 
 The Apostleship of Encouragement 
 
 and tunes up the cockles of the heart like 
 generous wine. How much good this old man 
 does I should not like to try to set down. 
 How far his Apostleship of Encouragement 
 and Cheer has reached out into the world 
 no one on earth can guess. But there he sits 
 clay in and clay out, dispensing spiritual sun- 
 shine. Some of his friends suspect (but I 
 think no one has ever dared to ask him), that 
 a great deal of that encouraging and sympa- 
 thetic temper of his is due to a resolution 
 (an agonized and awful resolution it must 
 have been) taken while he was yet sore and 
 quivering from that great discouragement of 
 his early years, that he would never let a 
 chance go by to hearten and inspire the low- 
 spirited and the timid by generous sympathy. 
 How much happier and holier the world 
 would soon become if every one who has 
 fallen victim to discouragement himself 
 would straightway take a similar resolution! 
 For encouragement, and this reflection 
 shall be our last, is a great deal like mercy 
 in the poet's saying: "It blesses him who 
 gives and him who takes." To be truly 
 encouraging one must keep his own soul in 
 an atmosphere of cheery and healthy optim- 
 ism. To exorcise the imp of dejection from 
 69
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 another, one must first shake free from his 
 dark and ugly sway one's self. 
 
 It is a very common counsel, when we are 
 sad, to go and try to cheer some other 
 mourner. Why not turn the same shrewd 
 advice to our present matter and shake off 
 our own discouragement if need be, by 
 trying to encourage some one else? What 
 a pleasant and holy place the world would 
 be if every one set himself manfully to work 
 to encourage goodness and virtue in all his 
 neighbors! No more sorry looks and envious 
 glances. No more chilling indifference, or 
 carping criticism or odious back-biting or 
 sneering opposition to good and virtuous 
 deeds. But everywhere, on all hands, a 
 sunny, cheerful good- will and charity that 
 warms the heart, and makes virtue, goodness 
 and brave endeavor a hundred times easier, 
 more sturdy and effective. A general atmos- 
 phere, in a word, of holy and Christian 
 charity, for after all true charity, truly 
 understood, always spells encouragement.
 
 THE POWER OF PRAISE 
 
 FROM the Apostleship of Encourage- 
 ment one passes on very naturally to 
 think of the Apostleship of Praise. "Why," 
 I think I hear some one say, "aren't they 
 .quite the same thing?" No, not quite the 
 same, although their spheres do overlap in 
 many places. For one may encourage a 
 person without praising him, though on the 
 other hand, as we shall see, it is hardly 
 possible to praise in the way we mean, with- 
 out at the same time giving some encourage- 
 ment. 
 
 To begin with, let us hedge in our field a 
 little. For there is praise and praise, and 
 we must not take too wide a stint to plow 
 out of such an expansive subject. 
 
 To praise, then, is in general to express 
 our approval and commendation of a person 
 or a thing. So much even the dictionary can 
 tell us. But how many kinds and shades and 
 subdivisions there are in praise! First of all, 
 there is praise honest and sincere, and praise 
 hollow, insincere and of the false lips merely. 
 This last we mention only to fling it far 
 aside, for it does no good to giver or to 
 71
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 taker, but only evil. Then there is the hearty, 
 whole-souled praise, which carries a convic- 
 tion of our sincerity, and faint, grudging, 
 qualified praise, such as we speak of in the 
 good old saying about "damning with faint 
 praise." Again, there is injudicious praise, 
 intemperate and effusive, which spoils the 
 truth of one saying by the exaggeration and 
 fulsome flattery of the next ; and there is 
 timely, tactful, refined and temperate praise, 
 which comes easily and modestly from a 
 sincere and unselfish heart. Last of all, and 
 most important for our purpose, is another 
 division sharper and more easily recogniz- 
 able perhaps than any of the preceding kinds, 
 between "praising one to his face," as we 
 say, or in other words, between the praise 
 we address to someone who is present and 
 is listening to us, and praising the absent, 
 or praising some quality or mode of action, 
 which is a very different sort of praise indeed. 
 When and where it is prudent to praise a 
 man to his face, how we should go about it, 
 and with whom, and under what conditions, 
 and whether it is likely to do the one we 
 praise more good or harm, these are all ques- 
 tions that for the present we leave to each 
 one's own wit and prudence to answer, for 
 72
 
 Christ Speaking to the People
 
 The Power of Praise 
 
 the subject does not concern us here. It is 
 about the second sort of praise that we mean 
 to think and argue at this present writing, 
 to wit, the praise we give to absent persons, 
 or to modes of action, or to virtues and 
 achievements, and the influence which that 
 praise has upon ourselves and upon our 
 fellow-men. 
 
 It is clear that we are all concerned with 
 the practical issues of this discussion. Are 
 we not all of us perpetually at it, praising or 
 dispraising men, women and things, during 
 most of our waking hours? Scarcely a topic 
 enters into our speech, but our personal 
 attitude of praise or blame towards it, o-f 
 commendation or disapproval slips from us 
 unawares. Even though we had as lief keep 
 our personal attitude in the dark of our own 
 minds, it will not stay hid, but slips between 
 our lips, or sparkles from our eyes, or peeps 
 from the very wrinkles and publishes itself 
 abroad whether we will or no. If, then, our 
 praise and our dispraise have any influence 
 on other men, we must do a great deal of 
 good or a great deal of harm with it, as we 
 go on about our business, through our long 
 lives in this watchful and listening world ! 
 
 That our praise, our commendation an</ 
 73
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 approval of other persons and of their acts 
 and virtues, does have an influence both on 
 ourselves and on other men, who can doubt 
 for a moment? Praise and its opposite, 
 blame, have a tremendous moral power in 
 forming ideals and attitudes and opinions 
 and points of view. All of us, whether we 
 like it or no, are moved by other men's 
 authority, and depend on their judgment and 
 lean upon their estimate of the value of 
 things. What they praise, we are apt to 
 esteem more highly ; what they blame, is 
 lessened in our sight. If they are contempt- 
 uous or indifferent, we are very likely to be 
 inclined to contempt or indifference too. 
 
 As other men move us by their expressions 
 of blame or praise, so do we in our turn 
 influence and sway the thoughts of other 
 men. We cannot express our admiration of 
 a person or a thing, but they are uncon- 
 sciously inclined to value it more highly; if 
 we depreciate or blame, we set their minds 
 to censuring or fault-finding too. 
 
 We may perhaps here object to ourselves 
 that we are quite too insignificant and of too 
 slight importance for our praise or blame to 
 have all the weight with men that has been 
 just described. But our importance, or want 
 74
 
 The Power of Praise 
 
 of it, merely changes the reach and power of 
 our praise. That we are obscure does not 
 take away our influence, it merely confines it 
 to a narrower circle. Within that circle, 
 where we are known and loved, our praise 
 or blame has still its own moral power, 
 inevitable and strong. 
 
 We may convince ourselves of this very 
 easily by taking the extreme example of a 
 little child. Who could be more insignificant, 
 of less authority and importance, than yonder 
 little one of six or seven years? His elders 
 listen to his prattled praise or blame with an 
 amused indulgence that does not take account 
 at all of his wee judgment in fixing the values 
 of things. But see him among his little play- 
 fellows his praise or blame is very weighty 
 there! If he likes a toy or a game, if he 
 dislikes a teacher, or thinks a lesson dull and 
 hard, he can mightily affect the public senti- 
 ment of the tiny republic of his equals which 
 hears his puny voice. So it is with us grown- 
 up children, in our way. Each one of us ha- 
 likewise his certain circle, be it great or small, 
 which listens with ready sympathy to his 
 praise or blame, and moulds unconsciously 
 its estimates upon his own. 
 
 Is it not clear, then, how easily we may 
 75
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 make our praise and our blame subserve the 
 end of helping other men? To put it simply, 
 the principle is this : What we praise, if we 
 have influence with others, they will like and 
 admire and desire to have some part in ; and 
 what we blame, or criticise, or condemn, will 
 be cheapened and lessened in their eyes. 
 
 See what a power this gives us, and what 
 a responsibility! Our casual remarks, our 
 praises and criticisms thrown off a hundred 
 times a day, in chance encounters or occa- 
 sional conversations, have all our lives been 
 moulding, altering, deepening the ideals and 
 convictions of our fellow-men. Have we 
 shown our esteem of heavenly and godly 
 ways of living? Our hearers are the better 
 for it. Did we base our praise or blame on 
 mere worldly or human standards of value? 
 We have done our part to lower their stand- 
 ards, their ideals, to our own. Hence it is, 
 mark you, that close friends come in time to 
 have common ways of judging, valuing and 
 esteeming those things of which they speak 
 to one another in praise or blame. Hence, 
 too, the fearful power of that bloody tyrant 
 called "Human Respect," which is nothing 
 else indeed than our respect for and fear of 
 the chorus of human praise or blame. 
 76
 
 The Power of Praise 
 
 Perhaps this power of praise or of blame, 
 its influence to mould and form ideals and 
 set desires afire, is nowhere greater than with 
 the little ones. Children are mightily moved, 
 beyond what most of us dream, by what they 
 hear their elders praising or blaming. They 
 have a marvelous power, almost an intuition, 
 for catching the opinions and standards of 
 the "grown-ups" and for weaving them into 
 their baby dreams and play. Preach to them 
 as you will of being good and honest and 
 sincere and pious, if they catch from your 
 daily praise and blame that you really esteem 
 other qualities far more than these, that you 
 esteem Mr. and Mrs. Wealthy, who are fash- 
 ionable people, far more than Mr. and Mrs. 
 Poor, who are simple, pious folk; that you 
 think much more highly of Miss Evelyn 
 Dress, who is socially exclusive, than of Miss 
 Anna Plain, who is full of charitable works 
 and does a great deal for the poor, do you 
 think your abstract sermons and advice will 
 hold out any bait to their youthful fancies? 
 Will they be dreaming of growing up to be 
 "good" and "pious" and "dutiful," or will 
 they be yearning to grow worthy in time of 
 such admiring words as they hear Papa and 
 Mamma give to Mrs. Wealthy and to Evelyn 
 77
 
 ^ Neighbor and You 
 
 Dress? Oh, how long we remember, and 
 how steadily we pursue the things we heard 
 praised and commended when no one thought 
 we were by, the praises which we drank in, 
 unsuspecting and unsuspected, with all the 
 thirst and fervor of our childish hearts ! 
 
 And now, how shall we turn this great 
 moral power to subserve the purposes of an 
 apostleship? First of all, by making our 
 own hearts firm and true and sound as to 
 what we should blame and what we should 
 praise. For the world at large, this would 
 be a desperate counsel and a disheartening 
 beginning, how should the unbeliever know 
 what justly to praise or blame? It is too 
 often all one to him, truth and falsehood, 
 good or evil. What he likes or dislikes must 
 be the present standard of his praise or 
 blame; indeed, vague as his convictions are, 
 he should dare scarcely blame at all. 
 
 But the Catholic is saved this vagueness 
 and confusion as to the standards of good 
 and evil; his opinion and attitude on a whole 
 range of subjects, on the deepest issues of 
 life, are settled forever by the one fact of 
 his whole-hearted allegiance to the Church. 
 As a loyal Catholic, there is but one attitude 
 for him, and he has only to be well-instructed, 
 78
 
 The Power of Praise 
 
 consistent, and sturdy in his Catholic prin- 
 ciples to praise well and blame well on the 
 weightiest subjects that can arise. 
 
 Let us then dare and bear to shape our 
 praise and blame, all our candid estimates of 
 men and things, upon the solid and consistent 
 ground of Catholic principle. Let us dare to 
 do it; for however convinced we may be of 
 the truth and soundness of our Catholic Faith, 
 we shall often be sorely tempted to forsake 
 those true and unpopular standards, and to 
 conform to the false but popular standards of 
 the world. How sad it is how queer it 
 must seem, even to the non-believer, when he 
 reflects upon it that a Catholic should judge 
 of and estimate men and things by the mere 
 worldly values of time and of this life, when 
 by his profession of Catholicity he should 
 weigh them by the standards of Heaven and 
 of eternity! What a huge incongruity: to 
 profess the doctrine of the Crucified, who 
 came to overcome the world, and yet forever 
 to have upon one's lips worldly maxims, 
 worldly estimates, lauds of money -getting 
 for its own sake, talk of pleasure-having for 
 its own sake, nay, even praise of prosperous 
 scoundrels, of skilful evil-doers who are the 
 evry foes and executioners of the Crucified! 
 79
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 Then, too, we must bear to praise and 
 blame according to our Catholic faith and 
 principles. And this means a distinct and 
 long-continued struggle against our own evil 
 leanings towards the falsely-seeming good 
 things, the standards and desires of the flesh 
 and of the world. To praise and blame dis- 
 creetly we must go counter to our own lower 
 inclinations. To estimate and approve all 
 things according to the value they have in 
 God's eyes, this is to go squarely against all 
 that is ungodly in us, to conquer our own 
 baser selves which yearn and crave to praise 
 the good things of this world. 
 
 Yet this only points to another good which 
 comes of the apostleship of worthy praise. 
 For it is a blessed thing for us to put the 
 world's standards by, and look up manfully 
 towards the eternal truths. If we could but 
 grow accustomed to looking up at them and 
 framing our ideas by them, how much more 
 consistent, and sensible, and Christian our 
 thoughts and our actions would come to be! 
 We would not then be dwelling on money 
 and fashion, on clothes or goods or business 
 or pleasure or barter or trade, as though 
 these were man's last end and aim ! 
 
 If we praise well, we shall come by degrees 
 80
 
 The Power of Praise 
 
 to love well, and then to act well. For what 
 we praise we grow to love, and we act by 
 what we love. So that if we would set our- 
 selves manfully to praise honesty and honor, 
 unselfish and lofty ways of living, faith, 
 charity, gentleness, obedience, and holy deeds, 
 and all the natural and supernatural virtues, 
 we should come in time to love, and then to 
 be these things. If we praised men because 
 they are staunch Catholics, because they bring 
 up their children carefully in God's fear and 
 love, because they are of sterling principle, 
 and faithful in their way of life, we should, 
 if we were sincere, soon come to be so too. 
 
 There is another advantage in this same 
 practice of worthy praise, to wit, that by 
 commending noble, Catholic and honorable 
 ways of living, we in some way commit our- 
 selves to attempt them ourselves. For every 
 man likes to appear, and to be, consistent. If 
 we have the courage to praise what is worthy 
 we gain heart to attempt to do it. If we rind 
 ourselves keeping company with high ideals, 
 we shall begin to itch a bit to put them into 
 action. If we have the good sense to speak 
 consistently with our Catholic faith and prin- 
 ciple, we shall grow more ashamed of going 
 counter to them in our deeds. 
 81
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 There are one or two practical applications 
 of the truths we have been dwelling on which 
 it would be too bad to leave unnoticed. One 
 of these has to do with the way Catholics 
 speak of other Catholics, or of Catholic 
 enterprises and Societies, or of Catholic 
 ecclesiastics and the rulers of the Church. 
 It is a sad thing to say, but a spirit is abroad 
 now-a-days to speak rather disparagingly of 
 things Catholic, merely from a desire, it may 
 be, of standing well with the world, or of 
 showing our own broad-mindedness ; or per- 
 haps, of giving other folks an idea that we 
 are rather above the common run of the 
 faithful, and not to be classed with the poor, 
 ordinary Catholics one sees in such numbers 
 in church! 
 
 Leaving aside the many reasons drawn 
 from loyalty and reverence and charity and 
 consistency and good feeling, which rise up 
 to condemn this unworthy attitude of mind, 
 how unwise and injurious it is when we look 
 at it from the viewpoint of its effect on the 
 non-Catholics around us ! They expect that 
 we, who pledge our whole faith and stake 
 all our hopes of life eternal on the truth, the 
 nobleness and the heavenly beauty of Catholic 
 teaching, should be filled with reverence and 
 82
 
 The Power of Praise 
 
 esteem for all that belongs to or is associated 
 with our holy faith. They realize that we 
 are the natural defenders and advocates of 
 all things Catholic. How shocked and dis- 
 illusioned and repelled they must be to find 
 us speaking in a depreciating way of our 
 brothers in the cause of Christ, of our 
 pastors, who bear His authority, of the 
 persons and things which are most intimately 
 associated with His Church, His spiritual 
 Kingdom in this world! 
 
 How sternly we should crush out in our- 
 selves this mean and carping spirit; how 
 steadily we should urge ourselves to lean 
 towards praise and encouragement whenever 
 there is question of Catholics or of Catholic 
 enterprise! No need of false praise, nor of 
 fulsome adulation ; for these things are never 
 helpful nor good. If we have clear eyes and 
 an unenvious heart, we shall always find 
 enough and to spare in the Catholic world 
 about us, to furnish us many an occasion 
 for hearty and merited commendation. 
 
 Again, a failing of ours which must often 
 hurt and scandalize the well-disposed non- 
 Catholic is that queer tendency we have to 
 set up as representative Catholics men who 
 are poor types indeed of what the Church 
 83
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 desires in her sons. Because a man owns to 
 the name of Catholic, and has besides won 
 place and esteem in the world, by his pro- 
 fession, it may be, or his fortune or his wits, 
 we are often all too ready to trumpet him 
 abroad as a great Catholic citizen and point 
 to him with pride as a bright example of his 
 kind. What must the non-believer think, 
 once more, when he knows quite well that 
 this man's whole claim to distinction and 
 esteem rests upon his possession of the good 
 things of this world ; that he is only good 
 and great, if so at all, from a worldly stand- 
 point, and that if he be viewed from a sound 
 Catholic viewpoint and weighed in the 
 balance of Catholic principle, he is one of 
 the least worthy and estimable of the Church's 
 sons? "And this is the manner of man," the 
 non-Catholic will say to himself, "whom 
 these Catholics set up as their representa- 
 tive, their boast and their pride! God save 
 the mark! They are the most inconsistent 
 people on earth. They praise unworldliness, 
 and honor this shameless worldling; they 
 speak of piety, and extol this notorious 
 neglecter of his religious duties; they prate 
 of honesty and sober living, and then join 
 hands with this successful rogue! I will 
 84
 
 The Power of Praise 
 
 have none of them ; they cannot believe the 
 noble things they say !" Let us be careful, 
 very circumspect and careful, about whom, 
 or what we set aloft as representative of our 
 Catholic principles! We are watched, and 
 we are judged by a keen-sighted, shrewdly- 
 suspicious and not over-friendly world ! 
 
 We have reached the limits we had set 
 ourselves, and have scarcely yet broken the 
 surface of this vast subject of the power of 
 praise. But what we have said will have 
 fulfilled its purpose if it serves only to make 
 us realize how great and how far-reaching is 
 the influence which our blame or our com- 
 mendation wields on the minds of other men. 
 
 We walk through the world, quite carelessly 
 it may be, speaking out our minds, proclaiming 
 our opinions, giving forth our standards, 
 little conscious all the while of how much 
 our light words may mean in the ears of our 
 fellows. Those words we utter the praise, 
 the criticism, the censure and the blame go 
 abroad into other minds and hearts, and are 
 caught up and repeated and multiplied like 
 ripples in still water, until the thoughts of a 
 whole multitude of men and women and 
 children are wrought upon, their standards 
 raised or lowered, their emulation and their 
 85
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 desire stirred up and fired for weal or woe. 
 How far each easy, careless speech of ours 
 has been borne abroad and swayed men's 
 minds and fortunes, who but God can tell? 
 Such a mighty power for good or for evil lies 
 hid in the tiny organ we call our tongue ! 
 
 86
 
 OUR TALK IN BUSINESS 
 
 'E sometimes say that professional 
 men are liable to grow abstracted 
 and over-engrossed in their own especial line. 
 If we observe a bit more closely, I think we 
 shall find that it is the man of business who 
 becomes most deeply wrapped up in the 
 affairs of his traffic and his gain. Listen to 
 the talk on the street cars some fine morning 
 when men's tongues are loosened by the 
 weather or the time of year, and see for 
 yourself what makes the chief matter of their 
 casual talk. 
 
 The professional man will speak of many 
 things quite foreign to his specialty, of cur- 
 rent happenings in this or other lands, of the 
 last book, or the latest rumor of war. But 
 the business man, in nine cases out of ten, 
 is rattling on either about politics, which is 
 a sort of secondary business with him, or 
 about his beloved trade. What he has bought 
 or sold or is just about buying or selling, the 
 profits he has made or is expecting, the 
 chances of markets, the changes in supply 
 and demand you may hear all these things 
 discussed to no end with the greatest gusto, 
 87
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 with never a word of any alien topic what- 
 soever thrown in on either side to relieve the 
 monotony of the talk of shop. 
 
 This perpetual abstraction and absorp- 
 tion in matters of dollars and cents 
 is, to put it mildly, no very ennobling 
 thing for the mind and heart. A man 
 must live, to be sure, and he must have 
 money to live; but to be forever busy with 
 thoughts of money is not very much more 
 elevating than to be always busy with 
 thoughts of food. Even from the low stand- 
 point of one's own mental saneness and 
 efficiency then, it would be a very useful thing 
 to make some practical reflections on the sub- 
 ject of the Apostleship of Speech in Business 
 Life. 
 
 However, there are other motives for 
 dwelling on the subject, which are more 
 weighty than this. To begin with, it is some- 
 times rather pointedly questioned nowadays 
 whether our Catholic business men are the 
 mighty instruments for spreading their holy 
 faith that one might expect them to be from 
 their numbers and their general influence. 
 When our Lord said that His followers 
 should be the salt of the earth and the light 
 of the world, He did not mean, of course, 
 88
 
 Our Talk in Business 
 
 that we were all to preach His gospel from 
 the house-tops, but it is quite certain that 
 He did mean that every one was to do his 
 share in spreading the good tidings among 
 men. Suppose that a Catholic spends ten, 
 twenty or fifty years of his life in the closest 
 kind of daily and hourly contact with all sorts 
 and conditions of men, and that at the end 
 of that long time of constant opportunity 
 he cannot point to any deliberate or consistent 
 work for the spreading abroad of the truth 
 of Christ, can that man by any stretching of 
 the meaning of words be properly said to 
 have discharged his Christian duty of being 
 the salt of the earth and the light of the 
 world ? 
 
 At this point of our reflections I seem to 
 hear some hard-headed man of business break 
 in upon me with an emphatic objection: 
 "Any one who would speak of business life 
 as a time of constant opportunity for spread- 
 ing Catholic truth cannot be very familiar 
 with what he is talking about. Why, a 
 business man would laugh at you if you were 
 to begin that sort of thing. An office or a 
 store is the last place on earth to do any 
 missionary work in the way of spreading 
 Catholic doctrine. The Apostleship of Speech 
 89
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 is all very well at home, in social life, or even 
 in professional life, if you will, but it is out 
 of place altogether in the busy and distracted 
 day of the average business man." 
 
 Let us go over the ground a bit together, 
 my dear objector, and see whether all oppor- 
 tunities are wanting even in the busy haunts 
 of trade. First of all, there is the negative 
 side of the picture to be looked at, for we 
 accomplish nearly as much good at times by 
 the things we refrain from as by the things 
 we do. Whether he likes it or not, the man 
 who professes to be a Catholic is always 
 under scrutiny. Men differ in many things, 
 but for the most part they agree in this, that 
 they despise a hypocrite and resent a man's 
 making profession of a high and holy creed, 
 and then acting and speaking no better than 
 the common run. And so they keep a sharper 
 watch on Catholics (who, as they know per- 
 fectly well, profess the hardest and loftiest 
 religion in the world) to see if they make at 
 least some decent effort to live up to their 
 exalted principles. This thought opens up to 
 us at once a rich and varied field for reflec- 
 tion, which, of course, we shall only have 
 time to travel over very briefly. 
 
 It goes without saying, to begin with, that 
 
 yo
 
 Our Talk in Business 
 
 a Catholic man's speech should be utterly pure 
 from any taint of that monstrous abuse of 
 man's faculty of speech which we call profan- 
 ity. To hear even a pagan making free with 
 the holiest words in our language, to lend a 
 little emphasis to his worthless remarks, is 
 dreadful enough, even though we may offer for 
 him the sorry excuse that he does not realize 
 the evil thing he is doing. But to hear a 
 Catholic employing in light and ribald jest 
 the sacred names he learned to reverence at 
 his mother's knee is melancholy and shame- 
 ful in the extreme. 
 
 There are, however, more subtle and 
 insidious ways than this of giving scandal in 
 our talk, which the Apostleship of Speech 
 will make an earnest Catholic avoid. One 
 of these, and that by no means the least 
 dangerous and harmful, is the way we are 
 liable to fall into of making free with another 
 man's good name. In this age of unlicensed 
 speech many folk seem almost to have lost 
 the sense of right and wrong in dealing with 
 their neighbor's reputation. They speak 
 quite freely of his faults and failings, they 
 even publish his hidden sins. Nothing is 
 more easy to acquire than this fatal habit of 
 making free with other people's good name, 
 91
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 but how little most men realize the sinister 
 consequences of their fluent slander ! How 
 little they think of the reparation they are 
 bound to make for the good repute they 
 have unjustly stolen, and for the scandal they 
 have given by their loose and libelous speech. 
 
 The average half pagan or whole pagan of 
 the day may again offer in excuse of this 
 evil habit of calumny and slander the slim 
 defense that the evil of his ways has not been 
 pointed out to him with all the clearness and 
 force of Christ's divine teaching, but only in 
 the vaguer warnings of the natural law. But 
 how can we Catholics justify ourselves 
 who have heard from the incarnate God 
 Himself such words as these: "Thou shalt 
 not bear false witness" ; "Judge not lest ye 
 be judged" ; "If ye did it to the least of these, 
 My brethren, you did it unto Me"? 
 
 Yet in the off-hand familiarity of the office 
 or the store we may find many an occasion 
 to fall into this abominable habit of unchar- 
 itable talk. We are abstracted, worried, or 
 tired, and our mind and our tongue both 
 crave a bit of ready, interesting speech. 
 Nothing easier in the world than to talk of 
 persons whom we know ! Nothing nearer, 
 alas, to our poor lips than a morsel of 
 92
 
 Our Talk in Business 
 
 acrimonious criticism, or an unsavory rumor 
 about some one of our acquaintance ! So 
 we say the word or two to our neighbor, 
 and he or she takes up the strain, and 
 perhaps even the topic becomes general, as 
 each one adds a bit of fretful or unkind 
 comment of his own. Then we go back to 
 work, feeling refreshed, it may be, at having 
 got rid of so much rancor; but we little 
 realize the evil we have done. The chances 
 are that in those few moinents we have done 
 our neighbor a serious, maybe an irreparable 
 wrong. We have planted the fruitful seeds 
 of aversion and suspicion in our hearers' 
 hearts. The memory of our words and even 
 of the occasion that called them forth may 
 die away from their minds. The very manner 
 of our disparaging and calumnious speech 
 may vanish from their thoughts. But when 
 hereafter the name of the person we spoke 
 ill of comes to their ears, the lingering 
 prejudice born of our unkind talk will rise 
 up, and they will dislike and distrust him. 
 Now, what is the keen, observant man of 
 business likely to think of men who profess 
 a creed of the tenderest charity and good will 
 towards all of God's children and yet soil 
 their lips with these vile calumnies? 
 93
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 Another sort of talk which the Catholic 
 man or woman in business should be solicitous 
 to avoid is what one might call for short a 
 sort of lip-worship of Mammon. To hear 
 some business men of the day, one would 
 think that the sole person to be admired is 
 the successful money-getter, and that the 
 last end of mankind is to gather worldly 
 gear. They speak of wealthy men with 
 bated breath, they praise the wiles of the 
 unscrupulous financier with an approving and 
 an envying air; you gather from their 
 ordinary talk that in their eyes the happy 
 man is he who can keep his stealings well 
 beyond the purview of the law. Even these 
 worshipers of sharp dealing will hardly be 
 much edified, I think, to find the Catholic 
 men and women of their acquaintance joining 
 in their loose views of the seventh command- 
 ment. They know well enough that in our 
 system of belief goods and gr>ld are only a 
 means towards the heavenly and everlasting 
 kingdom, and not an end to be pursued at 
 the cost of body and soul. They know, too, 
 quite well that a Catholic is bound to repent, 
 and to give back his ill-gotten gains before 
 he can validly receive the Sacrament of 
 Penance. What must they think, then, when 
 94
 
 Our Talk in Business 
 
 they hear us speak the same loose and worldly 
 language with themselves? 
 
 Another fault which we should dwell on a 
 bit (though our catalogue is rather long 
 already) is the way, alas too common, in 
 which some Catholics speak of persons and 
 of things pertaining to their Church and their 
 Faith. Here, again, we must try to realize 
 the marked difference between ourselves and 
 the followers of all other creeds. In other 
 creeds it has come at last to this, that men 
 look upon their ministers as pretty much on 
 the same plane as themselves, appointed by 
 merely human authority and governing and 
 teaching with that influence only which each 
 one's talents and good qualities can claim. 
 Every one knows quite well that here, as in 
 so many other points, the Catholic belief is 
 altogether different. We profess that, how- 
 ever humble the talents of our priests may 
 be, and whatever their personal character, we 
 are bound to see in each of them the ambassa- 
 dor and vicegerent of God, who has put them 
 where they are. Any insult we offer to them 
 in their priestly office is offered to the very 
 dignity and holiness with which they have 
 been endowed by God. How strangely 
 inconsistent, then, it must seem to those 
 95
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 without the fold to hear us discussing and 
 criticizing our pastors ! 
 
 Even though we were to do or say nothing 
 positive and definite upon the subject of our 
 Catholic faith, but were to content ourselves 
 with avoiding the evils and abuses we have 
 been pointing out, we should have accom- 
 plished a great deal in the way of a true 
 apostleship. For the world at large, used 
 as it is to hear all manner of slander and 
 criticism and the common malice and 
 uncharitableness, which make up so much of 
 the speech of men, will be struck with 
 wonder at the spectacle of a man or woman 
 whose talk is quite innocent of all offense, 
 and will be moved by that rare and singular 
 effect to esteem and inquire into our faith, 
 which is the motive of so much self-restraint 
 and careful reverence for the laws of God. 
 Thus, even though we should seem to have 
 but little time or opportunity for anything 
 like an apostleship during the full days of 
 business, here is at least one way in which 
 we may all become apostles, by never doing 
 or saying anything unworthy of our Catholic 
 principles, by making an effort to attend at 
 least to the negative side of the Apostleship 
 of Speech. 
 
 96
 
 WEARING A CATHOLIC FACE 
 
 IN our last paper we dwelt in some detail 
 upon what we called the negative side 
 of the Apostleship of Speech in business: 
 the ways in which one may aid the Church's 
 cause among men, by keeping oneself clear 
 of certain prevalent and common sins and 
 abuses of speech. There remains great 
 matter for useful observation on the positive 
 side of that selfsame subject, to which we 
 shall address ourselves in these present pages. 
 In the previous paper we put ourselves the 
 question, first of all, whether such an apostle- 
 ship has any place in the hurry and flurry 
 of business life, and as the speediest and 
 most effective way of answering this perti- 
 nent inquiry, let us plunge at once into a 
 discussion of some of the practical ways in 
 which ordinary Catholic men or women, in 
 shop or office or factory, may help by their 
 daily speech to spread the Kingdom of God 
 on earth. 
 
 Our first suggestion shall be a practical 
 
 and momentous one of wide and various 
 
 application, and with a bearing not only on 
 
 this present matter of daily speech (which 
 
 97
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 is, after all, only one, though perhaps the 
 chief one, of our ways of manifesting our 
 thoughts and character), but on all our 
 dealings with our fellow-men. And the 
 suggestion is this: "Let us begin by all of 
 us, and always, putting on a Catholic face 
 before the world !" A short sentence and 
 easily written but in need of how much 
 qualifying and explanation ! 
 
 What do we mean by putting on a Catholic 
 face before the world? We do not mean 
 that we should be arrogant, or intolerant, or 
 pugnacious about being Catholics ; not that 
 we should throw it into our neighbor's teeth, 
 nor drag our Catholicity forth at unseasonable 
 times, to be a rag of controversy, or a prov- 
 ocation to our non-Catholic fellows ; nor even 
 that we should be talking of our Catholicity 
 as an attribute or quality of ourselves, as 
 though it were a great credit to us that we 
 are Catholics, with the mild and obvious 
 implication to all dissenters that it is a great 
 shame and pity to them that they are not. 
 All these ways of acting, and many others 
 which savor of the same arrogance, selfish- 
 ness and personal vanity, may, by some 
 stretching of language, be called putting on 
 a "Catholic" face but not such a Catholic
 
 Wearing a Catholic Face 
 
 face as our saying recommends us. We 
 mean a very different sort of face, indeed. 
 For all these ways of acting only advertise 
 the selfish and partial viewpoint that Cath- 
 olicity belongs to us. 
 
 The attitude we mean to recommend is 
 quite the converse one, that we, heart, mind, 
 body and soul, and all of us, belong to 
 Catholicity ! The spirit which we should have 
 is quiet, modest, tactful and unintruding. It 
 is as gentle as it is fearless, as kind and per- 
 suasive as it is uncompromising, where there 
 is question of principle or truth. The man 
 or woman who puts on this sort of a Catholic 
 face goes through the world professing his 
 faith in every daily action, because he or she 
 is known by every acquaintance to be a sturdy, 
 prudent and staunch believer in and defender 
 of the Holy Catholic Church. 
 
 To convey this impression, and to let every 
 one know quite plainly that we are, first and 
 foremost, Catholics in heart and soul, no great 
 parade nor forced endeavor is required. 
 What is necessary is a deep and true and 
 unreserved interior loyalty to the Church, 
 and to her doctrines and her rulers, and a 
 firm, modest and consistent way of acting 
 along the lines of our principles and our 
 99
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 beliefs. There is something in the whole- 
 some moral atmosphere which a true-hearted 
 Catholic bears about him, which has a solemn 
 eloquence to proclaim his faith to his fellow 
 men. And the business man, or clerk, or 
 shop-girl, or factory-hand, or the servant in 
 a private home who keeps this attitude of 
 quiet, earnest and determined Catholic spirit 
 and principle will need to make use of few 
 formal proclamations to announce to every 
 one with whom he or she has any dealings 
 that here is a practical and sincere Catholic, 
 prepared and determined to do whatever that 
 great and holy name implies and requires. 
 
 If we carry into our daily life of business 
 such a Catholic face, such a Catholic attitude 
 and bearing of body and soul as we have 
 outlined here, our work of the Apostleship 
 of Speech will be half accomplished already. 
 For, as we have noted before, one speaks by 
 actions, by bearing, character and manners, 
 much louder and more eloquently sometimes 
 than by any mere noise of words. And 
 without the speech of action the speech of 
 words is mostly vain and ineffective ; for as 
 compared with the latter, as all men realize, 
 the former kind of speech is incomparably 
 more certain, earnest and sincere. 
 100
 
 Wearing a Catholic Face 
 
 There are some further consequences of 
 this "wearing a Catholic face" in our 
 business life that have an even more direct 
 bearing upon our present subject, and hence 
 invite us to a more detailed consideration. 
 To wear such a character before the world 
 tends to make earnest men come to us of 
 their own accord, to inquire about our Holy 
 Faith. We do not realize, I am afraid, those 
 of us who are busied all day long with the 
 clatter and clink of dollars and cents on the 
 dusty counters of trade, how weary, lonely 
 and starving the souls of many even of our 
 prosperous and well-fed fellows are for the 
 bread which Christ came to break to the 
 children of men, for the living water which 
 He alone could offer to the parched lips of 
 an eager and thirsty world. 
 
 In the midst of their material success, their 
 lust for gain and their eagerness for the 
 ventures and excitements of business life, 
 most men have vacant moments and weary 
 stretches of emptiness and longing. Some- 
 thing within their bosoms tells them that they 
 were, after all, not made only for the present 
 and perishable world. Something higher and 
 nobler in them stirs restlessly and craves for 
 the Infinite and the Eternal, and they look 
 101
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 .about with longing and uneasy eyes for some 
 guide, some hint, some token, some finger- 
 post to set them on the path towards God 
 arid Heaven. They yearn for some clue out 
 of their labyrinth of temporal affairs into the 
 pure air of God's spiritual dominion, into the 
 kingdom of the spirit, which somehow, some- 
 where, He must have set up in this world. 
 It is in those better moments that there shines 
 forth the brightest opportunity to save and 
 purify and strengthen these fellow men or 
 women of yours by pointing them the way 
 into that Church which has the clue to all 
 their questions, the balm for all their restless 
 ills and cares. 
 
 If their wandering eyes do not see any 
 guide out of their empty longings, any 
 deliverer to point out the way to better things, 
 their happy hour will pass. The dust and 
 fog of earthly concerns will close once more 
 around their spirit, the Heaven-sent longing 
 fade away, and all their energies will sink 
 down and become engrossed once more in 
 the sordid interests of this present life. Cut 
 if they have seen in you this sterling Catholic 
 spirit of which we speak, then in their 
 moments of spiritual longing your face will 
 rise up before them as the face of one who 
 102
 
 Wearing a Catholic Face 
 
 has some holy clue to the weary riddles of 
 life, they will come to you timidly, cau- 
 tiously, it may be, even the boldest of them 
 throwing out delicate hints, giving you subtle 
 invitations to aid them in their search after 
 light. Sometimes it will be only some seem- 
 ingly careless question they will have to ask 
 you sometimes they will make you a passion- 
 ate appeal to tell them of the truth. 
 
 Then, if you are a true Catholic, a true 
 and sterling man or woman, is your golden 
 opportunity. Then you may use, indeed, to 
 do a golden deed, the holy powers of the 
 Apostleship of Speech. Quietly, prudently, 
 tactfully, speaking humbly and earnestly with 
 the eloquence of a grateful and believing 
 heart, you may bear witness, as the Apostles 
 did of old, to the Faith that is in you. You 
 may put this searching soul into the true path 
 of salvation, and set his mind and heart upon 
 the way to find the fulness of Catholic truth. 
 
 Does all this sound Utopian and visionary, 
 too strange and too delightful ever to be 
 true? But it has happened, time and time 
 again, thank God, here in our own country, 
 even among our poorest toilers in the great 
 mill or the busy factory. 
 
 "For God's sake, tell me your secret, 
 103
 
 Vour Neighbor and You 
 
 Mary," cried a haggard-looking girl to the 
 Catholic shoe-worker who stood beside her; 
 "how do you keep so good among us, who 
 are some of us so dreadful bad? I'm sick 
 of all this wicked talk myself. Tell me your 
 secret, how you manage to keep clean of it?" 
 
 And do you think Alary had any trouble 
 then in pouring forth to that ready listener 
 her simple story of the strength, the consola- 
 tion and support she found in her Catholic 
 Faith ? 
 
 It was a somewhat different environment 
 which witnessed a similar appeal for guid- 
 ance and direction. Some five or six young 
 business men had come together at a club to 
 talk over plans for opening a new subdivision 
 of residence lots in one of our great cities. 
 They were all good friends, and after the 
 somewhat wearisome details of shares and 
 prices and boundaries had been decided, they 
 fell to friendly talk and banter. At last one 
 of them, a notoriously loose and careless 
 liver, proposed they should all go and finish 
 the evening at a resort near by. The others, 
 laughing, rose as if to comply, but one of 
 the band remained seated firmly in his seat, 
 his forehead knit with displeasure and deter- 
 mination. The others left the room, jesting 
 104
 
 The Miracle at Cana
 
 Wearing a Catholic Face 
 
 at the angry brows ; but one, a clean-featured, 
 honest-faced fellow of thirty or so, came 
 quickly back and sat down in a chair facing 
 the knight of the earnest countenance. 
 
 "Look here, Harry," said he. "Where in 
 thunder do you get your nerve? I've seen 
 you do that sort of thing before stand out 
 like a rock against a proposition like that, 
 and I'd like to know just how you manage 
 to do it. I believe I've got as much character 
 as you in most ordinary things, but it cer- 
 tainly is beyond me what reserves you draw 
 on to do a noble turn like this." 
 
 It happened that Harry was telling after- 
 wards of this event and of the way in which 
 he had astonished himself by the force and 
 aptness of his explanations about the Faith 
 that was in him. 
 
 "Well, do you know," said he in conclu- 
 sion, "I had him thinking fast. When I 
 turned off the tap and glanced at him to see 
 how he was taking it, he looked for all the 
 world as if he'd been seeing visions, he was 
 just gasping from the speed." 
 
 Do you think, dear reader, that Harry had 
 any great difficulty just then in practising the 
 Apostleship of Speech? 
 
 As to the matter of our Catholic speech to 
 105
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 our friends, it must arise, like eloquence in 
 Daniel Webster's definition, from the man, 
 the hearer, and the occasion. One's tact and 
 sympathy should tell him or her how far to 
 go, what to say, and what to leave unsaid. 
 Surely we do not need any hard and fast 
 rules or guide-posts to direct us in speaking 
 to our own friends of the subject which 
 should be nearest and dearest to our hearts. 
 Yet, excellent as this sounds in theory, in 
 practice the matter is by no means so smooth 
 and easy. Two things will help us on 
 immensely, knowledge and kindness. To 
 be effective apostles, as we have said before, 
 we must know thoroughly the elements of 
 Catholic belief, and the Catholic attitude on 
 questions of moment of the day. To do this 
 we must read Catholic books (and what 
 excellent ones are coming from the press 
 nowadays!) on Catholic subjects and Catholic 
 views. We must take an interest in Catholic 
 periodicals, we must, in a word, steep our 
 thoughts in a Catholic atmosphere. Then 
 Catholic truth will flow easily and naturally 
 from our lips. 
 
 Secondly, there is that other requisite: 
 heartfelt and sympathetic kindness. The 
 great heart of the world is really sad and 
 106
 
 Wearing a Catholic Face 
 
 lonely. The hilariousness, distraction and 
 pretence of our modern men are really only 
 a frantic effort to escape from a great inner 
 hunger and loneliness. To reach that aching 
 heart and minister the balm of truth and 
 consolation one must have recourse to gentle- 
 ness, sympathy and kindness. The heart of 
 man, to use a fine old figure, is like a delicate 
 flower it will not open to burly blasts and 
 tempests of disputation ; but let the genial 
 sun and the soft winds of friendliness and 
 kindness shine and blow, and it opens wide 
 to drink the warmth and light, and gives 
 forth grateful fragrance. 
 
 If we but fulfil these three conditions in 
 our own person; if we wear a Catholic face 
 before the world, and supply our minds with 
 the riches of Catholic thought and principle, 
 and fill ourselves our whole selves this time 
 with true charity, tenderness and kindness, 
 the Apostleship of Speech will grow easy for 
 us indeed. 
 
 "Hard conditions!" you say. So are all 
 conditions hard that lead to noble enterprises. 
 It was never easy to win souls to God. Christ, 
 our Lord, did not find it easy to walk, foot- 
 sore and weary, through the harsh ways of 
 Israel, repeating an unwelcome message in 
 107
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 the ears of an unwilling world. Peter and 
 Paul, and all the holy twelve, did not find it 
 an easy task to range over rude lands and 
 across dangerous seas to save the nations 
 given over to all lewdness, frivolity and 
 crime. The countless army of God's min- 
 isters do not find it easy to lead laborious 
 lives in the midst of weariness and privation 
 to bring men's rebellious necks under the 
 meek yoke of Christ. 
 
 Do you, my dear Catholic man or woman, 
 cry out in surprise that you are not worthy 
 to be spoken of along with these? You 
 must endure it. To you, though you were 
 the lowliest, the simplest, the most ignorant 
 among us, were spoken also those stirring 
 yet warning words from His own lips : "You 
 are the salt of the earth ; you are the light of 
 the world; you are a city seated on a moun- 
 tain ; let your light shine before men" ; and 
 most solemn, momentous and significant of 
 all, those words which we shall all of us, 
 great and small, teachers and taught, hear 
 from the lips of the Great Judge on the day 
 of the Last Judgment: "Amen, I say unto 
 you, as long as you did it unto one of these, 
 My least brethren, you did it unto Me." 
 
 108
 
 FOOLS' GOLD 
 
 SOMEWHERE in our romantic Colonial 
 history is told a very pitiful story. 
 One of those crews of hardy adventurers 
 who crossed the dangerous ocean to tap the 
 riches of the new continent came upon a 
 river whose very sands were gold. There it 
 lay, the precious, beautiful stuff, piled up in 
 glistening heaps, all ready for their eager 
 fingers, and they fell to work with glee. 
 They gathered sacks ful and barrelsful, 
 laughing at the hardships and the toil, until 
 their vessels were loaded down with the 
 treasure. Then they sailed happily home- 
 ward over the perilous sea. And when, after 
 many a storm and many an hour of wretched 
 and anxious toil, they got safely into port, 
 full of comfort and cheer, they spread the 
 wonderful news abroad that they had brought 
 unheard-of riches back with them. 
 
 So men from the shore, skilled in metal, 
 came eagerly out to look at the golden 
 hoard. They peered into the sacks of 
 treasure, plunged in their trembling hands, 
 and let the dust run down in golden streams 
 against the sunlight. Then they turned to 
 109
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 the exultant home-comers with scorn and 
 anger in their eyes. 
 
 "This the wealth of the New World !" they 
 cried. "Did you ask us out to look at this? 
 It is all only a base ore of iron, you unspeak- 
 able simpletons! All your hard-got treasure 
 is nothing but Fools' Gold ! " 
 
 And it was even so. The weary, dangerous 
 voyaging, the searching and toil, the tedious 
 passage home, had all been only for this. 
 They had a cargo of worthless pyrites ; all 
 their labor had only gotten them so much 
 paltry Fools' Gold. 
 
 A pitiful story, surely. After all these 
 years one feels a pang of sympathy only to 
 think of it. All that expectancy and labor, 
 and the bitter awakening at the end ! Yet 
 within the circle of our own experience, 
 under our very eyes, we often see an even 
 sadder and more tragic folly. For there are 
 many earnest and laborious men and women 
 nowadays, as in all days, who in their own 
 deluded way are sedulous gatherers of 
 shining rubbish; adventurous voyagers and 
 patient toilers, it may be, but bringers home 
 of nothing but Fools' Gold. 
 
 There is the unhappy man who will tell 
 you that he is quite satisfied with doing his 
 110
 
 Fools 1 Gold 
 
 duty by his neighbor, and harming no man, 
 and living as a decent fellow should. He 
 does not see any especial need of a definite 
 religion. He never cared much, anyway, for 
 ceremonies and observances and doctrine. A 
 good, clean, upright life is quite enough for 
 him. And so he does, sometimes, go to great 
 lengths and make costly efforts and sacrifices 
 to lead a clean and honorable life as the 
 world sees it. Perhaps he is by nature kindly 
 and courteous, generous and just; and his 
 days go by in fair and noble outward seeming, 
 making a show of good and worthy deeds. 
 But, alas, for all the outward glitter and 
 show of goodness! He is only gathering 
 heaps of silly treasure, painfully loading the 
 precious vessel of his soul with worthless 
 freightage of base Fools' Gold. There is no 
 substance in his pretentious virtue if it lacks 
 the precious touch of the love and service of 
 God. There is no merit in hi. godless good- 
 ness, because it is done for man and man's 
 eye only; it has not the weight and lustre of 
 the golden grace of God. 
 
 Again, there is the man who has been 
 
 brought up in an alien creed, yet comes some 
 
 day to see that in the Catholic Church, and 
 
 there alone, is the fulness of God's truth. 
 
 Ill
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 But he demurs when conscience tells him, 
 "Your place is there!" "Oh," he answers, 
 "not yet ! There will be time enough for such 
 a word. There will be ample opportunity for 
 such a change when I am older and more 
 interested in religious thought. God cannot 
 mean me to turn the whole current of my 
 life awry just at this time this specially 
 inconvenient time. Let me bide awhile where 
 I am. Why should one put oneself in such 
 a pother the very moment one finds out 
 something new? And, meantime, can I not 
 go on leading a good, devout, even a fervent, 
 life here in the Church in which I was born? 
 There is a good deal of truth to be found in 
 my religion too. I could serve God better as 
 a Catholic? Very true, but can I not serve 
 Him quite well here?" 
 
 Fools' Gold! Fools' Gold! When one 
 lineers on in bad faith where he knows that 
 God does not wish him to be, his specious 
 show of fervor and of zeal are nothing 
 worth. He may, indeed, put on all the out- 
 ward shine and glitter of a Christian life. 
 He may multiply observance on observance, 
 and offer many works which God does not 
 require, to balance out his slowness in the 
 one thing God demands. But in the eyes of 
 112
 
 Fools' Gold 
 
 Heaven are not his acts only a mockery of 
 justice and goodness? Hard words! Yet 
 are they not sadly and pitifully true? Can 
 not God see in these pious works the tinsel 
 glitter of insincerity? Is not such a man 
 wilfully delving in the deceitful river-sands 
 of heresy and error, instead of the deep 
 mines of truth, and bringing up, with all his 
 sweat and labor, only Fools' Gold to meet the 
 eyes of God? 
 
 Again (and this is the saddest case of all), 
 there is the fallen-off Catholic, who was once 
 faithful, earnest and devout, but has let his 
 fervor and service dwindle slowly away into 
 tepidity and carelessness. He lives quite 
 frankly a godless life, just as does the pagan 
 world around him. He does not deny the 
 Faith in theory, only he calmly disregards it 
 in practice. Its restraints and observances 
 are far too rigid, too uneasy and exacting for 
 his idea of comfort and of peace. And yet 
 in his secret heart he cherishes a hope that 
 he may somehow serve both God and 
 Mammon, that God will somehow be content 
 with the good he does, and not be too strict 
 and stern with him for the good he fails to 
 do. He has a lingering expectation that his 
 honest life, his kindness to his friends, his 
 113
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 doing hurt to no man, may raise him just 
 as safely to Heaven as some of those anxious 
 folk who never miss Mass on Sunday and 
 are so solicitous in keeping the precepts of 
 the Church. Is not his fair-dealing a glorious 
 and goodly thing? Are not his courtesy and 
 good feeling holy and blessed, and will not 
 his clean life here be found worthy of the 
 eternal life to come? 
 
 Fools' Gold! Fools' GoW! Fools' Gold! 
 What is all this material goodness in the 
 eyes of God, who has deigned to make 
 known the very precise and definite service 
 which He jealously requires, and who finds 
 that wished-for service insolently slighted 
 and denied? What would an employer think 
 or say if he found his employee taking his 
 own ease and pleasure, doing his own sweet 
 will in everything, and seeking to make up 
 for this neglect of duty by pleasant manners 
 and a winning smile? Surely, he who has 
 known the fulness of supernatural truth, and 
 who turns from the practice of our blessed 
 Faith to seek his happiness here and here- 
 after in the empty exercise of merely natural 
 and pagan virtues, is of all men the vainest 
 gatherer of vainest dross against the dreadful 
 Day of God! 
 
 114
 
 Fools' Gold 
 
 And so one might go on with example 
 after example of men now-a-days who carry 
 on the outward show of a blameless and 
 upright life, but whose works are mockery 
 and their good deeds a delusion for want of 
 the touch of grace and faith, for lack of the 
 true ring and lustre of heavenly merit which 
 only grace and faith can give. 
 
 But what have all these reflections to do 
 with us others, who are neither contemners 
 of religion nor followers of an alien creed? 
 Only this ! We know, or we should know, 
 very clearly the false gold from the true. 
 Suppose there had been with those hapless 
 adventurers some man skilled in metallurgy, 
 who could have told at a glance the false 
 gold from the real. Would it not have been 
 a crying shame, a terrible sin in him, not to 
 call out, and protest, and warn the deluded 
 crew that they were wasting their trouble 
 and their toil? Would it not have been 
 simple madness for him to have acquiesced 
 in their vain delight, and caught the prevalent 
 enthusiasm, and sympathized with their fools' 
 joy in their fools' treasure? 
 
 Yet how many Catholic men and women 
 who know full well that those who are near 
 to them, and dear, are living in a fools' 
 115
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 paradise of delusion and heaping up worth- 
 less and tinsel deeds against the great trying- 
 day, are deaf to the kindness and duty which 
 bids them warn these gatherers of Fools' 
 Gold? 
 
 "Oh, he, or she, is so good, so upright, so 
 generous," we hear them say of these deluded 
 ones. "Why, he is better than many Catholics ; 
 why should I trouble him with advice?" 
 
 Why tell him, in other words, that he is 
 heaping up false treasures, bogus gold? 
 Why say the word of warning and remon- 
 strance? Why show our uneasiness, our 
 distress and disapproval of this squandering 
 of precious lives, this wasting of effort and 
 of time that will never count for Heaven? 
 
 We do not act so, as we have said before, 
 in matters where earthly treasure is in 
 question, where money, lands, goods, are 
 the stake. If we see a friend of ours 
 wasting his toil in a bogus venture, or 
 spending good money on worthless stock, we 
 hurry and give him the word. May we not 
 do as much in matters of eternal moment, 
 when the gold at stake is the gold of heavenly 
 merit, with which a man must buy of his 
 God the Kingdom without end? 
 
 Is not this one reason why so many 
 116
 
 Fools' Gold 
 
 Catholics fall away little by little from all 
 pious observance and go down by gentle 
 grades, down the easy slope of indifference 
 to the sloughs of unbelief, because their own 
 people, who live at their side, do not reach 
 out a hand in time to save them? 
 
 They remark, of course, the first begin- 
 nings, the youthful piety growing chill, the 
 old fidelity at Mass and at Communion 
 waxing slack and poor. Now a Sunday 
 morning abed, no holy Mass ; now a slighting 
 word about sacred things that shows that the 
 soul is growing cold. If we would only aid 
 them then! If we would only stop them 
 there in the first steps of their downward 
 course, when a little leap would put them on 
 the sunny heights again. 
 
 We need not take them aside and put on 
 a solemn look and lecture them. Need not! 
 Often it would be a most silly and ineffective 
 way. But a quiet word, when we see their 
 ears are open and their heart is ready, a 
 sorrowful look when we feel sure they will 
 understand. Not many words are necessary 
 when a friend speaks lovingly to his friend. 
 
 And if we, their own friends, their own 
 people, refuse this easy, necessary work of 
 love, who else under Heaven is to attend to 
 117
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 it? God has put them in our hands, as he 
 puts all men into the hands of other men. 
 Can a stranger do it? Can even the priest? 
 How is he to know of the small and faint 
 beginnings? When he is besought to work 
 a change the harm is already done. Our 
 friend whom we could have saved when his 
 evil course was just commencing has now 
 strayed far away from Church and priest 
 and altar; he hears all pious exhortations 
 with a hard air of self-sufficient unbelief. 
 
 Little by little the fervor of his youth 
 cooled away; but now he is quite cold. The 
 priest, who could not have hindered the evil, 
 can scarcely begin to cure it now. Only you, 
 whose word, whose look, might have kept off 
 the mortal sickness, only you can bring it 
 medicine. You must begin, even now, now 
 at this late and evil day, and little by little 
 win him back again. 
 
 "But one must be prudent and tactful and 
 discreet! It does not do to speak much on 
 such subjects, one may so easily do more 
 harm than good ! Rather than say or do too 
 much, isn't it often better to let such folk 
 alone?" 
 
 Yes, by all means, let us be prudent and 
 discreet, but when were such precious gifts 
 118
 
 Fools' Gold 
 
 as prudence and tact required for such an 
 easy thing as merely letting our erring friends 
 alone? Indifference and laziness would seem 
 quite sufficient for that. No, our tact and 
 prudence may come into glorious play in 
 choosing the time and the manner of bringing 
 them to see the sad emptiness of their 
 fictitious virtue, the melancholy delusion of 
 their sedulous gatherings of base Fools' 
 Gold ! There one may find grand scope for 
 every particle of prudence and of tact which 
 he has got or God has given him ! 
 
 In sober truth it is a difficult task to open 
 men's eyes to their own amazing folly, and 
 point them out the worthlessness of their 
 laborious lives, spent apart from the will and 
 the service of God. It is a task which one 
 might well refuse to enter on at all, were 
 not men's very souls the stake for which we 
 toil. But God has put our brothers'* destiny 
 in the hands of us other men, and set us 
 near them to warn them tactfully, discreetly 
 always lest they waste all their precious 
 lives in gathering Fools' Gold! Let us not 
 suffer our own sloth or reluctance or false 
 diffidence to hold us back, where we see our 
 duty clear and recognize the urgent need. 
 For we may quiet our consciences now, and 
 119
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 justify our own non-interference with many 
 specious arguments; but what will our friends 
 whom we have not warned and counseled 
 say to us, think of us, when they have got 
 past that moment of terrible awakening and 
 revelation which is the lightning-flash of the 
 judgment of God? 
 
 "You knew and you did not tell us, you 
 saw and you did not cry out in warning and 
 fear ! You let us, your own people, fill our 
 hands with false and bogus riches, gather up 
 for the eye of a Judge who knows no deceiv- 
 ing the worthless dross and ore that has no 
 price nor value in Heaven ! All the while 
 you knew that we should go poor, and naked, 
 and mean before the eye of God. And yet 
 you left us so long to gather the tinsel of 
 seeming good works without love or grace 
 or merit. Fools' Gold! Oh, you unkind 
 friends! Fools' Gold!" 
 
 120
 
 Christ and Zaccheua
 
 THE ETHICS OF SATURDAY NIGHT 
 
 SAID Paterfamilias not long ago: "These 
 Saturday nights are getting to be the 
 plague of my life !" 
 
 "How so?" queried his friend. 
 
 "Well, you see, some six of my children 
 are just in the age when 'society' is in their 
 dreams. And somehow or other oh, indeed, 
 the reason's quite plain ! the dances and 
 dinners and theatre parties must all be on 
 Saturday night. So they come to me for 
 leave to go out Saturday night ! If I refuse 
 them, as I often have in conscience to do 
 of course there are wailings and meanings 
 till Monday at least. If I let them go, you 
 can fancy what happens next morning. They 
 get home in the wee sma' hours and are all 
 so desperately weary, and sleepy, and sulky 
 and sad ! They do not miss Mass, they are 
 too well brought up for that, but their 
 mother has all manner of trouble to rouse 
 them on time, and what sort of prayers do 
 you think they can give the good God, when 
 their heads are all fuddled with sleep?" 
 
 "I see. It is awkward," said the listener. 
 "But why always Saturday night?" 
 121
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 "Why ? How innocent you are !" answered 
 Paterfamilias with a rueful sort of a smile. 
 "Because we, who are so largely a pagan 
 people, are getting to pagan customs as well. 
 Because only two out of ten of our men go 
 to church of a Sunday. For the remainder, 
 the Lord's day is Morpheus' day, a day not 
 so much of rest as of sleep. To sleep one's 
 head off Sunday morning is so much the 
 fashion that men who work hard all the 
 week, and so must go to bed betimes, can be 
 got to stay up till all hours Saturday night. 
 Sunday morning, you know, they can lie 
 a-bed if they like, and sleep until noon." 
 
 "Now that you mention it," said his friend 
 with a thoughtful air, "I do seem to have 
 noticed rather a leaning to 'have things' on 
 Saturday night. The week's end dinner and 
 dance at the club must be on Saturday night. 
 The social organizations meet of a Saturday 
 night, the theatres are crowded then and it 
 surely tempts even our Catholic people to 
 stay up much later than ever they should, if 
 Sunday is to see them properly at Mass." 
 
 "Oh, and the trouble doesn't end even 
 
 there!" said Paterfamilias despondent 1 }-. 
 
 "These hilarious Saturday nights and the 
 
 drowsy Sundays after them, are teaching 
 
 122
 
 The Ethics of Saturday Night 
 
 our people to look on any religious exercise 
 of a" Sunday as a burdensome appendage, 
 instead of its being, as they used to think, 
 the proper way to spend a part of the day 
 of rest. Mass they will go to, grudgingly, 
 the later and the shorter the better, and if 
 there is no sermon, better still ! But all the 
 old-time practices of devotion, the beads at 
 home where all the family pray together, 
 Benediction and Vespers of a Sunday after- 
 noon, these things are quite beside the mark 
 for them. A hurried Mass, a sleep and a 
 walk, a rummage through the sickly-smelling 
 Sunday papers, a more or less gentle head- 
 ache from last night's sleeplessness, then 
 Monday ; and how much of their Sunday has 
 been for God? Only so much as one must 
 give to save one from a mortal sin!" 
 
 "A sad state of things," said the other; 
 "how shall we cure it?" 
 
 "Hard to think! The priests might preach 
 against it, but it would take a deal of preach- 
 ing to cry the evil down. It is in the air. 
 Everyone goes out of Saturday night; one 
 is a poke and a bigot if he ventures to inveigh 
 against it." 
 
 "I know of one way," said the friend, 
 speaking slowly and thoughtfully, "a very 
 123
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 effective way, too, though not pleasant at 
 first, I dare say. Down in Virginia, where I 
 go in the Summer, there lives a good mother 
 who has solved a very similar problem, all 
 by herself. She has five stalwart sons and 
 three daughters, who are, as you may fancy, 
 the pride of her heart. One of the sons and 
 one of the daughters are married, but the 
 rest are the soul of the social life there- 
 abouts, and nothing is quite successful unless 
 the Warners are there. Well, now comes 
 the point of the story. Do you know" and 
 he planted an emphatic finger on the other's 
 knee "that whenever any soul in that town, 
 Jew or Gentile, or Sleep-o'-Sunday though 
 he or she may be, wants to give an entertain- 
 ment and choses a day to give it, the first 
 question they ask is this: 'Is the day after 
 that the first Friday of the month?' Then 
 there is a rush for the calendars, and if they 
 find the next day is 'First Friday,' the date 
 they have chosen is changed out of hand. 
 And why? Because, as they all of them 
 know and say, 'the Warners won't come! 
 They always go to church with their mothei 
 on the first Friday, you know.' So they do, 
 all the nine of them, and up to the altar-rail 
 with her, to honor the Sacred Heart. You 
 124
 
 The Ethics of Saturday Night 
 
 can fancy whether an example like that makes 
 an impression or no !" 
 
 "I imagine it does," said Paterfamilias 
 admiringly, stroking his chin. "If we had 
 enough of such mothers and children most 
 of our urgent questions would solve them- 
 selves with a rush." 
 
 This bit of serious talk, which is here very 
 plainly set down pretty much as it came 
 from the speakers' own lips, is worth think- 
 ing over by every good Catholic of us who 
 wants God's way to prevail in the world. 
 Isn't it true that Sunday, as the Lord's day, 
 is vanishing fast from our lives? That is 
 the way with the spirit of the world. If it 
 cannot quite crush out our feasts, it will 
 tamper with them and change them until 
 they are something quite different from what 
 God meant when He bade them to be. It 
 has changed Christmas so; and Christmas, to 
 more than half of the world, is now a 
 feverish season of feasting and gifts, with 
 the Christ Child still in His stable and a 
 queer oaf, called Santy, perched up on the 
 throne. On All Hallows' Eve, and on Easter, 
 what do the little ones think of most the 
 Holy Souls and the risen Saviour, or silly 
 jokes and colored Easter eggs? Shall we let 
 125
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 the peace and rest and prayer of Sunday 
 pass from the world and give place to a feast 
 of sleep-after-revel, a time to recover from 
 the follies of Saturday night? 
 
 Paterfamilias was right. If we Catholics 
 stood sturdily out for a clear head and a 
 tranquil heart for Sunday morning, and 
 refused to make revel of Saturday night, 
 the evil custom would change. We are too 
 many, too widespread, too necessary, we 
 Catholics, for most social gatherings to be 
 quite complete unless we choose to go. Let 
 us not choose to go of Saturday nights, nor 
 on Thursdays before our First Friday Com- 
 munion, nor on the eves of any of the great 
 sacred festivals. Above all, we will not set 
 our own entertainments on those days, and 
 so lead other folks into the temptation of 
 spending their Sundays amiss. 
 
 When we are asked out ourselves on a 
 date that happens just to be Saturday night, 
 and there is no very urgent reason why it 
 should be Saturday rather than any other of 
 the seven long days of the week, what a neat 
 little, kind little, helpful little deed it would 
 be to give, with an air of friendly surprise 
 some such answer as this: 
 
 "Why, that's Saturday, you know ! Can't 
 126
 
 The Ethics of Saturday Night 
 
 we make it another time? I don't just like 
 being up late on Saturday night. It makes 
 one so heavy and sleepy on Sunday morning, 
 and I detest being drowsy and stupid at 
 Mass." 
 
 If all of us Catholics had the courage and 
 zeal to answer like this, what would become, 
 I wonder, of the Sleep-o'-Sunday folk and 
 their revels of Saturday night? 
 
 "But," some one will say "Saturday night 
 is the only night of all the week when I am 
 free to do as I choose to have a little 
 pleasure and rest and be with my friends." 
 Very true. But, honestly, do you feel rested, 
 and happy, and calm * after the excitement 
 and wear of Saturday night? Would not 
 you and your friends be better and happier 
 of a Sunday morning if your Saturday night 
 had been passed in some quiet and cheerful 
 amusement, which leaves off betimes, and 
 sends you tranquil to sleep? 
 
 Men are like sheep. However rocky the 
 road, some one must break from the beaten 
 way before the flock will turn, but when one 
 man takes to better ways he will carry many 
 along with him. 
 
 127
 
 THE POOR- OUR CREDITORS 
 
 IS it not enough to make us tremble, to 
 see how many otherwise good, and even 
 fervent, Catholics, habitually neglect Christ's 
 solemn admonition to help the poor? "The 
 poor indeed you have always with you," so 
 we seldom can plead a lack of opportunity 
 for putting into practice the grave command- 
 ment of our Lord. 
 
 In town and country, now as ever, they 
 are always with us, needy and numerous; 
 not only the poor who have become so by 
 their own fault or negligence, but the inno- 
 cent poor, the victims of a mother's sloth or 
 a father's crime. What excruciating mis- 
 eries they suffer! The weakness of hunger, 
 the agonies of shame, the pang of anxious 
 uncertainty as to whence shall come their 
 evening's shelter and to-morrow's food; the 
 hopelessness of utter indigence, these are 
 often with them, and threaten them always. 
 
 The child wails to its mother for food, 
 but the mother herself is faint with hunger. 
 The mother sees her little ones perishing 
 from want and shivering with cold, and she 
 weeps before her husband and their father. 
 128
 
 The Poor Our Creditors 
 
 But he, too, perhaps, is crushed with poverty 
 and feeble with disease, and he looks on in 
 despairing agony, unable to relieve them. 
 They cry aloud to their Father in Heaven, 
 who has compassion on the least thing that 
 lives, and who hears the young ravens when 
 they call to Him for food. But that infinitely 
 merciful and tender Father is a God of order 
 and of law, and He has given man into man's 
 keeping, and put the relief of the wretched 
 into the hands of his fellow-men. 
 
 It is to us, then, that the hungry and 
 destitute must turn at last, as to their ap- 
 pointed saviours from misery and distress. 
 Do we minister to them in tenderness and 
 compassion, or are we so thoughtless in our 
 comfortable plenty, as to deny these wretched 
 ones the little aid they seek? Ah, when our 
 own children gather round us, clean and fair 
 and merry, well-clad and well-housed against 
 cold and storm, innocent of hunger and of 
 shame, we must let our thoughts wander in 
 pity from their bright looks, safe as they 
 are in the sheltered ways of happy childhood, 
 to the wretched shanty where lurk the squalid 
 children of the poor. Christ prays us to have 
 pity, at least upon the little ones; to take 
 compassion in a practical way, on neglected 
 129
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 children, ragged, shivering and weeping, cold 
 and hungry, ignorant, it may be, and aban- 
 doned. The leavings of many a table would 
 make them a banquet ; the cast-off clothing 
 of richer little ones would be a decent cov- 
 ering to wrap their wasted limbs ; a little part 
 of the money spent in mere indulgence would 
 mean to them very life, and happiness, and 
 cheerful hope. 
 
 But this is not all. There is another thought 
 which to some of us may prove more pierc- 
 ing and more moving still. We are the 
 almoners of God. He has given man into 
 the hands of man, and made each one's 
 brother his keeper. "Love thy neighbor," is 
 second only to "Love thy God." Now the 
 wail of the starving poor is going up for- 
 ever around us, and near us, even at our 
 very doors. What meaning has that inces- 
 sant, piteous crying of hungry hearts and of 
 hungry bodies, in the ever-listening ears of 
 God? Alas! May it not be an unceasing 
 though unconscious accusation, an indict- 
 ment uttered loud and strong against us at 
 the dreadful bar of the Most High? And 
 shall we answer to that charge, that we were 
 thoughtless and distracted and busied with 
 our own concerns, when we have such com- 
 130
 
 The Poor Our Creditors 
 
 mands and often-repeated warnings? Or is 
 this a light duty, to be easily disregarded, or 
 a trifling opportunity for merit, to be readily 
 forgotten, when Christ Himself has declared: 
 "Amen, I say unto you as long as you did 
 it to one of these My least brethren, you did 
 it unto Me. As long as you did it not to one 
 of these My least brethren, you did it not 
 unto Me"? 
 
 Would that it were only the very rich in 
 this world's goods who stood in danger of 
 this grave charge and stern accounting! 
 Would that those of us were at least exempt, 
 who are poor ourselves, and can scarcely give 
 an alms in money or in food ! But the pre- 
 cept is most broad, the needy are without 
 number, their wants, various and manifold, 
 so that there is not one of us who cannot 
 give alms of some sort, if willing to do so, 
 and there is not one of us who can give but 
 is held by this command of God. Nor does 
 our personal inability to minister to the poor 
 excuse us, for there is the Society of St. 
 Vincent de Paul, with many other charitable 
 societies, ready to be our vicar ; nor does 
 even the lack of earthly goods acquit us, for 
 we can give at least the alms of prayer. 
 
 God speaks, it is true, as we speak most 
 131
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 commonly, of corporal aid and corn fort, 
 but these, after all, are things of lesser im- 
 port, types and figures of the aid we ^we 
 to our neighbor's spirit; of the alms we 
 should give, of love to his needy heart, of 
 faith to his starving soul. God speaks in 
 terms of temporal aid for this further reason 
 also, that the body must be fed and clothed 
 before the spirit can be strengthened, and he 
 who lets his neighbor thirst, or starve, or lie 
 uncared for in sickness or imprisonment, 
 when he might easily aid him, will scarcely 
 have the countenance to pretend concern for 
 his sick heart, or lonely soul. 
 
 It is, then, a salutary thing for us all to 
 read this precept over, as it is written in 
 many ways and for many ages, by prophets, 
 sages and saints ; and to take it practically to 
 heart. And there is perhaps no other place 
 in the whole cycle of the scriptures where its 
 weight is forced upon us so emphatically as 
 in the description of that last great Judgment 
 where the warnings of the Eternal reach a 
 sanction and a summing-up, in the momen- 
 tous sentence to be pronounced on man, 
 before he goes forth to everlasting joy or 
 woe. How strange in our ears are the warn- 
 ing words of that sentence, as Christ has 
 132
 
 The Poor Our Creditors 
 
 told them to us. "Then shall the King say to 
 them that shall be on His right hand: Come, 
 ye blessed of My Father, possess you the 
 kingdom prepared for you from the founda- 
 tion of the world. For I was hungry, and 
 you gave Me to eat; I was thirsty, and you 
 gave Me to drink; I was a stranger, and you 
 took Me in : naked, and you covered Me : 
 sick, and you visited Me : I was in prison, and 
 you came to Me. . . . Then He shall 
 say to them also that shall be on His left 
 hand: Depart from Me, you cursed, . . . 
 For I was hungry and you gave Me not to 
 eat: . . . naked, and you covered Me not. 
 sick and in prison and you did not visit Me. 
 Then they also shall answer Him, saying: 
 Lord when did we see Thee hungry, or 
 thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in 
 prison, and did not minister to Thee? Then 
 He shall answer them, saying: Amen I say 
 to you, as long as you did it not to one of 
 these least, neither did you do it to Me. And 
 these shall go into everlasting punishment : 
 but the just, into life everlasting." Matt, 
 xxv, 34-46. 
 
 No word here of murder, or blasphemy, or 
 the seven deadly sins ; or any of those offences 
 from which in our inward searchings we are 
 133
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 likely to thank Heaven we are so free. No; 
 but the just are to be rewarded and the 
 wicked to be condemned on this strange 
 standard: "Have ye fed the hungry, clothed 
 the naked, visited the sick and the im- 
 prisoned? Have ye pitied the wretched and 
 needy with an active pity, and succored them 
 in their distress?" Not that other good deeds 
 are disregarded, nor that other crimes shall 
 fail of their just retribution on that awful 
 day. But it is of these works of charity 
 that we are most strongly .reminded, because 
 it is these that even good men seem likeliest 
 to forget. Let us heed, then, our Saviour's 
 warning and take pity on the distressed. Let 
 us be good stewards and faithful almoners, 
 spending our goods and labor, with care and 
 gentleness and love, on the helpless members 
 of Christ's family, the great, piteous, suffer- 
 ing multitude of His destitute poor. 
 
 134
 
 OUR HOLIER SELVES 
 
 THE path of good endeavor, of toil for 
 your neighbor and you is always steep, 
 as our Lord foretold it would be; but besides 
 being steep, it grows very weary and dusty 
 betimes, and we need some cheery thought to 
 brighten our hearts on the way. Now the 
 feasts of the Church are like springs by the 
 roadside, each with its cooling and strength- 
 ening flood of holy, encouraging thought. 
 And of all the feasts of the year, Easter 
 brings us courage and strength ; for Easter, 
 besides being the Feast of Christ's Resurrec- 
 tion, is also in a special way the Feast of our 
 holier selves! 
 
 "Our holier selves! What in the world 
 does he mean?" 
 
 Let St. Paul explain for me, so that I may 
 not seem to be saying any new thing not 
 vouched for by the Church. In that first 
 magnificent Epistle of his to the Christians of 
 Corinth, in the fifteenth chapter, after he has 
 told them of the Resurrection of our Lord, 
 the Apostle repeats again and again, utterly 
 to confound some rash deniers of it, this 
 truth which rings like a trumpet-call, to stir 
 135
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 us up to effort, hope and longing: "But if 
 there be no resurrection of the dead, then 
 Christ is not risen again. . . For if the 
 dead rise not again, neither is Christ risen 
 again. . . Awake, ye just, and sin not. 
 . . . For there are bodies celestial and 
 bodies terrestrial. . . It is sown in corrup- 
 tion, it shall rise in incorruption. It is sown 
 in dishonor, it shall rise in glory. . . The 
 first man was of the earth, earthly: the sec- 
 ond man, from heaven, heavenly. . . There- 
 fore as we have borne the image of the 
 earthly, let us bear also the image of the 
 heavenly." 
 
 The Resurrection of our Lord, then, which 
 we hail with Easter joy is only the first fruit 
 of that great and general resurrection when 
 we, too, who shall have laid down our earthly 
 selves in death, may hope to rise in everlasting 
 glory clad in our holier selves forever more! 
 
 That holier self of ours ! It is sweet to 
 think how fair, how goodly and how glorious 
 it shall be, if only we are steadfast in God's 
 grace. Here on earth, as w r e grow gradually 
 to know ourselves better and better, we see 
 with increasing self-contempt all the sad 
 havoc that our forefathers' sins and our own 
 sins have worked in our minds and hearts 
 136
 
 Christ Praying in the Synagogue
 
 Our Holier Selves 
 
 and wills. Even with proud, ungodly met? 
 this knowledge begets a secret self-disgust 
 that grows deeper and deeper in them through 
 the years; while in the hearts of the Saints 
 it flowers out into the white blossom of 
 humility. 
 
 But on some happy day, if we cleave 
 valiantly to God, we shall be changed. The 
 stroke of death will ease us of our broken 
 body, the keen and fiery bath of Purgatory 
 will leave our souls all clean and fit for 
 Heaven. Then the light of glory will trans- 
 form us in a twinkling from the poor earthly 
 selves we know too well to the fair, heavenly 
 selves that shall be ours for days eternal ! 
 
 It is a pleasant thing to dwell on that 
 celestial and immortal beauty and dignity 
 which will adorn us, soul and body, as we 
 walk with all the other Saints of Heaven 
 through the bright mansions of our Father's 
 home. Ear hath not heard, eye hath not 
 seen, what a glorious and supernal loveliness 
 shall clothe about even the least of that great, 
 princely multitude. The noblest mind, the 
 tenderest, truest heart that ever was on earth, 
 or that poet's fancy ever dreamed, or flat- 
 terer's pencil ever drew, is very far beneath 
 the bright reality that shall be ours in Heaven ! 
 137
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 There is another aspect to* this thought of 
 our holier selves which Easter brings, on 
 which we should often dwell to stir ourselves 
 to valiant deeds for God. Even now we 
 carry in our souls the seed, the earnest and 
 the pledge of all that glory and that loveliness. 
 For the -seed of our heavenly selves is 
 Sanctifying Grace. 
 
 With every holy act of ours which merits 
 increase of our glory in Heaven, the hand 
 of God sows a new measure of this precious 
 seed in our souls. Each day that we go forth 
 to do God's will and please our Father in 
 Heaven, we come home richer unspeakably 
 in this celestial treasure. So long as we 
 serve God and keep our souls from grievous 
 sins, our store of the precious seed of glory 
 grows and grows, and when the light of 
 God's eternal sunshine falls upon us and we 
 wake into His halls of everlasting joy and 
 peace, the seed of Sanctifying Grace which 
 we have got with pain and toil through the 
 long labors of a holy life will spring suddenly 
 to flower in our souls and bodies, and we 
 shall blossom forth to that especial brightness 
 of eternal glory which corresponds to the 
 very measure of the Grace which our good 
 works have laid up in our souls! 
 138
 
 Our Holier Selves 
 
 We need not wait, then, we must not wait, 
 until the very eve of our entrance into 
 Heaven to make ready our holier selves. 
 For the earnest of them and the seed of them 
 rnu^t be within our hearts each hour, grow- 
 ing greater, sinking deeper day by day. 
 Indeed, if we are prudent and reasonable 
 men our whole business in this world, and 
 the most serious and steady purpose of our 
 lives, must always be, by serving and loving 
 God, to gather more and more of that 
 Sanctifying Grace, which shall bloom out so 
 gloriously in us under the sunshine of 
 Heaven. In our brief little lives it must all 
 be gathered and garnered. With the sum- 
 mons of death our profitable toils are at an 
 end forever. All the love and praise of all 
 the Saints in Heaven cannot add one iota of 
 glory to any soul that has passed the gates 
 of death. 
 
 There is another way besides this in which 
 we must be solicitous for our holier selves, 
 even while we are here on earth far off from 
 our heavenly country. With care and prayer 
 and effort, we may show forth those holier 
 selves of ours even in our earthly lives. We 
 often speak of our better self, of listening to 
 our better self, and following our better self, 
 1-39
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 and letting our better self get uppermost in 
 our acts and thoughts. Now our better self 
 on earth is the foreshadowing and promise 
 of our better self in Heaven. 
 
 It is told of St. Catharine of Siena 
 that her countenance sometimes wonderfully 
 changed and took on the evident likeness of 
 the face of Christ. What happened to the 
 countenance of the holy virgin was type and 
 figure of what may happen to our own souls 
 and lives, if we are faithful in listening to 
 and striving with the secret whisperings of 
 the grace of God. Little by little, struggle 
 by struggle, trial after trial will bring our 
 better and our holier selves uppermost in us, 
 and mould us slowly but surely into the very 
 likeness of Christ. Meantime, every holy 
 act and thought and word will heap up great 
 treasures of the seed of glory within us. 
 Little by little it must be done, day by day 
 we must bring forth the better self within, 
 but the end is no little thing. All those acts 
 of self-restraint and self-denial which give 
 our better self the victory, will form in us 
 holy habits, strong and fair, until the counte- 
 nance of our soul is moulded into the seeming 
 of the soul of Christ even here on earth, as 
 it must be in Heaven. 
 
 140
 
 Our Holier Selves 
 
 After these reflections, it is not hard to 
 see why Easter, the feast of the Promise of 
 our Resurrection, should bring with it the 
 strengthening and confirming of our every 
 holy purpose and good resolve. Now we 
 must pray and labor and weep, sowing the 
 seed, against the morning of that eternal 
 Easter Day, so that when we rise again from 
 the dead, it may be a rising with Christ our 
 Lord into surpassing glory, clad for all ages 
 of ages in our due beauty, dignity and power, 
 in all the fulness and the splendor of our 
 holier selves. 
 
 141
 
 THE BURNING QUESTION 
 
 THERE is a time of year when the closing 
 of the schoolday life brings before the 
 mind of many a youth and maiden the old. 
 old question which has perplexed, each in its 
 turn, all rising generations: "What shall 1 
 do in the world?" Time was in our land, 
 when the choice of a way of life was simpler 
 than now. The world had not grown so 
 varied and delightful and men chose more 
 soberly and calmly, and often with an anxious 
 eye to the life to come. Now the richness 
 and complexity of modern days have placed 
 so many goods and trinkets in the world's 
 great Vanity Fair that it is hard to turn our 
 eyes from them to look towards Heaven at all. 
 
 "Shall it be wealth, or' fame, or love, or 
 lettered ease? Shall I choose pleasant rural 
 haunts, with freedom from the crowd, or 
 plunge into city throngs?" So the young 
 adventurer, half distracted, half delighted, 
 counts his opportunities and talents, and 
 chooses hopefully, dreaming meanwhile such 
 golden, golden dreams. 
 
 But the great, turbid current of the world 
 keeps on its wonted way. It buffets each 
 142
 
 The Burning Question 
 
 newcomer as lustily as the last, cools and 
 drenches his feverish expectation, and flings 
 him aside at length into some quiet eddy of 
 old age, if he endures so far, to ponder, oh, 
 so differently, on the green, foolish fancies 
 of his departed youth. 
 
 This bright intoxication of youthful hopes, 
 and the disillusionment that comes with age, 
 have been the pleasant sport of wits and 
 moralists time out of mind ; but when one 
 dwells on the pain and loss and sorrow that 
 this foolish grasping after worldly goods has 
 caused, amusement changes quickly to anxiety 
 and grief. What a pity ! What a tragic and 
 terrible pity, to risk all and struggle so much 
 for this little, sorrowful dying-space which 
 we call life, and to forget and neglect the 
 full, eternal, glorious life which is to be 
 hereafter. 
 
 Dear young adventurers, pausing on the 
 threshold of life and face to face with this 
 fateful question of your true vocation, do 
 not follow, as fools do, the easy counsels of 
 the world. Do not ask yourselves: "What 
 shall I buy in Vanity Fair?" but ask: "What 
 is my vocation ? What noble and precious 
 work does God intend me to do for Him as 
 He sends me out into the world?" Then, 
 143
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 whatever answer your true heart gives you, 
 follow it manfully. "Choose the noblest way 
 of life, however hard," was the counsel of 
 Pythagoras to his disciples, "for by use and 
 habit even the hard things will become easy 
 and sweet." 
 
 What bright fields of possible endeavor 
 stretch wide and fair before your hesitating 
 feet. There is the religious life of poverty, 
 chastity and obedience; a truly angelic state, 
 wherein a man comes most near to Jesus 
 Christ. Kings, like St. Louis, have wept for 
 this holy calling; saintly Popes and Bishops 
 have grieved when summoned to their dig- 
 nities, and have eagerly returned to their 
 humble cells, so soon as God's glory and 
 souls' good would allow. Moreover, this 
 most noble way of life, like so many of God's 
 greatest gifts, opens to poor and lowly as to 
 the rich and great, to simple as to wise. The 
 humble lay brothers and sisters are welcomed 
 with no less charity and joy than is the 
 scholar and the sage. Here men live lives 
 most nearly like the angels'. Search your 
 soul, therefore, earnestly, lest you should lose 
 so priceless a vocation. Oh, the madness of 
 those who neglect a religious calling ! the 
 cruel, mistaken fondness of parents and 
 144
 
 The Burning Question 
 
 friends who dare to interfere with God's 
 designs on His chosen ones, out of flimsy 
 pretexts, sprung from selfish love or worldly 
 hopes ! 
 
 Then there is the glorious and amazing 
 dignity of God's holy priesthood, "a priest 
 forever, according to the order of Melchise- 
 dech," standing daily to lift to God the 
 Eternal Sacrifice, fed at the Table which the 
 Seraphs envy, father and ruler of the people 
 of God! How is it that our young men so 
 lightly overlook the priesthood when their 
 eager hearts are dreaming of honor and 
 power and achievement? Is any earthly 
 dignity like this? Is any power like this 
 power to call the eternal God from His high 
 throne, to bind and loose the very souls of 
 men? If to do good to our fellow be our 
 desire, who has so direct and grave a mission 
 to save and help his kind as has the priest? 
 Finally, as to the glories of the world to 
 come, we have God's own word for it, that 
 they who instruct others unto justice shall 
 shine like stars in the Kingdom of Heaven. 
 
 All are not called to such amazing dignities, 
 
 and for such as are not there open out the 
 
 various worthy callings of the world wherein 
 
 to serve God nobly and aid their fellow-men. 
 
 145
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 Are we to choose even here according to our 
 freakish fancy, or from vain desire of wealth 
 or pleasure or fame or ease? God, since He 
 is all-wise and all-provident, must have 
 designed each of us for some special work 
 and given us talents and graces apt for that 
 definite end. Our character, our gifts, above 
 all, the still, small whispers of His inspira- 
 tion, duly weighed with holy counsel, must 
 point us out His will. "How can I best honor 
 God, serve my fellow, save my soul?" this 
 is the proper question; not "how can I live 
 the easiest life or have the keenest pleasure, 
 or gather the richest gear?" 
 
 How much depends on one's first choice in 
 life! What fearful hazards lie about those 
 earliest steps! Never trust that you may 
 experiment and try again. Never hope to 
 venture rashly among the maddening pleas- 
 ures of the world and yet come off safely, 
 somehow, after all. It is a fateful and crucial 
 time, this entrance into life, to which your 
 eager hopes strain on so fast, and gravely 
 and earnestly must you prepare for it. Pray 
 well, think deeply, take counsel with a wise 
 confessor, go often to the Sacraments, choose 
 as you think you will wish to have chosen 
 when you must come to die. 
 146
 
 LAYMEN'S RETREATS 
 
 HE movement for laymen's retreats, 
 which has wrought and is working 
 still such wonders in Europe, has come over 
 the water. It is making its way, gradually 
 but surely, across the face of America, and 
 already we hear great tilings of the interest 
 these retreats are arousing, of the growing 
 numbers that attend them, and their precious 
 and lasting fruit. 
 
 The idea of retreats, even of retreats for 
 laymen, is of course not by any means new. 
 Not to speak of older days, it is now more 
 than three hundred years since St. Ignatius, 
 by an unquestionable inspiration from on high, 
 composed his method of Spiritual Exercises. 
 It is an old story how he and his children 
 after him gave these exercises with such fruit 
 to all classes of persons, that the Jesuits 
 were accused of witchcraft and of using 
 magic to change so suddenly the characters 
 and souls of men. Since St. Ignatius' time 
 the yearly retreat has come to be the very 
 marrow of the spiritual life in all communi- 
 ties of religious, and at most Jesuit Novitiates 
 some rooms are set aside for those men who 
 147
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 may wish to come, singly or in twos or threes, 
 to go through the exercises of a private 
 retreat. But the undertaking of which we 
 speak is something over and above all this. 
 It has the vigor and impetus of a new and 
 individual enterprise. It is organized, wide- 
 spread and energetic. It embraces large and 
 definite bodies of all kinds and conditions of 
 folk. 
 
 The movement in its present form has been 
 growing and gaining head in the Old World 
 for nearly forty years. It rose very obscurely 
 in Belgium about the year 1865, and was at 
 first confined to a narrow sphere. From 
 those lowly beginnings the work has pros- 
 pered and spread until at the present time it 
 has gone far and wide over Europe, and 
 even into the distant colonies. It is so well 
 established that there are now more than one 
 hundred Houses of Retreats for men, and 
 those for women are even more numerous. 
 Most of these are exclusively given over to 
 the work, and some of them afford accom- 
 modations for a surprising number of retreat- 
 ants. In Belgium alone there are twenty-two 
 buildings devoted to this purpose, almost all 
 of them in the vicinity of great industrial 
 centres where it is possible to gather rich and 
 148
 
 Laymen's Retreats 
 
 poor alike without compelling them to be 
 long away from their business or trade. 
 Over a hundred thousand men of both the 
 working and employing classes have made a 
 three days' retreat in these houses since their 
 establishment, and the number of women 
 who have made retreats is still greater. Some 
 of the other countries of Europe are not far 
 behind. In Germany, for example, the num- 
 ber of retreats annually made by men is 
 said to equal the yearly count in Belgium. 
 In France, Austria, Italy, Spain, Holland, 
 Switzerland, the work is at a notable stage 
 of development, and it has been begun in 
 England, Ireland, Denmark, and even as far 
 abroad as British India, Ceylon, China and 
 Madagascar. 
 
 Among our neighbors of South America, 
 too, the work goes on apace. Mexico has no 
 less than three houses of retreat. In Santiago 
 de Chili, we have been told, more than two 
 hundred thousand souls have gone through 
 the Exercises in the last ten years. In 
 Colombia, forty-four thousand private retreats 
 were counted in two years. Everywhere 
 great results are found to follow. In Canada, 
 too, the work of retreats is being pushed for- 
 ward with energy and success. 
 149
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 Beside many of the retreat houses, societies 
 of laymen have arisen to promote the move- 
 ment and perpetuate its fruits. These 
 societies band together the erstwhile retreat- 
 ants for mutual encouragement in their good 
 resolves ; they collect funds to build new 
 houses, organize bands of retreatants, distrib- 
 ute literature bearing upon the work, and 
 even pay the wages of those workingmen 
 whose families would otherwise suffer by 
 their absence from their daily toil. Generous 
 contributions to this latter end are also made 
 by some employers, even non-Catholic ones, 
 who realize the benefit to their interests which 
 comes from the good influence of a retreat 
 upon their workmen, and the antidote a good 
 retreat affords against the dreaded plague of 
 Socialism. 
 
 In the United States the movement is still 
 in its infancy, but it is a vigorous and thriv- 
 ing infancy, promising noble growth. When 
 our people awake to the immense power for 
 good which these retreats can exercise among 
 them they will not fail to lend their enthu- 
 siastic support. The unity, fervor and zeal 
 which we cry out for in greater measure 
 among our Catholic laity, the interest in 
 social work and in the cause of Christian 
 150
 
 Laymen's Retreats 
 
 charity, which modern conditions more and 
 more demand of us, and the solid faith and 
 devotion which these unbelieving times 
 require, are nowhere to be found in fuller 
 measure. The antidote for modern fallacies 
 and for the poison of Socialism, Rationalism, 
 Liberalism all the venomous swarm of 'isms 
 which the stagnant pools of materialistic 
 thought have bred upon us awaits us, too, 
 where our brothers of Europe have found it, 
 behind the quiet walls of houses of retreats. 
 In New York City the work has been on 
 foot for several years and is reaching notable 
 proportions. At St. Mary's College, Kansas, 
 an annual retreat was inaugurated some years 
 ago, and the movement grows from year to 
 year. At Santa Clara College, California, 
 the work has been going on for a number of 
 years and four retreats are given there every 
 year. The Fathers of the Divine Word at 
 Techny, 111., are also carrying on laymen's 
 retreats with gratifying fruit. At Brooklyn, 
 near Cleveland, O., and at Florissant, Mo., 
 retreats have long been given to individuals 
 and small groups of men. The Sacred Heart 
 College of Prairie du Chien, Wis., has like- 
 wise begun the work of retreats, and in the 
 South the new College of St. Charles, at 
 151
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 Grand Coteau, La., has been turned into a 
 house of retreats for laymen, during the sum- 
 mer months, at the request of many Catholic 
 citizens. 
 
 What we may hope from these good begin- 
 nings one may judge by studying the move- 
 ment at its fullest stage of development in 
 the countries of Europe. There are special 
 buildings, built with a view to the retreatants' 
 needs, roomy, pleasant and secluded, and 
 usually in the country or on the outskirts of 
 some quiet town. To these come continually 
 bands of men from city and countryside, all 
 manner of men : some of them fervent and 
 exemplary, some, it may be, on the verge of 
 making shipwreck of their faith ; wise men 
 and unlearned (for not the least hopeful ele- 
 ment in this work is its universal and demo- 
 cratic appeal) ; "gentlemen," as one list has 
 it, "farmers, youths, commercial employees, 
 workmen, students, seminarists, recruits and 
 conscripts, professors, brothers of religious 
 orders, priests !" In bands of from twenty 
 to a hundred they go through the exercises 
 of the retreat, pondering seriously the great 
 and fundamental truths, weighing and squar- 
 ing their daily lives to the measure of the 
 Faith that is in them, putting in order the 
 152
 
 r 
 
 Christ Praying with His Disciples
 
 Laymen's Retreats 
 
 things of time and providing duly for the 
 all-important issues of death and of eternity. 
 
 Then they go forth again to their homes, 
 to the office, or shop or factory, and here the 
 true work of the retreat and its efficacy are 
 seen in their lives. They are changed men. 
 They have seen a vision, and the world does 
 not look quite the same afterwards. It is a 
 holier place and a happier, and they have a 
 charm against its evils and a clue to its snares 
 and its confusions. The delusions of the 
 world and the devil and the flesh are fallen 
 from them, they have a balm against their 
 old soreness and discontent. Socialism and 
 Rationalism and Liberalism can no more 
 deceive them, while they hold clear the holy 
 reflections and the strong convictions gained 
 during the ponderings of their retreat. In a 
 word, they have been "oriented," their hearts 
 are set right and they come soberly yet joy- 
 fully to make a new start in life. 
 
 These men, filled with a new spirit and a 
 keener realization of their faith, are not con- 
 tent with their personal betterment alone. 
 They have caught a livelier zeal, they wish 
 to become apostles. Henceforth the move- 
 ment finds in them its sturdiest supporters 
 and most eager advocates. Their own experi- 
 153
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 ence guides them in the work, a very impor- 
 tant one, of inducing others to come and 
 make retreats. 
 
 It must be confessed that many men at 
 first look upon the proposal that they should 
 spend three whole days in meditation and 
 prayer with a feeling of uncertainty and 
 strangeness, not unmixed with apprehension. 
 They look upon it as an odd experiment, to 
 say the least, and dread not a little the idea 
 of spending so long a time in silence and in 
 thought. It is interesting to notice the change 
 in their attitude when one speaks to them 
 after the exercises are over. Those three 
 days were the happiest, the most interesting, 
 the most profitably spent in all their experi- 
 ence. It was not so much that the matter 
 presented to them was new much of it after 
 all they had known from their catechism days 
 but the method, the clear, strong, logical 
 development of meditation after meditation, 
 the atmosphere of retirement and peace, the 
 encouragement of their companions, not least 
 the catching enthusiasm of their director, all 
 these made the good old truths shine clearer, 
 glow warmer, burn deeper into the soul. 
 Instead of dreading the ordeal now, many 
 of them are concerned already about arrang- 
 154
 
 Laymen's Retreats 
 
 ing for its repetition, and make joyful prep- 
 aration to return each year for three days 
 more of this attractive and effective cure for 
 souls. 
 
 When we seek to explain to ourselves the 
 real nature of the Spiritual Exercises, it would 
 be hard perhaps to find a better brief charac- 
 terization of the work than this : that it is 
 in very truth a skilful and effective cure of 
 souls. We all of us know that the rush and 
 struggle of modern life goes hard with the 
 body and the mind. Perhaps we do not so 
 often pause to think that they are wearing 
 and trying too upon the strength and purity 
 of the immortal soul. It stands to reason 
 that just as the feverish excesses of the 
 present time cause men constantly to suffer 
 from brain-fag and nerve-fag, and drive them 
 into breakdowns and collapses, so those very 
 same excesses and distractions, the same 
 headlong chase after amusement and pleas- 
 ure, make the poor soul suffer and grow ailing 
 too. True, the soul cannot give such sharp 
 warning of its illness as the body does. It 
 may be perishing, or already dead with sin, 
 and no headaches rack us, we feel no keen 
 and bodily distress. But whether we are 
 conscious of it or not, just as the clang and 
 155
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 clatter of city streets jar our nerves, and its 
 smoke and dust soil our faces and hands as 
 we pass, so our souls are hurt and jarred 
 with the many noisy distractions, and soiled 
 by the murky spiritual atmosphere of the 
 world in which we are forced to live. 
 
 Now, when the body craves for repose and 
 change of scene there are broad, quiet coun- 
 try places, cheerful sanitariums, or camps in 
 the mountains, or houses by the sea, to nurse 
 our feverish bodies to health again, and heal 
 the jarred nerves and calm the whirling brain. 
 So, one may truly say, the House of Retreats, 
 quiet, pleasant and secluded, is a place of 
 calm and cure for the strained, distracted 
 soul. 
 
 This spiritual rest is, however, only one 
 side of the retreats ; for if our body craves 
 healthful exercise to vary its repose, still 
 more does our fiery and restless spirit. So 
 there is another aspect to these retreats which 
 gives them their other name, the Spiritual 
 Exercises. "Spiritual Exercises" the words 
 explain themselves, for what is it to exercise 
 our spirit, but to work with the three great 
 powers of the soul, the memory, intellect and 
 will? To work with prayer and reflection 
 and reasoning and strong resolve for this 
 156
 
 Laymen's Retreats 
 
 we enter into retreat to realize the true 
 meaning of life, the purpose of God in placing 
 us in this world, the use of the creatures He 
 has set about us, the destiny we must aim 
 at and the means by which that destiny may 
 be best attained, and to work also in taking 
 measures and forming resolves, to carry this 
 realization deep into our lives. 
 
 But the mere clamor and distraction of our 
 daily life are not always its worst peril to 
 ourselves. There are positive dangers, and 
 there are aggressive enemies. False theories 
 of religion and morals are abroad, which 
 almost without our knowing it poison our 
 thoughts, pervert our ideals, and weaken the 
 divine health and vigor of the faith within 
 us. Indifference in matters of belief, a toler- 
 ance of false ideals of family life, loose 
 morals, vile and insidious literature, false 
 standards of honesty in business, political cor- 
 ruption, an impatience of authority, Socialism, 
 a false Liberalism the enumeration of mod- 
 ern errors and perils reads like a catalogue 
 of sub-divisions of the Deadly Sins! 
 
 As a protective from this miasma, this 
 
 vaporous poison which rises from the low 
 
 places of the world, it is well at times to 
 
 climb to clearer and holier heights, and fill 
 
 157
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 one's lungs with some saving breaths of 
 unpolluted air. It is well to dwell a while 
 on the pure truths and unselfish principles of 
 Holy Faith, which are a medicine and an 
 antidote against these evils. It is this oppor- 
 tunity which retreats for laymen offer to 
 Catholic men who are in the world. 
 
 Finally, one must not confuse the idea of 
 a mission, with which we are so familiar, with 
 that of a retreat. Good and helpful as mis- 
 sions are, these retreats for the individual 
 mean something more. The very words 
 suggest the difference. For a "mission" 
 means a sending. God's messenger is sent 
 to us to exhort and to arouse us. We come 
 together for a while each day to hear his 
 instruction and to pray, and then we per- 
 force go home or about our business, so that 
 we are in great danger of growing distracted 
 and even perhaps of forgetting, in other cares, 
 the holy message we have heard. But in a 
 retreat we ourselves retire from the din and 
 bustle of our daily lives to give ourselves 
 entirely, without distraction, to intimate con- 
 verse with our Creator. We arise from our 
 daily tasks and go apart to God. Not that 
 a retreat is a lonely experience, for there are 
 many together and we profit by companion- 
 158
 
 Laymen's Retreats 
 
 ship and good example. But we keep much 
 to ourselves and very near to God. 
 
 It is needless to say that the Holy Father, 
 in common with zealous Churchmen and far- 
 seeing Catholics of every state, has given his 
 earnest and repeated encouragement to so 
 apostolic a work. It is, as he has said (in a 
 letter to the director of one of the European 
 houses of retreats), one of the chief means 
 which he looks to for the fulfilling of his holy 
 purpose "to make all things new in Christ." 
 And on another occasion he declared even 
 more definitely and strongly: "I wish to be 
 the Pope of retreats." 
 
 We Catholics of America cannot do better 
 then, than further this earnest wish of the 
 Sovereign Pontiff by the offering of our good 
 works and prayers. Nor need we pause at 
 good desires alone. There are many ways 
 of actively aiding the work. To go oneself 
 to one of the centres already established, or 
 to persuade another to go there and enter 
 upon a retreat ; to offer contributions to these 
 centres in aid of the building of houses for 
 this special purpose, to contribute, as is done 
 in Europe, to pay the wages of workingmen 
 while they are in retreat, to organize bands 
 of retreatants and spread the knowledge of 
 159
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 the movement even to those outside the faith 
 (for a belief in the fundamental doctrines of 
 Christianity is all that is required to make the 
 retreat useful even to a zealous Protestant), 
 these are some of the many ways which open 
 up before the individual's zeal. If one aids 
 the work now in its infancy, he will feel a 
 noble pride when in God's providence houses 
 for retreats are spread throughout the land; 
 like so many fortresses of Christian zeal and 
 virtue, or rather like other cenacles where the 
 Holy Spirit descends to kindle and inflame 
 the hearts of men. 
 
 160
 
 A COMMONPLACE WONDER 
 
 W AST night I was present at the ending 
 JLv of the three days' retreat of a Young 
 Men's Sodality. A very commonplace occa- 
 sion. But it was the memory of the circular 
 of a great non-Catholic proselytizing society, 
 read not long before, that cast for us a mys- 
 tical and tender glory about the ending of 
 that retreat. 
 
 The circular had been sadly eloquent of 
 what "they" are doing, and we, it seems, find 
 it so hard to do. There were tales of great 
 gymnasia, and reading rooms in crowded 
 cities, and halls in lonely villages; of railroad 
 libraries and sailors' rests in home and 
 foreign ports. There were lists of lecture 
 courses, and Bible classes ; and figures which 
 dealt with brick and stone and money and 
 games and books. And to be sure, the ques- 
 tion rose in our mind, as it has in many minds 
 before: Why cannot we, with our faith, 
 with our clear vision of the need, with our 
 sorrow for perverse proselytizing, and zeal 
 for conversions to the one true Faith, why 
 cannot we make such boasts as these? 
 
 Some hours later I stood in the rear of a 
 161
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 Sodality Hall and listened to the closing 
 words of the retreat. There, crowded 
 together on the not luxurious benches, 
 listened a throng of men various in nearly 
 every respect, but they all were Catholics 
 and earnest souls. No social pleasure nor 
 fine equipment, nor sports nor books helped 
 at all to gather them together for these three 
 days of thought and prayer. But they had 
 been coming in just such throngs from office 
 and store, and workshop and factory, to listen 
 to the soberest truths of Faith, Death, Judg- 
 ment, Hell and Heaven. And they listened 
 humbly, piously, with honest and reverent 
 eyes. 
 
 After this last instruction there was to be 
 an admission of candidates, and a crowd of 
 young men, bright-eyed, vigorous fellows, 
 knelt at the railing and recited a simple Act 
 of Consecration, and were given the medal of 
 the Sodality. What did that mean? That 
 these young men, with the flush of their hot 
 youth in them, and the spell of the world all 
 about them, were joining a society which aims 
 first and almost exclusively at unearthly 
 things. They were pledging themselves to 
 monthly Communion, with all that means of 
 a steady will and strong pursuit of heavenly- 
 162
 
 A Commonplace Wonder 
 
 mindedness. They were promising to try 
 and keep their hearts as clean and their lives 
 as innocent as becomes the sworn sons of a 
 stainless Mother, who is crowned Queen of 
 all Virgins, here and in the Heavens. 
 
 Then my reverie grew, and I saw in that 
 self-same city other such sodalities, each 
 with the same bright, unearthly aim, the 
 same more than natural promises, and the 
 same various membership of energetic, hot- 
 blooded men, exposed every day and hour 
 to the full blast and flame of this world's 
 wickedness. Then I saw sodalities in other 
 cities, other countries, other continents ! The 
 strangeness, the superhuman strangeness and 
 beauty of it all dawned slowly upon me, from 
 the commonplace forms and work-a-day sur- 
 roundings. These men move in a world 
 which sneers at unworldliness, smiles at 
 simple faith and yearns for the sensible and 
 the delightful, for what it can touch and 
 grasp and see. Yet they are not moved to 
 their hard and pure allegiance to the Queen 
 of Heaven by much present gain or genial 
 fellowship, or bright assembly rooms, or 
 social gatherings. They like all these things 
 
 and have them, in some measure, and it is 
 very desirable no doubt that they should 
 
 163
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 have them more and more. But the beauty 
 and glory of their fellowship lies just in this : 
 that it is independent of all temporal gain, 
 an unpurchased fealty, a supernatural service 
 surely a high and holy and a strange 
 phenomenon in this sadducean world. 
 
 I lifted my head. The bricks and stones 
 and books and games good and worthy helps 
 though they are did not shine quite so 
 brightly now, beside the glory of those many 
 forms bowed at the shrine of Mary. A touch 
 of true unworldliness this after all is rare 
 and wonderful on the earth! 
 
 164
 
 ONE ASPECT OF OUR PUBLIC 
 LIBRARIES 
 
 THOUGH great zeal is being shown here 
 and there, the question still remains in 
 general most pertinent: "Why do not we 
 Catholics make more use of the public libraries 
 of our great cities to spread a proper knowl- 
 edge of the truths of Holy Faith?" 
 
 If one thinks a moment, the opportunities 
 they offer seem singular and attractive enough 
 to stir the zeal of the coldest. The shelves 
 of our great libraries are open, generally 
 speaking, to any sort of useful and interest- 
 ing book, be its theological or philosophic 
 color what it may. Day after day, the keen- 
 est, most alert and eager of the city's students 
 come to search the rows of books and the 
 cards of the catalogues for information on 
 all manner of topics history, science, 
 sociology, letters, art all the wide range of 
 subjects in which atheism, materialism, and 
 a host of minor 'isms wage war against 
 Mother Church. While they find the non- 
 Catholic or even the anti -religious side well 
 stated in many bulky volumes, they too often 
 get the Catholic view only in the half- 
 165
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 comprehending interpretations of its sternest 
 enemies. 
 
 To realize what a great loss this may be 
 to the interests of the Faith, you need only 
 watch the earnestness with which these 
 seekers after information pursue their 
 search. Like a good hound on the scent, 
 you may see such a man following the trail 
 of his subject through all the devious ways 
 of catalogues and shelves. Indifferent to dust 
 and toil, he handles volume after volume, he 
 fingers indices, he hunts through files of 
 ancient magazines, he spares no time or 
 pains to rummage out cross-reference and 
 quotation which may help him to swell his 
 essay or ornament his critique. 
 
 Jew, atheist or Christian sage, such a man 
 will read any author duly who treats of his 
 cherished theme, and his mind is often too 
 earnest after fact not to spring easily beyond 
 the pales of bigotry; too thirsty with pursuit 
 not to drink up any honest words which 
 promise him the pleasant flavor of the truth. 
 
 Now, if you could only put before such a 
 man, in such a favorable moment, the very 
 book he needs to help him to a knowledge of 
 that truth; if you could place in his hands 
 a Catholic author, who has well said in his 
 166
 
 One Aspect of Our Public Libraries 
 
 earnest pages just what will enlighten and 
 perhaps persuade, and bring the Catholic 
 doctrine home, would you not think it worth 
 a great deal of painstaking and toil? Yet, 
 the thing is as simple as day. We all have 
 the means constantly, so to speak, at our very 
 elbow you need only go to the library and 
 recommend the purchase of that book. 
 
 The librarian and his corps of assistants 
 will look with greater or less interest on 
 your suggestion, according as they think the 
 book you recommend more or less likely to 
 be useful and welcome to the public they seek 
 to serve. In many cases, if past experience 
 may be relied upon, they will be thankful for 
 the suggestion and take measures to procure 
 the volume and enroll it in the catalogue, 
 cross-referencing it in several ways. And 
 thenceforth, for many years, your patient 
 messenger will stand ready to offer itself to 
 any inquirer on the subjects with which it 
 deals, appealing to all comers without weari- 
 ness or reserve, doing good deeds for you 
 long, perhaps, after you have left the world. 
 
 Here one might pause to wonder how 
 
 very few distinctly Catholic books appear 
 
 among the gifts to our great city libraries. 
 
 Tn many of our Catholic homes there are 
 
 167
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 scores of excellent works honored and dis- 
 used which gather dust from year's end to 
 year's end without there being the slightest 
 prospect in their present surroundings of 
 their ever reaching any mortal eye. What 
 an excellent idea it would be to take these 
 volumes to some library which is open to 
 the public, where they would be honorably 
 lodged, catalogued each under its respective 
 subjects, and put in the way of enlightening 
 many minds! We are all coming to realize 
 more and more what a fruitful and noble 
 work of charity it is to give even to a single 
 individual a worthy Catholic book, with its 
 wealth of possibilities for spiritual good. 
 Surely, then, to offer the same precious 
 opportunity to a whole city, to the most 
 interested and most influential minds of a 
 whole community, is a work of still more 
 admirable zeal. 
 
 Nor should we fear unduly any resentment 
 or resistance on the part of the library 
 authorities in this effort of ours to gain a fair 
 representation of Catholic books upon their 
 shelves. For libraries are for the people 
 and we Catholics often form the majority of 
 readers. Again, libraries are for information, 
 and on what topic is copious and accurate 
 1G8
 
 One Aspect of Our Public Libraries 
 
 information more essential than on the 
 Catholic Church, the greatest religious 
 fact of all the world. 
 
 Viewed in this light, then, the apathetic 
 attitude of many even among our more highly 
 educated Catholics toward this matter of intro- 
 ducing Catholic books is lamentable indeed. 
 Time and time again they come into the 
 libraries seeking information on points of 
 literature, history, science, and what not, 
 which they had far rather gain from some 
 writer in sympathy with their own traditions 
 and beliefs. They, too, like the other eager 
 searchers, run through the catalogues, and 
 hunt the shelves, and find the same elegant 
 profusion of the standard works of free- 
 thinker, Protestant and Jew, with only here 
 and there some antiquated volume which 
 bears a welcome and familiar Catholic name. 
 And so, to gain the information they wish, 
 they must needs choose out what seems the 
 least objectionable work, and turn over its 
 alien pages in a dissatisfied sort of way, trying 
 to make proper allowance for the author's 
 religious bias, and to pick out the desired 
 grain of information from the mass of 
 mingled error and truth. 
 
 Then, sad to say, quite oblivious to the 
 169
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 suggestion box or printed suggestion form 
 which is provided for just such cases as this, 
 the disappointed seeker commonly walks 
 forth in some disgust, murmuring, it may be. 
 at the lack of Catholic energy and spirit, but 
 never dreaming of urging his common right 
 as a citizen, and of providing for future 
 Catholic students books that they can trust 
 and use. Surely, our horizon is too improvi- 
 dently narrow, when, in such a case, we look 
 only to our own, and that, too, our present 
 need. We may wish to consult reliable books 
 on these same topics again and others surely 
 will. 
 
 A word or two might be added here on the 
 special opportunities possessed in this matter 
 by Catholic teachers, especially of the higher 
 classes. They often have occasion to give to 
 their students lists of references, on the 
 matter in hand, on philosophy, or letters, or 
 history, and so on through the list, which 
 are to be called for by the students at the 
 public library. Of course, the report comes 
 back that this book or the other is to be had, 
 but that the rest, and perhaps the ones most 
 valuable as references, are "not in the 
 catalogue." 
 
 Now, what could be more natural and 
 170
 
 One Aspect of Our Public Libraries 
 
 proper (and will some one add, in cynical 
 parenthesis "more unusual") than that the 
 said professor should write to the librarian, 
 mentioning the deficiency he has discovered, 
 stating the merit of the work desired, and 
 its usefulness in his own classes, and asking 
 that it be procured? Such a request from 
 such a source would carry double weight. 
 
 We have now run over, briefly and in a 
 cursory way, some of the more obvious and 
 easy ways in which Catholic books may be 
 introduced in proper proportion to the readers 
 of the "public libraries" of the land. With 
 even a moderate activity along these lines, 
 how quickly the situation would improve! 
 
 Once the book is safely bought and cata- 
 logued, one's zeal need not rest there. A 
 word to this one or that who is interested 
 in the subject matter will give the work a 
 present circulation, so that one good deed 
 may bear fruit in many more. This sort of 
 work might well be introduced among the 
 enterprises of Catholic clubs and sodalities. 
 If we were to accustom our children to take 
 interest in such things we would not hear so 
 many complaints, when they grow older, of 
 their indifference toward Catholic literature. 
 
 What has been said of books might well be 
 171
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 repeated of Catholic papers and magazines. 
 It is quite exasperating, when one considers 
 that we Catholics form so large a part of the 
 population of our American cities, to come 
 into the reading-room of a public library, 
 where there is a whole host of publications 
 of every stamp, and find, perhaps, but a 
 single one of the many excellent Catholic 
 magazines which this country and England 
 now afford. Here again concerted action on 
 the part of Catholics would readily procure 
 a fair sprinkling at least of Catholic 
 periodicals. 
 
 Perhaps at this point some one may be 
 wondering: "But how is one to know of 
 these good Catholic books?" Not a very 
 creditable query, surely, considering how well 
 informed many of us are on alien publica- 
 tions, but a very practical one, and therefore 
 to be squarely met. Generally, one might 
 answer: "Take an especial interest in the 
 work of writers of your own faith, glance 
 now and then through the catalogues of 
 Catholic publishers, who are yearly adding 
 some valuable new works, and reprints of 
 older ones, to their lists ; speak on the subject 
 with others better informed than yourself, 
 read the reviews of recent books in Catholic 
 172
 
 One Aspect of Our Public Libraries 
 
 magazines, in a word, use all the means one 
 ordinarily tries to gather information about 
 books." Doubtless, when you have finished 
 your search, two things will have impressed 
 you deeply : first, the goodly number of 
 valuable works by Catholic authors that exist, 
 and then your surprising slowness in not 
 having found them out before. 
 
 Now to close with a somewhat disagree- 
 able admonition perhaps the most necessary 
 caution in a matter of this kind is that each 
 one should look on the duty of spreading a 
 knowledge of Catholic books as personal to 
 himself, and not pass it on, mentally, to other 
 hands. This habit of trusting that every good 
 work of the kind we mention may be some- 
 how done by someone else is, perhaps, the 
 most distressing element of the listless atti- 
 tude taken by so many Catholics on urgent 
 issues of the day. With such a principle, 
 how is there any hope of spreading duly our 
 precious message of the truth? It is only 
 by each one's doing honestly his little part 
 that the grand sum of noble effort which God 
 so evidently requires of the Catholics of this 
 generation can ever worthily be paid. 
 
 The earnest attempts in this line, made 
 here and there by the zealous, may result
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 very well in their own limited field and for 
 a certain time, but it is only when educated 
 Catholics as a whole awaken from their 
 present apathy to a sense of individual duty 
 and responsibility, that any great and lasting 
 good will be achieved. Surely when the 
 forces of evil show such fearless zeal and 
 tireless energy in spreading far and wide 
 their false and dangerous doctrines, he must 
 be a paltry soldier of Christ who will not do 
 even the little that he can to speed to the 
 waiting millions the sacred message of our 
 ancient Faith. 
 
 174
 
 A SUMMER OPPORTUNITY 
 
 TPIE idea came to me in this wise. I 
 was surveying with deep interest from 
 the organ-loft the last exercises of a Chil- 
 dren's Mission. Truly it was a touching 
 sight. There were two hundred or more 
 little heads bobbing in the benches, the girls 
 to the left, the boys to the right, for all the 
 world like lively little flowers. 
 
 They were demure and interested, too, 
 and when two or three little buds in a 
 secluded spot began to nod rather too vio- 
 lently, I saw one of the older lads put forth 
 an admonitory arm and bring them back to 
 an admired meekness and propriety. Good 
 little lads and lasses ! They had come, some 
 of them, many a mile over rough country 
 roads and by-ways; and their attention and 
 sobriety would in the main have done credit 
 to a gathering of their elders. It was plain 
 that they were drawing excellent profit from 
 these precious days of the Children's Retreat. 
 
 Such a sight will send one's thoughts trav- 
 eling, and mine set forth something after 
 this fashion. "What well-behaved, attentive, 
 dutiful little boys and girls these seem, to be 
 175
 
 Your Neighbor and YOB 
 
 sure! Are not our Catholic country children 
 growing more and more refined and gentle 
 year by year? Surely it is so in general, and 
 those who have to do with our little ones 
 rejoice in the change. The roughness and 
 rudeness which were sometimes so much in 
 evidence in earlier days have lessened notably ; 
 our children in the main are measurably more 
 docile, more courteous and responsive than 
 in the not-so-very-long-ago. 
 
 "If anyone doubts this," so my medita- 
 tions continued "let him contrast, for exam- 
 ple, the country Catechism classes of to-day 
 with those of former times. True, even now 
 we have our scapegraces, but on the whole 
 is it not a pleasure rather than a drudgery to 
 teach the little ones their faith? And was it 
 always so?" And just here came a sharp 
 pang of a thought which gave me woe. "But 
 then/' said I, "how sad it is that so many of 
 these good little country children have so 
 little opportunity to learn their Catechism as 
 they should f" 
 
 "For however zealous the parish priest 
 may be, the children often live miles away, 
 and it is hard to get them all together often 
 enough to make Catechism teaching quite 
 thorough and complete. And again many of 
 176
 
 A Summer Opportunity 
 
 our Catholic families dwell in some far-off 
 corner where a priest comes only once or 
 twice a month." And then came the idea! 
 a happy one, I hope, and surely not too new 
 or strange ; which is hinted at in the title 
 words: "A Summer Opportunity." 
 
 Many of our good Catholic folk, some men 
 and many women, go a-summering to the 
 homes of these country children or to near- 
 by hotels and cottages. These good Catholic 
 folk are sometimes weary and yawn a little 
 and sigh for occupation. Perhaps they love 
 children, and talk pleasant nothings to them 
 to while away the time. What an opportunity 
 to teach them a bit of Catechism, to gather 
 a pleasant little class together, and win their 
 everlasting gratitude, if not here at least here- 
 after, by giving them more and more of the 
 precious treasure of the Faith ! As a stranger 
 they will give you the warmer welcome, and 
 you may influence them more perhaps than 
 do their elders whom they see all the year. 
 And if you can do only a little, do not let 
 even a little part of such an opportunity 
 escape you. It is only little in seeming. Who 
 can tell what good one does when he teaches 
 one tiny child one tiny prayer? "For their 
 angels see the face of God," and "whosoever 
 177
 
 Your Neighbor and You 
 
 does it to the least of these My little ones 
 does it to Me." 
 
 One need not dwell very much on so 
 obvious a train of thought. Look up from 
 the. page, dear reader, and let your own 
 reflections wander in this strain. And indeed 
 why should we call this merely a summer 
 opportunity? Whenever anyone has leisure 
 and can find a little child, he has an* occasion 
 ready to his hand, such as a Guardian Angel 
 might sigh for with desire. There may be 
 lads and lasses near the door of your city 
 dwelling who are as much in need of religious 
 teaching from you as any country child that 
 lives remote among the woods and fields. 
 Alas, the thickets and wildernesses are not 
 the only homes of ignorance! Poor little 
 waifs of the streets, poor little waifs of our 
 city institutions ! Will not our zealous 
 Catholic men and women steal the time 
 even from their busy" days to tell you, too, 
 of Jesus and Mary, and to teach your yearn- 
 ing little hearts to love and seek your Father 
 who is in Heaven ? 
 
 The prudent Shepherd of Christendom has 
 
 laid an especial emphasis in these latter days 
 
 on the teaching of Catechism; and this most 
 
 wisely, as we all agree. We are too apt to 
 
 178
 
 A Summer Opportunity 
 
 think of his advice as pointing directly and 
 almost exclusively to the appointed guides 
 and pastors of the Fold. They are the leaders 
 and the principals in the work, to be sure, but 
 any well-instructed Catholic may be their 
 prized and helpful adjutant in a work which 
 truly knows no bounds. It would be a happy 
 thing if every one of us were constantly to 
 see, in the need of our little ones for cate- 
 chetl'cal teaching, a golden opportunity, for 
 Summer in particular, and then, too, for all 
 the livelong yearl 
 
 179
 
 BY THE 
 SAME AUTHOR 
 
 A BOOK OF DEVOUT 
 
 POEMS FOR ALL THE 
 
 YEAR 
 
 139pp. 12mo.i GUt Top 
 PRICE PER COPY $1.00
 
 000711 538 9