of the Besso, and the converted Huns fell on their knees before the uplifted cross, the church bells of Vissoie rang out a joyous peal, and the audience, rising to its feet, sang the Te Deum in thanksgiving for the triumph of the Christian faith. They were as pleased about it, as if it had happened yesterday. "Le théatre en Valais," says an old chronicler, "est l'école de vertus."

On this occasion, as on every other which offers an opportunity, there was a procession through the village streets and down the mountain side. The ancient Egyptian was not more wedded to the delights of a procession than is the modern Valaisan. All seasons afford them excuse for this harmless diversion, which gains dignity from the antiquity of the custom, and picturesqueness from the extraordinary beauty of the surroundings. There is a procession in early summer for the blessing of "les bisses"-the canals which irrigate the pastures. There are processions from township to township through the Vallée d'Anniviers on Rogation days; and the villages of Ayer and Saint-Jean have, from time immemorial, furnished the food -bread, cheese, and wine-which is eaten by the participants. There is a procession on the 16th of August in honor of St. Théodule, patron of vineyards; and a bunch of ripening grapes, tied to a cross, is carried at its head. There is a procession in June, when the cattle are solemnly blessed, before being sent to the high pasture lands where many dangers await them. For three months they browse on the steep inclines, and the milk is made into the great cheeses upon which the sturdy Valaisan lives and grows strong of limb. In the Vallée d'Anniviers there is one day appointed, on which all the milk is set sacredly aside for the "Cure's cheeses." These are marked with a chalice, and are carried down to Vissoie in mid-August, and piled in the sacristy of the Church. Thence they find their way to the scattered villages, whose pastors fare as hardly as their flocks. The fat, sleek cleric, forever dear to the satirist, has yet to be encountered in Valais.

For a "plentiful poverty" abides in this bleak land, and she has set her seal upon the mountaineers. The plainness of their gala dress, contrasting sharply with the rich, gay costumes of the Vaudois; their low chalets-so picturesque a feature of the landscape, but so eminently uncomfortable as homes; the bare

simplicity of their daily lives; the absence of decoration everywhere; all tell of poverty bravely endured, and so common it is scarcely deemed a hardship. Beggars there are none. It is not the custom of the Swiss to beg, and the Valaisan would take shame to ask ought of a stranger. Rather is he minded to give; and I have had a peasant woman, sitting on the hillside, offer me a portion of her bread and cheese with charming courtesy and kindness. Once, watching a pair of strolling musicians who were wearily climbing the steep road to Zinal, I wondered what harvest they could hope to glean; and why, with the cold September night settling swiftly down upon the valley, they had wandered so far afield. My companion, an Anglican clergyman and a true mountaineer, laughed at my concern. "They are all right," he said. "You and I will give them some money, and-this is not Vaud, but Valais. There is not a house nor a hut by the roadside that will not take them in."

It was the finest comment on the situation. "He is rich," says Sir Thomas Browne, "who hath enough to be charitable, and it is hard to be so poor that a noble mind may not find its way to this piece of goodness."

"COME O'ER AND HELP US."

BY MARGARET FLETCHER.

ZOME of our English newspapers devote a few columns daily-during the summer holiday season -to discussions on domestic and family ethics. By this device a little ferment of thought is raised among a class of people who seldom have time for reflection. Letters flow in which, if they are not very closely reasoned and not very wise, have the value of human documents. The chosen topics have been growing more serious, until this year we have had "The Decay of Domesticity" and "The Dwindling Birth-Rate." Much of the correspondence shows a restless and feverish intelligence, and but little vigor and courage in the face of life. The whole of it witnesses to the marked decline of definite religious belief. Religion would seem seem to be no longer reckoned with as a restraining and controlling power. With no common basis and no definite goal, these discussions only serve to illustrate the drifting ideas of the majority. They do not make cheerful reading, and, while following them, there has been stealing up from some dim recesses of my memory the refrain of a hymn heard long ago, a mission hymn sung to a grave, swinging

tune:

Through midnight gloom from Macedon,

The cry of myriads as of one;
The voiceful silence of despair

Is eloquent in awful prayer;

The souls' exceeding bitter cry:
"Come o'er and help us, or we die."

How mournfully it echoes on

For half the earth is Macedon !

Unconsciously the cry of half the civilized earth goes up

in witness to spiritual starvation. It goes up to the Church. of Christ, and Catholics have the power to help. And yet we are a small body and likely to be a quiet and a passive one. Are we as effective as we might be? Do we leave an impress upon society that is in proportion to our numbers? There seems to be a growing feeling that we do not; not because of the lack of a brilliant few, but because of the absence of certain qualities in the rank and file of our laity. It is the average Catholic in the world who first ploughs the furrow into which the missionary can drop the seed.

I venture to suggest that we are apt to be too timid and too unpractical in bringing up young people. We cannot hope to influence our times if we do not understand them. A Catholic atmosphere is the priceless accompaniment of a Christian education. But since, as a body, we stand to the modern world very much as the early Christians stood to pagan Rome, if we produce types of character which need a continuation of this atmosphere for their maintenance, we fail as educators.

Under the present conditions such an atmosphere can only be generated in a social set at the price of ignorance of, or indifference to, what is going on outside. Should we not rather aim at generating the Catholic atmosphere, which the early Christians carried within them and diffused into dark places? Their's was the type of character that conquered paganism, and that without the help of what we understand today as Catholic atmosphere. So many of the pious books placed in the hands of the young strike a note of timidity at the outset, and dwell upon flight from the world and thoughts of death. But the young have something to do before they die; they have to live, and if we do not teach them to live nobly, we are are not teaching them to die well. We teach them to fly from the "world" as a spirit; do we teach them as well to labor and serve in the world, which is God's vineyard? If we stir enthusiasm in a young heart for promoting Christ's Kingdom in the modern world, and enlist a youth in some practical social service which demands some sacrifice, we have surely strengthened him in the hour of temptation more effectually than by countless warnings against the attractions and allurements of sin.

And to be more definite: Are Catholic women in the world

the centres of influences they might be? Through the discussions I have been reading, one note persisted, first struck in Eden long ago, and quite audible to-day: "The woman gave me and I did eat." In sober earnest the majority of writers laid the whole burden of social ills upon the shoulders of woman. That note would not have persisted as it has unless it expressed a measure of truth. The power of woman is increased, and to-day we behold that power run riot a little.

The spectacle of uncontrolled force, even spiritual force, is an ugly one. To take the fiction of the last twenty years, what an indictment could be brought against the women writers of two continents for the zeal with which they have worked to de-Christianize society! Admitting the solid progress that has been made in woman's position, the fact remains, that those who have led her forward have not been sure of their goal.

They have trained her intellect and starved her spirit, while they dreamed of some ideal age which these changes should usher in. An idealist woman will always be, and she is capable of following false philosophies with the self-sacrifice of a saint and the mental vision of the unbalanced. When her ideal is individualism and materialism, we find her heading blindly for moral destruction, and quite confident that the dawn lies over the horizon. She has drunk in the false reasoning which preached the practises whose fruit we call "racial suicide"; and while she sins, she persuades herself that she acts in the interests of progress. And the stream of this progress is swollen and swept along by all the selfishness and cowardice in human nature. She is no longer content to follow the taste of an individual man, but she is tricked into following the ideals of man at the cost of self-destruction.

For the truth is, when woman is in touch with God, her spirituality is a great force and she is capable of leading man. When she is not, man inevitably leads her. For, the strength of the spirit excepted, she remains in other ways the weaker. There is a need for the presence in the midst of society, not of an exact repetition of any previous type of woman, but of a "new woman" who is new in Christ. Catholicism alone can produce her. The Catholic Church alone has the ideal pattern. and the living grace which can breathe the true spirit into expanding knowledge.