The education of women of this type implies the laying of solid foundations and must include some discussions of the questions which agitate the outer world. No Catholic atmosphere we can arrange will exclude these questions from the minds of girls who have left school. They are laid on our breakfast tables with the newspaper-are overheard in railway trains and tram cars; they filter through the novel and magazine into every home in the land. And if they did not, we might miss our incentive to work. Yet with that cry from Macedon, My voice is crying in their cry: "Help ye the dying lest you die." If the introduction to false conceptions of life is anticipated while a girl is still under the influence of her school, she can be helped to discriminate between good and evil in subtle forms, and to have her powers of thought and sense of responsibility trained. Later she may have slipped from under any influence and may be far from help. We Catholics need to send young women out into the world in love with knighterrantry, eager to ride abroad redressing social ills, longing to atone for the untold evil women have wrought. If we give them this field for enthusiasm, they will not employ the storedup energy of youth in the excitement of coquetting with temptation. Should not this awakening of sympathies be a part of education in the later years of school life? Bishop Spalding says: "But true religion is life and thought and love and ceaseless striving for deeper insight and more unselfish conduct. If we were more alive in mind, in heart, and in conscience, we should be able to do almost incredible things to bring the Kingdom of God to multitudes who wander bewildered and lost because there is no one to throw about them the light which Christ came to kindle. Not the priest alone is his minister; we are all his servants and the servants of all for whom he died, if we are not recreant and false." We must endeavor to foster a wider esprit de corps among all Catholic women, and an enthusiasm for using every means of intellectual advance, that they may be better fitted to influ ence others. I am much struck by some of the associations and guilds that are springing up in non-Catholic but Christian circles in England. They seem well aimed against some of the bad tendencies of the times. One in particular I will describe, for a Catholic guild on similar lines might have a far-reaching influence. It is called the "Guild of Good Service," is under the patronage of the Anglican Bishop of London, and is connected with the magazine called The Girls' Realm. Young women and girls, who have more money than they actually need for their own wants, subscribe regularly to a fund, which is employed in helping girls of the professional and upper classes, whose parents are poor, to some training which shall fit them for a start in life. It is, in fact, applying the spirit of charity, which has long been directed to orphans and children of the poorest classes, to those of the class upon which social conditions press very hardly at present. The idea is not to supplement school fees, but to help a girl to some technical training when she leaves school which will fit her to earn a living. Those who have remarkable artistic gifts are enabled to develop them. The cases of applicants for grants are carefully considered by a committee who recommend them to the voters. All subscribers have a vote. The names of applicants appear only under initials, both on the voting papers and in the published list of the successful. The use which recipients of grants make of their opportunities and their after successes continues to be chronicled in the magazine. In this way the interests of rich and leisured girls are enlarged, they are helped to acquire imaginative sympathies with lives less fortunate than their own, and to take a pride and pleasure in the gifts of others. Upon the Catholic middle class the social pressure falls the most heavily of all. According to the teaching of our faith, the Catholic parent must not shrink from the bearing of many children. An income that will efficiently educate three will not educate nine; and the children of these classes are often obliged to bury their talents and perhaps to sink into a condition below the one into which they were born. In the case of girls this state of things often involves temptations, the thought of which must make the heart of the parent ache. Now the Catholic body needs educated women, and the best intellectual material is usually found in the class which is compelled by circumstances to use mental faculties at full pressure. If the effort to help others entails a little economy and contrivance on the part of those exempt from labor, what a boon for them, since the worst feature of their lot is often the absence of any stimulus to exertion. Why should we not have such a Catholic guild? Or if not this, can we not inaugurate one that will tend to awaken new philanthropic zeal in women, effective because directed to the needs of the day and calculated to cultivate the qualities of character most needed as a corrective to prevailing weaknesses. When we Catholic women realize our corporate strength and, standing shoulder to shoulder, are prepared to share one another's burdens to a fuller extent, we shall be bringing help to Macedon. Wake heart and will to hear their cry: STUDIES ON FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. BY M. D. PETRE. I. A LIFE MILITANT. HE title of this first essay may surprise those who are used to regard Nietzsche as the apostle of decadence, of egoism, of anti-moralism, of anti-Christianity. And yet, since we would naturally wish to strike the keynote of a man's life and character in one's first words about him, I can think of him only, in this place, as, above all else, a fighter. We can sum up his philosophy under the title of one of his posthumous works, and say that it all deals finally with The Will to be Strong; and we can sum up his life, in like manner, under a single heading, and say that it was, throughout, an assertion of strength, a prolonged effort at the mastery of self and the conquest of everything else. That this fighting instinct was often most mistakenly employed need not lessen our belief in the pluck and determination of the fighter; we can admit the courage of the soldier, though we may not always sympathize with his cause. Nor would it, I think, be possible to spend a certain time in fair-minded study of the works and life of Nietzsche without drawing therefrom, not only admiration for his genius, but also kindness, if not personal love, for the character therein displayed. If a great spiritual-minded philosopher, like Professor Rudolf Eucken, of Jena, can speak with affectionate sympathy of his many great qualities, and with tender indulgence of his intellectual exaggerations and mistakes, we too may hope to find in the works and life-story of this tragic figure something to learn and something to admire, as well as something to criticise and condemn. It was a life, from first to last, of purity, integrity, utter unworldliness, and detachment from all low interests. It was a strenuous life, a suffering life, an unselfish life. (Yes; though he was the philosopher of egoism!) It was a life devoid of common pleasures and de voted to an ideal; it was, in the truest sense of the word, though not from religious motives, an ascetical life. His one great fault was, indeed, that which is recognized as the besetting danger of the ascetic-he was proud. We find this pride, tender and embryonic, in his younger days, and the grain of mustard seed has grown to a mighty tree in his later years. And with pride came, as usual, its own chastisement-blind. ness and limitations. The light of that brilliant mind was extinguished before the world at large had come to recognize its existence. His interest in this life was extinguished before he became a name, on the lips of those who knew him not, as well as of those who knew him. But, by a not unaccountable Nemesis, this intellectual aristocrat has been lifted on the shoulders of the very crowd he despised. Along with more distinguished and appreciative recognition he who, in principle and conduct, was anti-decadent, has become the archpriest of the decadents. He who thought a man's pride was his strength, has been adored by the weak; the anti-feminist has become a favorite amongst women; he who boasted (and with truth) that he was a mountain-climber, "Berg-steiger "; he who lived with his own Zarathoustra on the heights; he who fought the world and his enemies and his friends, but who fought himself more than all, has been venerated and invoked as the patron saint of those who, consistently and deliberately, follow the line of least resistance; who confine themselves, as it has been said, "to the sunny side of the garden"; who teach that whatever is easiest is best. Poor Nietzsche! he went through much self-conquest to be upheld as the teacher of self-indulgence; he did hard things to become the supposed advocate of easy ones. Nor is the reason so very far to seek, if we consider his deeds along with his philosophy. In those things wherein he had to overcome himself, he was stringent in his injunctions to others to do likewise; but there were whole tracts of life in which he had no personal experience of temptation or wrong-doing, and in such matters his principle of self-assertion was easily transformed into a doctrine of self-indulgence and license. He had to overcome himself in the endurance of sickness and pain and depression, and he has taught us noble lessons upon this subject; but, on the other hand, he had an instinctive loathing |