GOING TO SCHOOL

New Zealand Tablet, 30 October 1913, Page 61

GOING TO SCHOOL

Some time ago a correspondent called on Cardinal Gibbons and asked him to say a few words to prospective pupils. His Eminence answered promptly and to the point, as usual. 'You ask me,' he said, 'to say something to the young people of America who are about to take up their studies again. I would say to them: Do what you are doing. Concentrate your mind and heart on what is before you. The secret of study is -concentration. When Sir Isaac Newton was asked how he had made his wonderful discoveries, he replied- "By always thinking unto them. If I have done the public any service," he said, "it is due to nothing but industry and patient thought." 'And Newton at school stood next to the bottom of his class in the early part of his course, but by study and perseverance he rose to the front rank among his companions. ' Persevering labor is the key to knowledge The great men of literature, philosophy, and art have been indefatigable workers. ' Fenelon wrote his Telemachus eighteen times before he gave it to the press. Virgil worked for ten years on his Mneid, and even then it fell so far short of his ideal that when he felt his death approaching he ordered two of his friends to burn the manuscript But happily, the Emperor Augustus intervened and tne classic was saved. 'lt is said that seven years elapsed from the da Y that Gray began his Elegy until he had finished it, Dante began the Divina Gommedia nearly thirty years before he completed it. ' A friend, after reading a short stanza of Tennyson s, said to him: "Surely this verse did not cost you much study. The words flow so smoothly that •> y , (^r fc £ ave come spontaneously to your mind." ffr i < j JSo answered Tennyson quietly, "I have smoked a box of cigars over those four lines." • • In -n 1 8,?? I heard r - Dicken s give a public reading in Baltimore, and I imagined he read extracts from his own writings without previous preparation. But it is said that when asked once to read a new selection he excused himself on the ground that he had not toe to prepare himself, as he was in the habit of reading a piece once a day for six months before reading it in public. ; Constant application, that is the secret of success in studies. And let our young people remember

that no man can contend by proxy in the area of intellectual strife. He must there fight his own battles. ' And while we are on this subject may I say that I hope the teachers of our youth—those who are the constituted guardians of their pupils, in loco 'parentis —will gain the heart of every member of his class, for he who gains the heart easily commands the attention of the mind. ' Let our young people now at school also remember that they cannot in any pecuniary way compensate their devoted teachers for the pleasures of the intellect, imagination, and memory which will be theirs in after years. The intellectual banquet is a perennial joy to the soul. 'Let them realise, too, that learning must not be only passively received: it must be actually and actively entered into, embraced and mastered. "The mind," as Cardinal Newman says, "must go half way to meet what comes into it from without." ' And let our. young people he obedient to their teachers. Obedience is among the most heroic of the virtues, for by it man conquers his will. "An obedient man shall speak of victory." ' So much for the minds of our young Americans. In regard to the care of their bodies, I can suggest nothing better than to have them take a lesson from our clean-living young athletes who recently in the Olympic games, in track and field events nailed the American flag high above the standard of every other nation. They won because they voluntarily subjected themselves to a life of self-denial. Othewise the respective champions could not have been champions.'