OPENING OF ST. PATRICK'S SCHOOL, SOUTH DUNEDIN.

New Zealand Tablet, 15 March 1917, Page 11

OPENING OF ST. PATRICK'S SCHOOL, SOUTH DUNEDIN.

, » . THE OCCASIONAL ADDRESS. (Concluded). Continuing his address, the Very Rev. Father Paul Cullen, CM., said:—■ By way of illustration, may I show you how our theory of religious education works out in practice. How am I to induce a child to prefer the right to the wrong? The secularist takes the old Stoic maxim, ' Do the right because it is the right.' We have a vastly more powerful motive to inculcate, and we say: ' You are in the hands of God, the author and guardian of the moral order, who must some day call you to account for what you do, and must reward or punish you accordingly.' Many and many a time had this sense of desire and fear saved the tempted soul from entering the downward path, and, even when it had been disregarded, it remains in the heart, exciting remorse and calling to repentence, or at least assuring the sinner that his defiance of the moral law must end in his own discomfiture. Besides the motive of fear we had the motive of love to set before our children love for our Lord Jesus Christ, Who first loved us and gave Himself for us. The Two Motives Commingle Together and fuse into one, just as they do in the case of a well-brought-up child in its attitude towards a good and wise earthly parent. But, if the former is most efficacious in restraining those inclined to evil, as experience testifies, the latter has a singular power to gain over the young heart, and oftentimes to stimulate it to deeds of the most generous kind. It takes up the cold, hard maxim of the Stoics, 'Do right because it is right/ and, by giving it a personal direction—a direction towards the Person of Christ, it is transfigured until it ceases to be cold and hard, and can appeal, even to the soul that is sorely tried, with all the warmth and glow of life. This is what explains its influence over the heart of the Catholic child who is trained from its earliest years to feel that it has in our Lord Jesus Christ not only a kind Master to love, and a Divine Pattern to copy, but a Divine Companion ever present to converse with, and a Divine source of spiritual strengthening to which it can have continuous recourse. Religion, Then, Supplies the Standard of Right and Wrong. Further, it supplies the motive, the incentive strong enough to make the child desire and strive to live according to a high ideal. In fine, religion supplies the motive force which braced the will and makes the good prevail. To ignore religion is a theory of education that can only tend to impoverish, distort, and in the end degrade human nature. Such a course is as irrational and misleading as it would be to teach the theory and work of the locomotive without reference to steam. Its omission means exclusion; and exclusion means the dissolution of the highest sanctions for moralitythe gambling away the glorious inheritance of a Christian people. Such is Our System of Education; a system in which the intellect is taught all truth', or at least the principles of all truth, whether of science or of faith, and the will is gradually educated to all good ; a system that prepares a man to live well here and hereafter. It is scarcely necessary to point out to you, Catholics of Dunedin, that in the personality of its teachers and in its prevalent atmosphere, the Catholic school is distinctly superior to the ' public' or State school. You recognise that. If you did not, you would not be here to-day—you would not be so willing to give another proof of your loyalty to the Catholic system of education. Pity those schools, public or State schools, whose system is ineffective, where religious principles are not taught during the spring-time of life. Pity those schools which forced religion into the background of the child's life and

warped its moral consciousness. Pity those schools; I say, pity the system, the party, that have taken on themselves to insult God by implying that He was unwelcome, undesirable, something to be avoided in the schoolroom. *. ' If They Undertake to Banish God From The j Schoolroom, s what guarantee is there that they may not banish everything religious from the life of the individual, the family, and the nation. We are not satisfied with raising our voices in alarm and in protest, we are not satisfied with pointing out the injustice of a conscience tax on the Catholic people, we are not satisfied with declaiming against a system that discounts religion and favors irreligion and indifference; a system that cultivates the atheist of this generation to beget the anarchist of the nextno, we go further and build schools where Christ may enter; where His principles, His teachings, His morality are taught, learned, and followed. Our Catholic teachers hold out their arms exclaiming with Christ: ' Suffer Little Children to Come to Me and Forbid Them Not'; and behind the teachers and children stand our Catholic citizens building schools, paying teachers, giving their children as pupils, and encouraging every effort to save the faith of the child, and the morality and Christianity of this young nation. Catholics of Dunedin, you have the best trained teachers in the world in your schools— whose work is acknowledged as excellent in every respect by the very same inspectors who report on the favored and pampered ' public ' schools; men and women who are sacrificing the ambi- . tions of business, the comforts of home, for unremitting, unremunerated labor in the schoolroom, and valuntary lives of public effacement, and all the private discomforts of poverty, chastity, and obedience. You are proud of them. And, I may add, with you is the secret sympathy of many a zealous and enlightened member of the different creeds in this community those who love justice and fair play and who admire steadfast adherence to principle. » Again I Ask Why Should Catholics Be Unjustly Taxed? Does it not look like persecution and tyranny ? The taxation of Catholics for the support of a system which they cannot in conscience avail themselves of is unjust. Catholics are discontented, and rightly so. If is a serious question for any government to annoy and sow discontent amongst any section of the community. Catholics have done their duty to the State. They have done more. They have saved the State over .£.100,000 annually in their schools. They seek no privilege, but only equal treatment with the other classes of the community. Put it this way. Suppose that the Catholics, instead of being one-seventh of the total population, represented six-sevenths of the whole, and levied a tax for the support of an educational system, part of which consisted in (he pupils being compelled to conform to the religious forms, practices, and ceremonials of the Catholic • religion. Would such a system be just ? Would it be tolerated for a day ? What sort of Government do we live under ? We fulfil our duty to the State as citizens. Our 'Sons are Fighting the Battles of the Empire. We pay our taxes and shed our blood in the common cause. We have made sacrifices for education that call forth the admiration of every fair-minded person in the world. Yet our rights are not respected and burdens are placed upon us which are not only unreasonable but unjust. Is it bigotry ? Is it ignorance ? Why should such shameless imposition and injustice be tolerated in this age of the world? Will you find it anywhere else in the world We shall continue 5 to clamor and show it up. Here's a case of recent occurrence. A deputation of Catholics waited on the Minister of Education and asked that facilities in the matter of swimming lessons, medical and dental inspection, a supply of the School Journal, should be granted to the Catholic schools in common with the

State schoolsfor all of which, of course, Catholics were paying. It was put to the Cabinet and was refused. Thus the boycott extends to such matters as physical development and medical inspection and the reading of the School Journal.