More Specific Details on Solid Learning

...outward things, original Latin: exterioribus. This completes the sentence from the previous page. namely our own, which we might perhaps wish to lend to Him for a little while; but that most divine Guest Referring to the Holy Spirit or the presence of God within the soul. disdains such things. He leaves them to be occupied, or rather whitewashed, by the Spirit of hypocrisy and of vain and showy ostentation—likewise by the lean, sterile, and superficial spirit of the most vain activity of corrupt human Reason. This spirit indeed smears and defiles those things

(a) English books, also translated into French.

both with its dry and superficial ideas (a) of Rational Religion, original: Religio Rationalis. A movement during the 17th and 18th centuries that sought to ground faith in logic and natural reason rather than revelation or mystical experience. of the Religion of worldly Lords and Ladies, and similar showy ideas adapted to the palate of earthly men; and also with flattering persuasions of this kind: namely, that those men will be truly Christian when they quietly sleep and rest in those speculations, those superficial ideas and mental pictures. They remain content with a certain justice of that same outward nature, and with such a sense of integrity that they would never truly dare to depart from it—unless, perhaps, they wished to renounce their honor and reputation in the eyes of the "respectable" men of this world.

It can hardly be denied by anyone who has any knowledge of this matter that what has just been said is the general disease of the Christians of this age, and the very origin of that disease. Would that some immediate remedy could be brought to this contagion—one that would reach the roots of the evil and the first inclinations toward it in infancy! This would not be entirely impossible if Parents and those to whom the EDUCATION original: EDUCATIO. Here used in the classical sense of "bringing up" or "nurturing" the whole character, not just academic schooling. of infants is entrusted would wish to make themselves fit to instill solid virtue into them. This should be done through the way, or method, or principle of the heart and the innermost faculties of the soul; they should bestow all care upon this duty as the importance of the matter requires. Without a doubt, God—who seeks the hearts of men even from their earliest years—would join the grace and workings of His good Spirit to such cares and labors. These are undertaken so that, as soon as possible, lessons and inclinations worthy of the Christian name might be instilled into tender minds.