affection they are apt to drop into querulous and exacting habits. If
they are endowed with more than ordinary energy it is in the direction
of diplomacy, and not always frank. On the whole this is the character
whose features are least clearly defined, over which a certain mystery
hangs, and strange experiences are not unfrequent It is difficult to
deal with its elusive showings and vanishings, and this melting away
and reappearing seems in some to become a habit and even a matter of
choice, with a determination _not to be known_.

Taking these groups as a rough classification for observation of
character, it is possible to get a fair idea of the raw material of a
class, though it may be thankfully added that in the Church no
material is really raw, with the grace of Baptism in the soul and
later on the Sacrament of Penance, to clear its obscurities and
explain it to itself and by degrees to transform its tendencies and
with grace and guidance to give it a steady impulse towards the better
things. Confirmation and First Communion sometimes sensibly and even
suddenly transfigure a character; but even apart from such choice
instances the gradual work of the Sacraments brings Catholic children
under a discipline in which the habit of self-examination, the
constant necessity for effort, the truthful avowal of being in the
wrong, the acceptance of penance as a due, the necessary submissions
and self-renunciations of obedience to the Church, give a training of
their own. So a practicing Catholic child is educated unconsciously by
a thousand influences, each of which, supernatural in itself, tells
beyond the supernatural sphere and raises the natural qualities, by
self-knowledge, by truth, by the safeguard of religion against
hardness and isolation and the blindness of pride, even if the minimum
of educational facilities have been at work to take advantage of these
openings for good. A Catholic child is a child, and keeps a childlike