promote education in the real sense of the term. Nay, more than this,
the insistence on certain types of instruction which they have
compelled has in too many cases paralysed the efforts of teachers who
in their hearts were striving after a better way.

The effect on some of our Catholic schools of the newer methods has
not been free from harm. Compelled by force of circumstances, parental
or financial, to throw themselves into the current of modern
educational effort, they have at the same time been obliged to abandon
the quieter traditional ways which, while making less display, left a
deeper impress on the character of their pupils. Others have had the
courage to cling closely to hallowed methods built up on the wisdom
and experience of the past, and have united with them all that was not
contradictory in recent educational requirements. They may, thereby,
have seemed to some waiting in sympathy with the present, and
attaching too great value to the past. The test of time will probably
show that they have given to both past and present an equal share in
their consideration.

It will certainly be of singular advantage to those who are engaged in
the education of Catholic girls to have before them a treatise written
by one who has had a long and intimate experience of the work of which
she writes. Loyal in every word to the soundest traditions of Catholic
education, the writer recognizes to the full that the world into which
Catholic girls pass nowadays on leaving school is not the world of a
hundred, or of fifty, or of even thirty years ago. But this
recognition brings out, more clearly than anything else could do, the
great and unchanging fact that the formation of heart and will and
character is, and must be always, the very root of the education of a
child; and it also shows forth the new fact that at no time has that