Now, if all these offences were simply infractions of the municipal law, we would naturally look to our legislatures, our courts, juries, and sheriffs for their prevention or punishment, but they are not only that, but breaches of the divine law, and we must depend likewise on the efficacy of moral suasion to prevent if not to correct them. Public opinion can do much to repress crime, the legislative, administrative, and judicial branches of our various local governments, each in its sphere, might effect far more good; but it is on the teachings of true Christianity alone, and all the consequences that flow from it, that we must rely if we wish to stem the tide of misery, vice, and outrage which are fast surging over every portion of our fair land. The strong arm of the civil power is potent to punish when the crime has been committed, but weak indeed to prevent its perpetration. This higher and nobler duty is reserved for religion, and for religion alone. It is well enough to make concise and exact punitive laws, though this is not always done; and to administer them fearlessly, honestly, and intelligently, though the reverse is generally the case; still, experience has taught us that wise enactments and impartial judges have very little power to stay the promptings of bad hearts or repress the temptations ever presenting themselves to men of vicious habits or defective moral training. The church, and only the church, can rule the mind and heart of man, can train him from his infancy, before he knows or is responsible to any civil law, can strengthen him with the graces of the sacraments, arm him with the most potent of all weapons against sin--prayer--place constantly before his eyes the certainty of everlasting bliss or eternal damnation, keep him in the "narrow path," and thus prevent the possibility of his being an enemy to society and an outcast of heaven.
Next to the church comes the school. The importance of education to the well-being of society can never be overstated. It may be well said that it is in the school-room the seeds of vice or virtue are first sown, it is there that the future benefactor or the enemy of his kind commences his career in life, and it is upon the proper or vicious method of teaching which he receives as a boy depends mainly his future course in the world. No wonder, then, that the Catholic Church is so desirous of superintending the training of those little ones who by the sacrament of baptism have been made children of God and heirs to the kingdom of heaven; that the zealous parish priest should mourn over the loss of hundreds of the youth of his congregation, who, taught in Protestant or infidel schools, have fallen away from the faith to plunge into sin and vice. Is he to be blamed if he exhausts every resource and strains every nerve to establish for his people a school where their offspring will be guarded from worldly contamination, and trained in all the beautiful morality of Catholic doctrine? Few seem to understand the comprehensive meaning of the word education. The mere acquisition of worldly knowledge is not education, the development of the highest intellectual powers is not education, but only a part, and a secondary part at that, of a complete education; for without inculcating morality, justice, a high sense of honor, a noble disregard for self, and a sympathy for the suffering and unfortunate, you curse man with a disposition that is its own Nemesis, with unlawful desires that "make the food they feed on," and simply enlarge his capacity for doing evil.