Chapter XVIII.
Religious Instruction.
The preceding chapter has shown how painstaking the Jesuits are as regards the moral training of their pupils. Other educators also insist on the necessity of this training, but the Jesuits, in fact all Catholics, differ from a great number of other educators in a most essential point, namely in that they base the moral training entirely on the religious education. They consider a moral training without the religious as defective and incomplete. Incomplete, because it disregards one of the most important obligations of man. Man's first and most sacred duty is to acknowledge his dependence on God, his Creator and Lord, and to give expression to this recognition by interior and exterior acts of worship. This is religion. Religion is a postulate of man's rational nature. This thought stood clearly before the mind of the founder of the Society of Jesus, when in his Spiritual Exercises he wrote down this brief summary of religion: "Man is created to praise God, to reverence and serve Him, and, by doing so, to save his soul." No system of education can be considered as harmonious which leaves this first duty of man out of consideration, and fails to implant religion into the hearts of the pupils. If it is man's duty to worship God, it is his duty likewise to know God; he can know Him from the manifestation of His works (Romans 1, 19), and the revelation of His word. Religion does not consist in mere senti-
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