WHERE WOMAN EXCELS

In the Home

Since woman is intellectually equal to man, there is no occasion-barring a few demanding great physical endurance-in which she may not, if she choose, excel. There are many. however, into which it is unwise for any save the exceptional woman to attempt to enter.

Sex differences are not simply physiological. There are equally important mental and ethical divergencies which, for the sake of right human progress, should be preserved and, indeed, intensified. While, therefore the majority of men and women could readily interchange most of their present occupations, to do so would be to sacrifice the enormous ad. vantage which comes from the duality of sex and the consequent doubling of the intellectual and spiritua! range of human life.

A woman must have the stability and shelter of a home while bearing and rearing children. Therefore, she excels, as she should, in the field of the household, not as a patient drudge. but as the house manager, as the center of family interests, as the chief guide and teacher of her children. She excels, moreover, because, as a woman, she has certain fundamental qualities, different from those of the male, that are seemingly essential to the preservation of the home and to the progress of civilization. The most vital of these is her ethical idealism.

To the many women who do not marry or do not have children there is presented the wide field of that larger family, the community. Therein are many occupations analogous to those of the household and requiring kindred powers, such as education the fine arts, the domestic arts, medicine, nursing, organized philanthropy and a long list of what may be called household and esthetic industries such as the furnishing of food, clothing and shelter, the making and selling of innumerable domestic supplies

and the filling of the increasing human need for decorative beauty.

Many of these fields, such as teaching and the domestic arts, are the peculiar province of women; into others they are rapidly making their way. Yet with notable exceptions-women do not to-day excel, do not, that is reach the standards of achievement to which men, in the preeminently male occupations, have attained. As a consequence, those ethical and intellectual sides of human progress which because they concern the family and the rearing of the child, are the most important, seriously lag behind the material side-the applying of the earth's resources to well-being and to luxury-which is mainly in the hands

of men.

This is through no fault of women and is no evidence of sex deficiencies. It is due to the fact that the intellectual equality of woman has only recently been acknowledged; that she has never been broadly trained for those occupations which are clearly hers; and that the rapid advance in her opportunities for education has been along male lines instead of towards developing, strengthening and training those powers which are natural to her sex and essential to the right growth of civilization. The question of her excellence in achievement cannot be answered until she has had time to show what, under modern conditions of freedom, she can really do.

DUE TO PRACTICE Whenever and wherever you see splendid work done with precision and without error you may take it for granted that the one who accomplishes it has had long and careful training. The rule holds good in every vocation. The boy who tosses off the task in the hope that he may hit on the proper answers, the boy who trusts to a certain quickness in catching a suggestion here or there is, of course, superior to the one who stoops to cribbing and deceit, but he is not

doing wisely for himself and he is mortgaging his future.

Young people dislike to acknowledge that their success in study costs labor and close attention. They often speak with complacency about the ease and rapidity with which they perform the work of the classroom, yet in the department of sports and athletics they do not object to continual practice and strenuous training. The man who wins honors as a runner, who is known far and near for his skill in baseball or football, the man who handles an oar or a sail to perfection, has not in any case arrived at finished grace and scientific accuracy without arduous drill. The training that fits a youth to serve his country in the army or the navy is rigid and severe. The same thing may be said of the training of the mining engineer, of the railway official and of the judge on the bench. Everyone whose work in this world. counts for something in the public eye or for private advancement has been obliged to serve a careful apprenticeship.

TIME FOR COURTESY

A business man who carried many interests, and in the management of them had won an unenviable reputation for irritability, had occasion to call up one of the leading manufacturers of the country not long ago. He himself told the result to a friend.

"No sermon I ever heard brought me more clearly face to face with myself than that man's voice. I knew how busy he was-my responsibilities are nothing to his; yet he answered me with such quietness, such courtesy, such a feeling of leisure, as if he had nothing in the world to do but give his time to my affairs, that-well, when I hung up the receiver I found I wasn't thinking about business at all. I was thinking, 'If he can take time for kindness and courtesy, so can I.'" It was an exquisite sermon, all the more effective, as many sermons are, for being unconscious.

DONT'S FOR THE PENITENTS Don't crowd into the confessional ahead of some one else who was waiting before you came.

Don't tell any one's sins but your

cwn.

Don't mention another's name in telling your sins.

Don't make the priest irritable by forcing him to repeat: "How many times?" for every mortal sin you confess.

Don't forget it is a sin to accuse yourself willfully of something you have not committed, just as well as it is to conceal a sin. you have committed.

Don't confess a doubtful sin as if it were not doubtful. Confess exactly as your conscience saw it.

Don't fail to ask for special remedies against your habitual sins if the priest forgets to give them. Take an interest in your soul.

Don't go to confession intending to use all the wiles and deceits of present day worldly life to conceal and shade over and soften down sins and circumstances of sins necessary for the priest to know.

Don't flit about from priest to priest to escape a little scolding for habitual faults.

Don't think a confessor is naturally severe and stern because he is so with you. He may be the kindliest of the kindly with the one that goes before or follows you.

Don't go to confession merely to relieve your lieve your mind.

Don't talk so low in confessing that the priest can not hear.

Don't talk so loud that everybody can hear you.

Don't neglect to say your penance immediately after confession.

Don't get the blues because your confessor is changed to another parish. Don't get the blues because he is not changed.

-There is no happy life; there are only happy days.

AN AUTUMN SONG The song-birds are flying, And southward are hieing, No more their glad carols we hear. The gardens are lonely,Chrysanthemums only

Dare now let their beauty appear.

The insects are hiding, The farmer providing The lambkins a shelter from cold. And after October

The woods will look sober Without all their crimson and gold.

The loud winds are calling, The ripe nuts are falling, The squirrel now gathers his store. The bears, homeward creeping, Will soon all be sleeping

So snugly, till winter is o'er.

Jack Frost will soon cover
The little brooks over;

The snow-clouds are up in the sky
All ready for snowing;
Dear Autumn is going,

We bid her a loving good-by.
-Emilie Poulsson.

UNDENOMINATIONAL TEACHING In the opinion of the non-Catholic editor of the London Academy, undenominational teaching is one of the strongest non-Christian factors at work at the present time, and largely responsible for the increasing indifference to the claims of all religion characteristic of the present and the growing up generation. He says further:

"Whatever Undenominationalism may at the outset have been intended by the idealists to represent, the name is wholly misleading. The antithesis of definite religion is indefinite religion, and if we call it by that name we realize better what we are talking about. Definite Christianity, founded. as its very name implies, on the Person of Incarnate God, preaches certain definite facts: the Fatherhood of God; the Incarnation and Virgin Birth; the Life of Christ as set forth in the Gospel narrative; the Passion of Christ and its atoning purpose; the Resurrection; the Co-equal Holy Ghost, and therefore the Trinity in Unity. These facts are reverently believed and

cherished by all Christians, but neither severally nor in sum are they acknowledged in the Indefinite Religion usually named Undenominationalism. The supporters of Indefinite Religion may, and usually do, accept some or even all these facts, but can not suffer them to be taught to the children, because it is of the essence of facts to be definite; and, since non-Christian ratepayers deny these facts, the only way to be truly indefinite is to omit their mention."

Regarding the effect of indefinite religious instruction on the child's mind, this thoughtful writer has something to say which should cause Christians of all denominations to repudiate that negation of Christianity which the high-sounding polysyllable always may, and often does, actually

cover:

"The effect of indefinite religious instruction (when the indefinite character is strictly observed) is either to inspire the child's mind with the conviction that religion is a very foggy, unreal, and superfluous matter, which concerns the sensible clever man not at all, since even his allknowing 'teacher' is obviously at sea on the subject; or, on the other hand, slipping into the strictly practical, it becomes synonymous with morality-a dull but necessary obedience to laws whose breach entails tangible penalties.......Undenomina tionalism, in a word, forbids the teacher to open up before the responsive spirits of his children those mysteries of God which become the inspiration of the whole life only when woven closely into the general material of the developing nature. Never in the after-years can definite religious education withheld in school-life be made good, because the spiritual vision of childhood is both farther and deeper than after the coming of adolescence. Among men and women, only one here and there may be met who retains in maturity the child's contact with all that the adult calls 'invisible.'"

This is the fifth of a series of sketches of famous artists and their masterpieces, published for the instruction of our young readers.

Bernard Plockhorst was born March 2, 1825, in Brunswick. He began his studies there and thence went to Berlin, and afterwards to Dresden, where in both cities he studied lithography. His natural bent led him to painting and he made his way to Munich and was admitted to the studio of Piloty. He next went to Paris and became a pupil of Thomas Couture. After traveling for some years on the Continent, he took up his residence at Berlin, where he continued to live and paint.

Plockhorst is among the greatest painters of religious subjects in the world. In the accompanying illustration we have before us an example of the strength and purity of Plockhorst's ideals of holy life. The attitude of both the Saviour and John are vigorous and striking. It is the picture of a strong man giving comfort to a strong man.

Some other pictures well known are Mary and John at the Sepulchre, the original of which is in the Lowenstein Gallery at Moscow; Christ and the Adultress in the Lipsic Museum; the Contest of Archangel Michael and Satan in the Cologne Museum, and Christ Blessing Little Children.

PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD In a recent issue of the London Saturday Review, a correspondent, signing himself "A Plain Man," observes that there is in the Anglican service something painful in the absence of any prayers for the dead, "I am speaking instinctively," writes this "Plain Man." "I do not profess to know the theology of the matter, but I am very sure that the man or woman who has any Christian belief at all would pray for the dead as a matter of course, if there were no prejudice." The objection is raised that it cannot be the proper thing to do because it is done by the Catholics. The "Plain Man" does not see any force or logic in such a remark. On the other hand, he argues that the fact of a Catholic doing it cannot make the act good or bad in itself, and should not deter him as a Protestant from performing it if he deems it advisable to do so. The Church of England, he states, "with characteristic policy, seems to leave it open to her children to pray for their dead or not as they will." This voices the natural inclination of the human mind towards that "communion of saints" which the Apostles' Creed enunciates and which the Catholic doctrine alone makes intelligible.

潔

IS CORRECT SPELLING A LOST

ART?

were

less and defective one. The election of a woman as superintendent of the Chicago public schools has been heralded as a novelty, but a pleasing one, when the lady states she is in favor of abolishing all fads and getting back to the old time three "R's." It is an auspicious time just now to throw out a hint that it will serve a good purpose to have parochial school authorities know that fads, fancies and follies have no place in our schools. The age is a very practical one and education should be practical also-in a word, to repeat a meaty motto-we want a common school education and at the same time a common sense one, notwithstanding all the learned and labored essays and papers that have recently burdened Catholic literature anent pedagogy and psychology-very good in their place-but let them be relegated to their proper sphere, for "Experience join'd with

common

SOME QUEER DISCOVERIES In this progressive and much enlightened age none of the professions have made more progress than the We are all profession of medicine.

the time hearing and reading about Professor So and So's new discovery which is given to the world by one school or another with a great flourish of trumpets. A French doctor, reputed to be of great learning, solemnly announced in the cablegrams some days ago that he had "discovered the nerve that caused cowardice in the individual." As a sequal to his "discovery" he announced that all that was necessary to make a brave man out of a coward was to cut a certain nerve in the back of the neck and the subject would never again feel the

tremor of cowardice.

The daily papers of the United States carried columns of this ridiculous rant with elaborate illustrations. Whoever might have concluded that this was "the worst" or "the limit" of