The gentler qualities which are to adorn the harder virtues may be more explicitly taught.  It is always more easy to tone down than to brace up; there must fist be something to moderate, before moderation can be a virtue; there must be strength before gentleness can be taught, as there must be some hardness in material things to make them capable of polish.  And these are qualities which are specially needed in our unsteady times, when rapid emancipation of unknown forces makes each one more personally responsible than in the past.  It is an impatient age:  we must learn patience; it is an age of sudden social changes:  we have to make ready for adversity; it is an age of lawlessness:  each one must stand upon his own guard and be his own defence; it is a selfish age, and never was unselfishness more urgently needed; love of home and love of country seem to be cooling, one as rapidly as the other:  never was it more necessary to learn the spirit of self-sacrifice both for family life and the love and honour due to one’s country which is also “piety” in its true sense.

All these things come with our Catholic faith and practice if it is rightly understood.  Catholic family life, Catholic citizenship, Catholic patriotism are the truest, the only really true, because the only types of these virtues that are founded on truth.  But they do not come of themselves.  Many will let themselves be carried to heaven, as they hope, in the long-suffering arms of the Church without either defending or adorning her by their virtues, and we shall but add to their number if we do not kindle in the minds of children the ambition to do something more, to devote themselves to the great Cause, by self-sacrifice to be in some sort initiated into its spirit, and identified with it, and thus to make it worth while for others as well as for themselves that they have lived their life on earth.  There is a price to be paid for this, and they must face it; a good life cannot be a soft life, and a great deal, even of innocent pleasure, has to be given up, voluntarily, to make life worth living, if it were only as a training in doing without.

Independence is a primary need for character, and independence can only be learnt by doing without pleasant things, even unnecessarily.  Simplicity of life is an essential for greatness of life, and the very meaning of the simple life is the laying aside of many things which tend to grow by habit into necessities.  The habit of work is another necessity in any life worth living, and this is only learnt by refraining again and again from what is pleasant for the sake of what is precious.  Patience and thoroughness are requirements whose worth and value never come home to the average mind until they are seen in startling excellence, and it is apparent what a price must have been paid to acquire their adamant perfection, a lesson which might be the study of a lifetime.  The value of time is another necessary lesson of the better