St. Paul supplies us with an answer to this ever recurrent question with a phrase which gives us at once a definition and a goal. To the thinking Catholic the process of growing up can never be a haphazard one for it is founded upon settled laws, directed by an established method, inspired by an ideal made concrete in the person of Christ Himself.

Now, it is of the very nature of the living being to wish to attain to maturity and the rational being strives towards that maturity not by a blind urge but with philosophic and selective apprehension. The social being, “Man-in-Society”, sees maturity not as his own isolated development, but as the widening, deepening and raising of the life, both natural and supernatural, of the society in which he lives.

Viewed in this light, the question of education cannot be narrowed into the confines of the School-system, the examination-syllabus, the University programme. It cannot be conceived, merely, as a branch of politics. On the contrary, the term must be made to embrace the whole of life and society, with every human being as its subject; while for its object we envisaged the rational, harmonious use of all created things. The field is vast, certainly, and by its demands for comprehensive thinking this vastness often frightens away the student. Nevertheless, it is only when viewed in its totality that the question of Education can be made to yield its full fruit of human interest and creative power.

Men can judge from this how they should love that Lord who, wicked as they were, and his deadly enemies, forestalled them with his mercy and resolved to bestow on them this signal favour. Saint John, in his Epistle, extols this divine prevention, exhorting us to love our Bedeemer, for he first loved us; that is, he determined to redeem those who were lost before we, being sons of wrath, could love him meritoriously since He had first to give us the power by the grace of the Bedemption. Saint John extols this by the divine words, “God so loved the world as to give his only begotten Son”, (John., Ill, 16). And ‘to give’ him was to deliver him up to the most severe sufferings ever endured. If God had said that he gave Christ solely as King, or as Master, or as an example and model of all the virtues, (as in fact he did give him), we should not have been so astonished, for it is natural to that supreme Goodness to do good and to communicate himself to his creatures, but to “give him” meant to deliver Him over to the worst cruelty and insults ever known. This is what paralyses the minds of those who meditate upon it. For there was no other reason for it except that the Eternal Father knew what great asd unspeakable benefits to mankind would ensue. God’s love for us and desire for our welfare were so intense that he did not think the blood and death of his only Son too dear a price to pay for it.