The Sun.
London, England, 1866-06-13 00:00:00

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Committee.
f 11ENRY EDWARD,
Archbishop of Westminster.
JOHN CANON Monnis, Secretary.
•

f this subject. !t will be eilepugh to sky tbut a bust will bi
created for the receiving, holding, and transmitting of funds,
and a council to advise us in the application of the same.
How urgent is the necessity for some such fund to supply to
the diocese that which is beyond the strength both of the
Poor School Committee and of the clergy of the missions
is too obvious and too well known to need many words.
We will, therefore, briefly state only the three chief
reasons for its prompt formation. First, it may be
safely affirmed that thousands of Catholic children in
London are without education. Two very careful and
guarded calculations have been lately made of the
number who nay be said to be practically without
education. One of these estimates them at twelve thousand
and the other at seven thousand. We refrain from giving
our own conjectures, wishing to avoid all semblance of ex-
aggeration, and earnestly hoping that we may be mistaken ;
but if there be 12,000, or even 7,000, or so much as 1,000
Catholic children growing up without Christian and
Catholic education, we ought to do penance • unless we
make an effort to save them.
That there ar© not 1,000 only, but 7,000 at least, may,
we believe, with perfect certainty be affirmed; and if so, it
is a fact sufficiently terrible and appalling to tinge all need-
less self-indulgence with bitterness, and to break our
indolent peace day and night. The ruin and the de-
pravity, or the perversion and apostacy, of one bap-
tised child is a sorrow which breaks the heart of
a father or a mother: The loss of one soul, and that
one of God's little ones, only the other day innocent
and in union with God, makes a wound in the Sacred heart
of Jesus. How is it that we can eat and drink, lie down,
and rise up in unconsciousness and insensibility at the
spiritual death of thousands before our eyes?
If in any one place 1,000 children without education
were seen together, we should be horrified ; but, though
scattered, they exist, and they are destitute as if they were
all congregated in one of our maze of courts. Being dis-
persed, they are hidden by fives and by tens here and there in
our thronging population, and, therefore, escape our eyes;
and because they are not seen some doubt of their existence.
Let us, therefore, lay well to heart that we see but little of
that which, by its very nature, lies withdrawn from the
eyes of Catholics—namely, the Catholics who, neglecting
their own souls, neglect also the souls of their children.
Such Catholics keep out of our sight.
There is also a second class of our children for whom

we must provide—namely, those who fall under the opera-
tion of tho law for offences, or are committed as friendless
and abandoned. The late Acts for Reformatory and In-
dustrial Schools enable us to provide for them with greater
facility; the cost of their maintenance being drawn from
the Consolidated Fund, the cost of management is compa-
ratively easy to bear. But so many are our poor children of
this class, and so great is our poverty, that we are not able
to keep pace with the need, and many of them have been
sent to, and are at this time detained in, Protestant institu-
tions.

But, lastly, there is a class of our
tis
poor children of
o
which we hardly know how to speak. I
believed that
more than 1,000 of our Catholic children are d
workhouses and workhouse schools of London.
They d
draughted for health and for convenience of are
from the workhouse in London to the workhouse scaellseinni
the country. Within the walls of those schools, the edu-
cation is exclusively Protestant —books, catechisms,
prayers, teachers, worship. And yet every Catholic child
has a right bestowed oa him by God Himself to Catholic
education. In baptism they acquired a personal right to be
trained in the whole and perfect faith of Jesus Christ, and
under the pastors of His Church. To deprive them of it is
a fraud against God. To educate them as Protestants is to
deprive them of it. And they are being educated as Pro-
testants as absolutely and as exclusively as children of the
Protestant poor. It is no answer to say that they would not
be there if their parents did not consent. Their parents
do not consent. Every Catholic father and mother, unless
they be sordid, and sell their souls, object with all their
heart and strength to the perversion of their child. Hun-
ger, and thirst, and nakedness drive them to the work-
house, and their helplessness may give way under the
temptations of meat, and drink, and warmth, for which their
children cry around them. They hope to keep their chil-
dren from starvation, in the trust that God will
keep them from perversion. There is no consent in
this, nor in the apathy of a man who is faint with

. -
hunger in the midst of hungry children. To take ad-
vantage of such a man is cruelty ; to tempt him to wrong
his own children is indignity added to cruelty. It is to use
him as the instrument to rob his children of the right
which God has given them as their own. Neither father
nor mother has authority to do this. They have no power
to disinherit the children of God--yet year by year this
cruel and sinful robbery of our poor little ones is per-
petrated. Plead for it who may, and argue for it what they
may, the fact stands before Gbd without a shade to soften
its enormity. A thousand Catholic children, detained Iby
hunger and practical mad-administration of the law, are
defrauded of their education in the faith, and are educated
in doctrines contrary to their faith.

Time compels us to pass over all other topics. The agony
and bitterness of Catholic fathers and mothers, who had
rather see their children in a parish coffin than in a Poor
Law school; the anguish of father and mother in the hour of
death, when the light of faith is keenest and the love of
their offspring is most vivid, as their eyes are closing upon
all save the terrific vision of their sons and their daughters,
robbed of the grace which at that hour is their only strength
in the last agony—all this, and much beside, we must pass
over now. We shall ask you hereafter to help us by your
prayers to open the doors of these houses of bondage, and by
your alms to enable us to receive these poor children into
schools of our own. But this must be for the future.
For the present we ask you to give of your alms for the
Poor School Committee as abundantly as you are able. Its
works are vital to us. Our works fill up what the Poor
School Committee begins. As ours prosper, theirs will
rise. The more vigorous and abundant our Diocesan
Fund, the larger will be the contributions to the Poor
School Committee for the formation and multiplication of
good Teachers. God's works do not exhaust each other ;
when the sea rises, all the rivers rise with it.
And now, dear children in Jesus Christ, few words need
to be added. The gaze of our Divine Lord is upon us, and
the Sacred Heart, with the delicacy of its divine sensitive-
ness, notes all we do. He is looking down upon these poor
little ones, and saying, "If those perish, what profit is
there in my blood ?" Is there any sorrow like unto My
sorrow, if you ctnnot deny yourselves for their sakes and
for Mine. Reckon up what you spend upon yourselves,
upon your houses and costly ornaments, upon your feasting
and profusion of luxury, upon your jewels and baubles,
upon your softness, refinement, self-indulgence in clothing
and apparel, upon the pleasures of the senses, the excite-
ment of an hour, the caprice of imagination, on nothings,
each of which cost the maintenance of an orphan, upon
waste and squandering which would save families from
seperumpeursloiouns:
butW ea hgarveaetndoeswiirell
teoitmhearketothbee,
tohroutoghmak t
of God
youaod
and His poor, and of the souls for whom the Most Precious
Blood was shed, penetrate and spread through all our ac-

tions and all our enjoyments. It will not embitter or darken
them, but give thorn a new quality of conscious fidelity,
and thankfulness for your abundance. Make it your daily
intention and prayer to console the Sacred Heart of Jesus
in this perishing world by saving some soul poorer and
more in peril than your own, and to return to Him, for the
great love with which He loves you still, the love of souls
for whom He died.

In order to obtain what we need for the salvation of the
souls of our poor children, we exhort you to earnest prayer
with this intention; and the more effectually to promote it,
we hereby give permission for the Exposition of the
Blessed Sacrament on Fridays of June and July, in honour
of the Sacred Heart and of the Most Precious Blood; or
for Benediction when Exposition is not possible, with the
same intention.

May the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, Who is
also the Love of the Father and of the Son, abide in you,
dear brethren and children in Jesus Christ, and make you
perfect in charity, and fill you with good all works. Amen.
Given at Westminster this sixth day of June, 1866, and
ordered to be read in all Churches and Chapels of the
Diocese on the Third Sunday after Pentecost, when a col-
lection will be made in aid of the Funds of the Poor School

WHAT AdaSyrblrDeaEkß
oEnAeTmS
ornPEinßgDthlEsMup.—plykilisorder to
what a spider could do in the way of eating, we
fly.
so we peeped among the leaves, and there
fine web
At first, however, the spider did not come
discovered that an earwig had been caught, and was now
testht a
being feasted on. The spider left the earwig, rolled up the
farroomsehatsboreuttreat,
fly, and at once returned to his "first course." This
was
at 5.30 a.m. in September. At 7 a.m, the earwig had been
demolished, j andoyispider,
ntgheanap, ea after
drroewstninfgorathliettlewhil e'an
fly,
which hde
had finished by 9 a.m. A little after
nine we supplied him
with a daddy-long-legs, which was eaten by noon. At one
i
o'clock a blow-fly was greedily seized, ancrwith an appetite
apparently no worse for his previous indulgence, he com-
menced on the blow-fly. During the day and towards
the evening, a great many small green flies, or what are
properly termed midges, had been caught in the web; of
these we counted 120, all dead, and fast prisoners in the
spider's net. Soon after dark, provided with a lanatranli
we went to examine whether the spider wasnsuhffisenpn,
from indigestion, or in any other wayufsmaffecte -,
d ho was
meals ; instead, however, of being
the various little green
employed in rolling up
together
retreat and ate. This
midges, which he then took to
the lots in little detach-
process he repeated, carrying up:,, „ten, for the web and
hole weu `v-- A slight rest of
suffering at
ments, until the w
followed by the most industrious web-
about an hour was
and before daybreak another web was
making process, the same way. Taking the relative
ready to be used
in
nd
of the creatures it ate, and applying
size of the spider
it would be somewhat
its contents were bundled
as follows : —At day-
this to a man, ---
alligator° was eaten ; at 7 a.m, a lamb ; at 9
break a small
eleopard ; at one o'clock a sheep ; and
up together.
4.m. a young.
me for one man during twenty-four hours,
very fair alloNira
find one gifted with such an appetite and
ignr t 120 larks. This, we believe, would be a
could we
such digestion,
web without killing himself, provided he
five miles of
we can readily comprehend how he might
machinery.—Cliambers's Journal.
pissed
aspdnur
idni::
the n
neceoary