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360 closures, the utility of its acquisitions, and the talents of its masters, still it will not avail in the event, to detrude classical literature and the studies connected with it from the place which they have held in all ages in education." Goethe, realizing what debt he himself owed to the classics, exclaimed: "Would that the study of Greek and Roman literature forever remained the basis of higher education."

These are the reasons why the Society of Jesus always gave such prominence to classical studies. She considers them to be among the "few well-related studies of central importance;" to them she would apply the words of Dr. Stanley Hall, quoted before: "Only great, concentrated and prolonged efforts in one direction really train the mind." The mind can never be trained by that miscellany of studies crowded into the programme of our modern systems. Their effects on youth were ably pointed out seventy years ago by the General of the Society, Father Roothaan, "In the lower schools [he means grammar schools and colleges], the object kept in view is to have boys learn as many things as possible, and learn them in the shortest time and with the least exertion possible. Excellent! But that variety of so many things and so many courses, all barely tasted by youth, enables them to conceive a high opinion of how much they know, and sometimes swells the crowd of the half instructed, the most pernicious of all classes to the sciences and the State alike. As to knowing anything