Page:Jesuit Education.djvu/570

550 acteristics of boys. ... This is a kind of knowledge which has long been known to be characteristic of the disciplinary system of the Jesuits, but has not been common among the head masters of English public schools." It is almost altogether absent in most modern systems, consistently with their principle of separating training from teaching, education from instruction, a principle which, as M. Brunetière said, "our forefathers would not have been able to understand."

Supervision and exhortation are powerful means for preserving the good morals of youths, but much more powerful are the divinely appointed means, Confession and Communion. Although they are practised in all Catholic colleges, the Jesuits, following the example and advice of their founder, worked most zealously for the spread of frequent confession and communion. By doing so they incurred the special hatred of the Jansenists, whose rigorous views they vigorously opposed. We need not here refute the Protestant views of auricular confession. Every Catholic knows that it is not a "torture chamber of conscience," not an "unwarrantable invasion of the privacy of the individual," not an "intrusion into the sacred domain of domestic life," not a "source of weakness to the will," not a "dangerous and demoralizing practice." To men who use such language and hold such opinions may be applied the words of the Epistle of St. Jude the Apostle: "Blasphemant quod ignorant, they blaspheme things which they know not." Apart from the divine institution, the