Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/88

82 come upon the earth if Adam had not taken to apples; whether (as it was once put to me) the soul will spend its eternity in careering round the divine essence or in plunging deeper and deeper into it, &c.

Through this scheme of education every student for the Roman Catholic priesthood must pass. In the larger seminaries and more prosperous congregations the programme is carried out with great fidelity, and frequently the more brilliant students are sent, to consolidate and develop their studies, to Louvain University or to Rome. The smaller seminaries and minor congregations, who are ever pressed for priests, curtail the scheme very freely: philosophy is all but omitted, dogmatic theology is reduced to the indispensable minimum, and moral theology is carefully pruned of its luxurious growth of superfluous controversies. In the case of monastic orders whose work consists almost entirely in missionary and parochial activity amongst the poor the Church connives at a lower standard of education.

In the Franciscan Order the constitutions, from which its admirers usually but wrongly derive their information of its practices, generously prescribe three years for philosophy and four for theology. In few branches of the order are more than five years devoted to the higher studies. In England we were the pioneers of a new system, and from first to last our studies were irregular and stunted. We spent five years as students at Forest Gate, of which fifteen