This spirit of sacrifice must
enter into every form of training for life, but above all into the
training of the Catholic mind. It has a wide range and asks much of its
disciples, a certain renunciation and self-restraint in all things which
never completely lets itself go. Catholic art bears witness to this:
"Where a man seeks himself there he falls from love," says a Kempis, and
this is proved not only in the love of God, but in what makes the glory
of Christian art, the love of beauty and truth in the service of faith.
CHAPTER XII.
MANNERS.
"Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each--once--a stroke of
genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage."--EMERSON.
The late Queen Victoria had a profound sense of the importance of
manners and of certain conventionalities, and the singular gift of
common sense, which stood for so much in her, stands also for the
significance of those things on which she laid so much stress.
Conventionality has a bad name at present, and manners are on the
decline, this is a fact quite undisputed. As to conventionalities it is
assumed that they represent an artificial and hollow code, from the
pressure of which all, and especially the young, should be emancipated.
And it may well be that there is something to be said in favour of
modifying them--in fact it must be so, for all human things need at times
to be revised and readapted to special and local conditions.
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