344 ANDREW J. SHIPMAN MEMORIAL 



changes wrought by modern medical science, and the cures 

 effected by discarding the old methods, he concluded one of 

 his rhapsodies about the ailments of the heart by vehemently 

 clasping his right side. A bystander cried out: "That's 

 wrong; the heart is not over there!" But the quack, not a 

 whit abashed, quickly rejoined: "Vous avez tort; nous avons 

 change tout cela !" and never admitted his mistake. 



It is this attitude of having changed everything in philos- 

 ophy and science, in ethics and history, in the whole outlook 

 upon the world, which will meet the Catholic woman graduate 

 at the very outset. It is this attitude which her learning and 

 her genius must learn to combat. It is she who must put the 

 heart back into its right place. She can best employ her tal- 

 ents in setting things in their true perspective. 



And she will find this no easy thing to do. An attitude of 

 this kind is not frankly hostile to the Church and Church 

 teachings, and it has no lines drawn up in battle array. There- 

 fore, it will be all the harder to combat, especially hard from 

 an intellectual standpoint, because no specific attack is made. 

 To-day we have arotmd us a neo-paganism, which grows subtly 

 in the general culture of to-day. It is wholly indifferent to 

 anything pertaining to the authority of divine revelation. In 

 its mildest, most innocuous form it takes the shape of the study 

 of comparative religion, in its most energetic, that of positivism 

 and monism. It does not waste itself upon the differences of 

 creeds or dogmatic teachings. They are rather the clothes, so 

 to speak, worn by the different individuals. But why be the 

 devotees of fashion at all? Why not be the primitive man and 

 woman, and let all the elemental passions and forces of human 

 nature have their play! It is this tendency, touched up and 

 gilded by a thousand arts of learning which the Catholic col- 

 lege graduate will find around her in the social and literary 

 world. They will understand your deep feeling for the "Im- 

 maculate Conception" of Murillo, or the "Madonna del Sedia" 

 of Raphael, but they cannot understand your recital of the 

 rosary or the stations of the cross. 



Everywhere the chief teaching of the day will be found to con- 

 sist of some form of materialism or utilitarianism. Once upon 

 a time we called a lack of the divine revelation of God to 

 man and of the sublime knowledge of God, by its Latin name, 

 "ignorance," and we spoke of a man being saved despite the 



