Page 204 - 聖母軍團員手冊（英文版，2014年5月-2022年1月更新版）

Legion HANDBOOK D10944_1 26/02/2014 15:53 Page 199

CHAPTER 33 BASIC DUTIES OF LEGIONARIES 199
The cry “Too long!” is not uncommonly heard, and some -
times, by a strange disproportion, from persons who each day
give to the perusal of the newspapers an amount of time
adequate for the reading of the major part of the handbook.
“Too long! Too much detail!” Would the serious student of
his country’s laws, or of medicine, or of military science,
apply such words to a text-book of only similar size which
embodied all that he was expected to know concerning the
particular science he was studying? Far from saying or
thinking so, he would in a short week or two have committed
to memory every idea, every word even, contained in such a
treatise. Verily, “the children of this age are more shrewd in
dealing with their own generation than are the children of
light.” (Lk 16:8)
And the objection is made that “the handbook is full of
difficult ideas and advanced matters, so that many of our
younger and simpler members can hardly understand it. So
why not have a simplified handbook for such as them?” It
should not have to be pointed out that such a suggestion is
contrary to the first laws of education which require that the
student be gradually led on into unknown territory. There is
no education at all if a person under stands a thing fully in
advance; and when the new is no longer proposed to the
mind, the process of education has ceased. Why should a
legionary expect to understand the handbook straight away,
anymore than a student be expected to understand immedi -
ately his first text book? It is the function of the school and
the whole idea of education to make clear what was not clear
and to implant it as knowledge.
“Even the words are hard!” But can they not be learned?
The vocabulary of the handbook is not so very advanced; it
can be acquired by asking questions and by looking up a
dictionary. In actual fact, it is precisely the vocabulary of the
daily newspapers which are read by everyone. Who ever hears
it suggested that those newspapers be simplified? And does
not every legionary owe it to himself and to his Catholicism
to master words that have been found necessary for the full
explaining of the spiritual and other principles of the Legion?
What has been said of the handbook vocabulary is to be
repeated in respect of the handbook ideas. They are not
obscure ideas. “There cannot be in the Church’s teaching an