Page 247 - 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 242

242 SUGGESTIONS AS TO WORKS CHAPTER 37
follow your advice. How are you so sure of this? Have you appealed to
him and tried to win him round? You reply that you have often
reasoned with him. But how often? Frequently, you say, time and
time again. And do you look on that as often? Why, even if you had
to continue for a whole lifetime, you should neither relax your efforts
nor abandon hope. Do you not see the way in which God Himself
keeps on appealing to us through His Prophets, through His Apostles,
through His Evangelists? And with what result? Is our conduct all it
should be? Do we set ourselves to obey Him in all things? Alas such is
far from being the case. Yet in spite of that, He never ceases to pursue
us with His pleadings. And why? It is because there is nothing so
precious as a soul. ‘For what doth it profit a man if he gain the whole
world, and suffer the loss of his own soul.’ (Mt 16:26)” (St. John
Chrysostom)

7. WORKS FOR THE YOUNG
“Children are certainly the object of the Lord Jesus’ tender and
generous love. To them he gave his blessing, and, even more, to them
he promised the Kingdom of heaven. (cf. Mt 19:13-15; Mk 10:14) In
particular Jesus exalted the active role that little ones have in the
Kingdom of God. They are the eloquent symbol and exalted image of
those moral and spiritual conditions that are essential for entering
into the Kingdom of God and for living the logic of total confidence
in the Lord: ‘Truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like
children, you will never enter the Kingdom of heaven. Whoever
humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the Kingdom of
heaven’. (Mt 18:3-5; cf Lk 9:48)” (CL 47)

If the preservation of the young in faith and innocence can
be assured, how glorious the future! Then, like a giant
refreshed, the Church could throw itself into its mission of
converting the pagan world, and make short work of it. As it
is, the great bulk of its effort is absorbed by the painful
treatment of internal sores.
Furthermore, it is easier to preserve than later on to restore.
The Legion will attend to both, for both are vital. But certainly
it should not neglect the easier work of the two — that of
preservation. Many children can be saved from disaster for the
trouble it will later take to remake one debased adult.
Some aspects of the problem are as follows:—

(a) Children’s Mass attendance. A bishop, delivering a prog -
ramme of work to legionaries, placed as the item of first
importance the conducting of a Sunday Mass Crusade amongst