4. In these days, and in the present condition of the world, when the tender age of childhood is threatened on every side by so many and such various dangers, hardly anything can be imagined more fitting than the union with literary instruction of sound teaching in faith and morals. For this reason We have more than once said that We strongly approve of the Voluntary schools, which, by the work and liberality of private individuals, have been established in France, in Belgium, in America, and in the colonies of the British Empire. We desire their increase, as much as possible, and that they may flourish in the number of their scholars. We Ourselves also, seeing the condition of things in this city, continue, with the greatest effort and at great cost, to provide an abundance of such schools for the children of Rome. For it is in and by these schools that the Catholic faith, our greatest and best inheritance, is preserved whole and entire. In these schools the liberty of parents is respected; and, what is most needed, especially in the prevailing license of opinion and of action, it is by these schools that good citizens are brought up for the State; for there is no better citizen than the man who has believed and practiced the Christian faith from his childhood. The beginning and, as it were, the seed of that human perfection which Jesus Christ gave to mankind, are to be found in the Christian education of the young; for the future condition of the State depends upon the early training of its children. The wisdom of our forefathers, and the very foundations of the State, are ruined by the destructive error of those who would have children brought up without religious education. You see, therefore Venerable Brethren, with what earnest forethought parents must beware of intrusting their children to schools in which they cannot receive religious teaching.