At long last the educational work of the religious Orders in the modern world is coining into focus. The days are gone when, for example, one still had to depend, for the educational pioneering of St Augustine, upon contemporary and sub-contemporary Lives. With the rise of research-schools in Education in our modern Universities the ‘field-work’ on original documents is being done, for Order after Order. Some of these dissertations, notably that of Dr Mary O’Leary on the Society of the Sacred Heart, have been published. Others, such as the monographs by Mother Mary Philip on Mary Ward, Fr Patrick Walsh on the Society of African Missions, or Mother M. Dominic on the schools of the Assumptionist Nuns, are to be seen only in the libraries of the Orders or of the Universities for which they were written. As time goes on and the field-studies multiply, a coherent picture of modem Catholic education will at last emerge. It is very much to be hoped that the present Lasallian celebrations will stimulate in other fields the trained research students without whom the full picture will never be possible.

It is remarkable that, until only a few years ago, the work of so outstanding a pioneer as St John Baptist De La Salle himself, which is being commemorated in London this month, on the occasion of the centenary of his Institute’s arrival in England, was known only through such tributes as the standard historians of education had been able to cull from the pious but undiscriminating early biographies. The life of De La Salle by Blain was for generations the source.