For, to school discipline is added religious discipline, no less compulsory, just as rigid and more constant--daily pious exercises, ordinary devotions and extraordinary ceremonies, spiritual guidance, influence of the confessional and the example and behavior of a staff kept together around the same work by the same faith.

The closer the atmosphere, the more powerful the action; the chances are that the latter will prove decisive on the child sequestered, sheltered and brought up in a retort, and that its intellect, faith and ideas, carefully cultivated, pruned and always under direction, will exactly reproduce the model aimed at .-- For this reason, in 1876, 33,000 out of 46,000 pupils belonging to the 309 ecclesiastical establishments of secondary instruction, are internes,[6357] and the Catholic authorities admit that, in the 86 small seminaries, no day-scholars, no future lay persons, are necessary.
This conclusion is perhaps reasonable in relation to the 23,000 pupils of the small seminaries, and for the 10,000 pupils in the great seminaries; it is perhaps reasonable also for the future military officers formed by the State at La Fleche, Saint-Cyr, Saumur, and on the Borda.[6358] Whether future soldiers or future priests, their education fits them for the life they are to lead; what they are to become as adults, they already are as youths and children; the internat, under a convent discipline or that of the barracks, qualifies them beforehand for their profession.

Since they must possess the spirit of it they must contract its habits.

Having accepted the form of their pursuit they more easily accept its constraints and all the more that the constraints of the regiment will be less for the young officer who recently was at Saint-Cyr, and for the young ministrant in the rural parish who recently was in the great seminary .-- It is quite the reverse for the 75,000 other internes of public or private establishments, ecclesiastic or secular, for the future engineers, doctors, architects, notaries, attorneys, advocates and other men of the law, functionaries, land-owners, chiefs and assistants in industry, agriculture and commerce.

For them the internat affords precisely the opposite education required for a secular and civil career.