The Little Ones
A Course of Religious Instruction for children up to eight years and The Faith for Children
From Seven to Fourteen
by Mother Mary EatonReligious of the Sacred Heart
St. Augustine Academy Press
Homer Glen, Illinois
This volume is a photographic reprint under a single cover of two individual books written by a single author.
In order to preserve page reference numbers, the pages in the second book have not been renumbered.
The Little Ones was originally jointly published in 1923 by Sands & Co. in London and B. Herder Book Company in St. Louis, MO.
This reprinted edition based on the Third Edition printed in 1930 by Sands & Co.
The Faith for Children was originally published in 1925 by the same.
This reprinted edition based on the 1925 edition. Imprimaturs for these books can be found on the reverse of each one’s individual title page.
ISBN for this omnibus edition: 978-1-64051-124-8
Mother Mary Eaton
A B r IEF BIO gr A p HICAL S k ETCH
Mary Ann Charlotte Eaton (1862-1934) was the daughter of Charles Ormston Eaton, a prominent banker from the East Midlands of England. Just days before her daughter’s birth, Mary’s mother was received into the Catholic Church, and her father followed three months later. In thanksgiving for the blessing of their conversion, Mary’s father sponsored the building of a grand new church in the nearby town of Stamford, while also establishing a chapel in his home at Tolethorpe Hall. The celebration of Mass there marked the first time the Holy Sacrifice had been offered in that part of England since the reformation.
At the age of 5, Mary suffered a fall that damaged her spine and, despite the best care, she suffered this deformity for the rest of her life. She was often in fragile health, and in 1874, during an
illness that brought her to the point of death, she was favored with an apparition of the Blessed Virgin, which she kept a secret the rest of her life. She recovered, and despite the challenges she faced, entered the roehampton convent of the Society of the Sacred Heart in 1882. This marked the beginning of a long career as a teacher, not only in the convent boarding schools, but most especially in the teacher training schools of the Society.
Her infirmity was an aid to her in humility as well as perseverance, and she was always revered for her patience and inspired teaching. It was when she was stationed at the Society’s schools in Edinburgh that she was asked by the editor of a journal published in Birmingham (where her brother, Fr. robert Ormston Eaton, was a well-known and widely published priest of the Oratory), to commit her teaching methods to book form. This resulted in the books The Little Ones, The Faith for Children, Consider the Child, Our Inheritance, Our Birthright, and The Bible Beautiful, all of which she intended as suggestions for the students, to help develop a sense of personal initiative in learning the faith.
In 1934, her health began to deteriorate quickly, and in March she suffered a stroke which left her bedridden. She died on May 8 and was buried in the newly established cemetery at the convent in kilgraston.
