types of boys had: rascals, bad boys, scatter-brained boys and good boys. Don Bosco offers a hierarchy of goals and content to poor and abandoned boys. Some offer early steps a true and proper spiritual life. The first goal is that of helping the young who have gone astray to find the most elementary reasons to live. This meant leadingthem to desire and enjoy living, adding the intention of having them learn how to earn by work and sweat, the means needed for a decent existence for themselves and their relatives.849
An educational kind of work for these youngsters might have required a preliminary cleansing of their
mind a nd heart: a mind darkened by ignorance and prejudice and a heart ruined by vice and bad moral
behavior. “Enlighten their mind, render their hearts good”; this was the specific objective Don Bosco had in mind when he first started writing his books. He saidas much as we have already seen in his preface to hisBible History and Church History.
As for the many boys who had been entirely deprived of affection or had little of affection in their lives, Don Bosco aimed at creating an atmosphere and a rich network of relationships seasoned with a fatherly, motherly, brotherly and friendly touch namely, relationships capable of restoring their affective life, their emotional life, loaded with intense practical and emotional involvement. Naturally, the work of recovery and formation reaches a higher and richer plateau when affection, their experience of loving kindness received and regenerated, tend to be integrated and interact with reason and religion. After all,reason, religion and loving kindness represent principally the goals and content of Don Bosco's educational system; it is the substance of Don Bosco's system prior to being just means and approach..
Don Bosco places holiness as the goal of the journey of salvation, greatest of all the educational goals and he clearly proclaims it as such. This is not a simple message conveyed to an individual, but a sermon preached to all: “It is God's will that all of us become saints; it is very easy to become one; there is a great reward prepared in Heaven for those who become saints”.850
6. Love and fear of God expressed through service
Secondly, young peoples' attention throughout the entire length of the 'salvation journey', is constantly drawn toward the goal which he had heard explained to him from the time of his childhood, when he learned his catechism: to know, love and serve God, Creator and Lord of Heaven and Earth. The love of the Father supposes honouring, revering and serving our Creator and Lord, or to put it in a nutshell, 'fear of God'.
The fear of God is explicitly or implicitly present in all of Don Bosco’s moral and spiritual activity. Remotely, it has the ability to dispose a youngster toward love as servile fear, which is useful to achieve conversion from sin through confession and forgiveness. It becomes 'initial fear' when it becomes 'filial fear’, which means rejection of sin. This filial fear shares its life with love-charity in time and in eternity and it grows as charity grows; and when it is really lived, then it assumes the aspect of an adoring respect, homage or reverence and honour vis-a-vis the greatness, majesty, sanctity and justice of God, our all powerful and provident Creator.
An educated youngster is rightly and habitually aware of the adorable and amiable presence of God, the all powerful but at the same time, merciful Father. The believer experiences God's presence underboth forms and is aware of the saying: God sees me! The words Don Bosco so often used in his pedagogy, “make yourselves loved rather than feared” are nothing more than a reflection of the “make yourselves loved rather than feared” which characterizes the relationship of a faithful Christian with his God, the
849We see this for example in the Cenni storici..., regarding the 'discoli': Cenni storici..., in P. Braido (Ed.), Don Bosco
nella Chiesa..., pp. 78-79.
850G. Bosco, Vita del giovanetto Savio Domenico..., p. 50, OE XI 200.