The theory of development, which is now widely received and applied to all things, from star dust to the latest fashion, is at once a sign and a cause of the almost unlimited confidence which we put in the remedial and transforming power of education. We no longer think of God as standing aloof from nature and the course of history. He it is who works in the play of atoms and in the throbbings of the human heart; and as we perceive his action in the evolution both of matter and of mind, we know and feel that, when with conscious purpose we strive to call forth and make living the latent powers of man’s being, we are working with him in the direction in which he impels the universe. Education, therefore, we look upon as necessary, not merely because it is indispensable to any high and human kind of life, but also because God has made development the law both of conscious and unconscious nature. He is in act all that the finite may become, and the effort to grow in strength, knowledge, and virtue springs from a divine impulse.

Although we know that the earth is not the centre of the universe, that it is but a minor satellite, a globule lost in space, our deepest thought still finds that the end of nature is the production of rational beings, of man; for the final reason for which all things exist is that the infinite good may be communicated; and since the highest good is truth and holiness, it can be communicated only to beings who think and love. Hence all things are man’s, and he exists that he may make himself like God; in other words, that he may educate himself; for the end of education is to fit him for completeness of life, to train all his faculties, to call all his endowments into play, to make him symmetrical and whole in body and soul. This, of course, is the ideal, and consequently the unattainable; but in the light of ideals alone do we see rightly and judge truly; and to take a lower view of the aim and end of education is to take a partial view. To hold that God is, and that man truly lives only in so far as he is made partaker of the divine life, is, by implication, to hold that his education should be primarily and essentially religious. Our opinions and beliefs, however, are never the result of purely rational processes, and hence a mere syllogism has small persuasive force, or even no influence at all, upon our way of looking at things, or the motives which determine action.

As it is useless to argue against the nature of things, so we generally plead in vain when our world-view is other than that of those whom we seek to convince; for those who observe from different points either do not see the same objects or do not see them in the same light. Life is complex, and the springs of thought and action are controlled in mysterious ways by forces and impulses which we neither clearly understand nor accurately measure. What is called the spirit of the age, the spirit which, as the Poet says, sits at the roaring loom of time and weaves for God the garment whereby He is made visible to us, exercises a potent influence upon all our thinking and doing. We live in an era of progress, and progress means differentiation of structure and specialization of function. The more perfect the organism, the more are its separate functions assigned to separate parts. As social aggregates develop, a similar differentiation takes place. Offices which were in the hands of one are distributed among several. Agencies are evolved by which processes of production, distribution, and exchange are carried on. Trades and professions are called into existence. As enlightenment and skill increase, men become more difficult to please. They demand the best work, and the best work can be done, as a rule, only by specialists. Specialization thus becomes a characteristic of civilization. The patriarch is both king and priest. In Greece and Rome, religion is a function of the State. In the Middle Age, the Church and the State coalesce, and form such an intimate union that the special domain of either is invaded by both. But differentiation finally takes place, and we all learn to distinguish between the things of Cæsar and the things of God. This separation has far-reaching results. In asserting its independence, the State was driven to use argument as well as force. Thus learning, which in the confusion that succeeded the incursions of the Barbarians was cultivated almost exclusively by ecclesiastics, grew to be of interest and importance to laymen. They began to study, and the subjects which most engaged their thoughts were not religious, in the accepted sense of the word. The Protestant rebellion is but a phase of this revolution. It began with the introduction of the literature of Greece into Western Europe. The spirit of inquiry and mental curiosity was thereby awakened in wider circles; enthusiasm for the truth and beauty to which Greek genius has given the most perfect expression, was aroused; and interest in intellectual and artistic culture was called forth. New ideals were upheld to fresh and wondering minds. The contagion spread, and the thirst for knowledge was carried to ever-widening spheres. It thus came to pass that the cleric and the scholar ceased to be identical. The boundaries of knowledge were enlarged when the inductive method was applied to the study of nature, and it soon became impossible for one man to pretend to a mastery of all science. And so the principle of the division of labor was introduced into things of the intellect. Of old, the prophet or the philosopher was supposed to possess all wisdom; but now it had become plain that proficiency could be hoped for only by lifelong devotion to some special branch of knowledge. This led to other developments. The business of teaching, which had been almost exclusively in the hands of ecclesiastics, was now necessarily taken up by laymen also. As feudalism fell to decay, and the assertion of popular rights began to point to the advent of democracy, the movement in opposition to privilege logically led to the claim that learning should no longer be held to be the appanage of special classes, but that the gates of the temple of knowledge should be thrown open to the whole people. To make education universal, the most ready and the simplest means was to levy a school tax; and as this could be done only by the State, the State established systems of education and assumed the office of teacher. The result of all this has been that the school, which throughout Christendom is the creation of the church, has in most countries very largely passed into the control of the civil government.

This transference of control need not, however, involve the exclusion of religious influence and instruction; though once the State has gained the ascendency, the natural tendency is to take a partial and secular view of the whole question of education, and to limit the functions of the school to the training of the mental faculties. And, as a matter of fact, this tendency is found in men of widely differing and even conflicting opinions and convictions concerning religion itself. It is most pronounced, however, in the educational theories and systems of positivists and agnostics. As they hold that there is no God, or that we cannot know that there is a God, they necessarily conclude that it is absurd to attempt to teach children anything about God. This view is forcibly expressed by Issaurat, a French writer on education, in a recently published volume, which he calls “The Evolution and History of Pedagogy.”

“All religion,” he affirms, in the concluding chapter of his book, “impedes, thwarts, misdirects, and troubles the natural education of man, the normal and harmonious development of his physical, moral, and intellectual faculties; and since educational reform is not possible without reformation in the government, it is the duty of the State, not merely to separate itself from the church, but to suppress the church and to found the science of education upon biological philosophy, upon transformism let us say the word, upon materialism.” This view is manifestly the inevitable result of Issaurat’s general system of thought and belief. In his opinion, matter alone really exists, and what is called spirit is but a phase of its evolution. The world of spirit, therefore, is illusory; and to bring up the young to believe that it is the infinite, essential reality, is to teach them what is false, and to give a wrong direction to the whole course of life. For practical purposes this is the view not only of materialists and positivists, but of agnostics as well, who, though they do not deny the existence of spirit, assert that only the phenomenal can be known, or become the subject-matter of teaching. They all agree in holding that the theological world-view was the primitive one, which, yielding to the metaphysical, has been finally superseded by the scientific, the sole basis of a rational philosophy. The ideas of God, substance, cause, and end, are metaphysical ideas, which, if we wish to understand nature, must be ignored; for the study of nature is the study simply of facts and their relations with one another. There is, so they think, no such thing as substance, any more than there is such a thing as a principle of gravity, heat, light, electricity, or chemical affinity. The vital principle too, which has played so great a part in physiological inquiries, must be given up; and therefore, while nearly all the philosophers, from Kant to our own day, have made psychology the foundation of the science of education, there is at present a marked tendency to have it rest solely on biology. Whether and to what extent these theories are true or false, is beyond the purpose of this argument. True or false, they fairly describe the views of a large number of thinkers in our day, and enable us to form a conception of their philosophy of education. “Why trouble ourselves,” asks Professor Huxley, “about matters of which, however important they may be, we do know nothing and can know nothing? With a view to our duty in this life, it is necessary to be possessed of only two beliefs: The first, that the order of nature is ascertainable by our faculties to an extent that is practically unlimited; the second, that our volition counts for something as a condition of the course of events.” Our volition counts as a condition, but it is after all only a part of the course of events, and, consequently, the only belief it is necessary to hold is, that the course of events is ascertainable by our faculties to a practically unlimited extent. Such is the brief creed of materialists and agnostics. The order of nature is the only known god, and man’s sole end and duty is to make himself acquainted with it, that through obedience he may attain the highest perfection and happiness of which he is capable. This is the one true religion, and an enlightened people should forbid that any other be taught in their schools. Here we have an intelligible and well-defined position, and the one which, from the point of view of such men as Issaurat and Huxley, is alone tenable.

Every one now, who thinks at all, has some theory of the world, and hence the shades of unbelief as of belief are many; and since views of education are part of a more general system of philosophy, it is inevitable that those who disagree upon the fundamental questions of thought, disagree also in their notions as to what is the school’s proper office.

Materialists, pantheists, positivists, secularists, and pessimists unite in denying that there is a God above and distinct from nature, while agnostics and cosmists affirm that such a being, if he exist, must necessarily lie outside the domain of knowledge. Positive religious doctrines, therefore, are superstition. As these views are reflected in a more or less vague way in the writings of the multitude of those who make the current literature, public opinion becomes averse to religious dogmas. A large number of cultivated minds turn from all definite systems, whether of thought or belief. Everything may be tolerated, if only the spirit of dogmatism is away. They recognize how great a thing religion is, how profoundly it touches life, how powerfully it shapes conduct. Without it, civilization is hard and mechanical, art is formal and feeble, and man himself but a shrewd animal. But, from their points of view, doctrines about God and Christ and the church have nothing to do with religion. To think of God as substance is to convert him into nature, to think of him as a person is to limit him. The only absolute is the moral order of the world. The religion of Christ is not a theory or a system of thought; it is a view of life, and its essence is found in belief in the reality of moral ideas. The supernatural may fall away, even the notion of a Providence which rules the world in the interest of the good may be given up, and we still have the method and the secret of Jesus, all that is of value in his life and teaching. All theology is an illusion, all creeds are a mistake. Religion rests upon the moral power, which is not a conclusion drawn from facts, but the fact itself, the primal and essential fact in human life. Religion is simply morality suffused by the glow and warmth of a devout and reverent temper, and to teach doctrines about God and the church will not make men religious.

It is obvious to object that morality supposes belief in a Personal God and in the soul of man, as law implies a law-giver. This objection is meaningless, not only for the thinkers whom I have mentioned, but for others who find little interest in the literary and religious ideas of such men as Matthew Arnold. Morality, they claim, is independent, not only of metaphysics, but of religion as well. It is a science, as yet, indeed, imperfectly developed, but a science nevertheless, just as chemistry or physiology is a science. Human acts are controlled, not by a higher will or man’s freedom of choice, but by physical laws. The peculiarity of this view does not lie in the contention that ethics is a science, but in the claim that it is a science altogether independent of metaphysical and religious dogmas. All forces, it is asserted, physical, mental, and moral, are identical; and morality, like bodily vigor, is a product of organism. It is, in fact, but an elaboration of the two radical instincts of nutrition and propagation, from which springs the twofold movement of conscious life, the egoistic and the altruistic. This theory is accepted alike in the German school of materialism, in the French school of positivism, and in the English school of utilitarianism. What the influence of modern empiricism upon American opinion may be, it is difficult to determine. Americans certainly are a practical people, but they are not devoid of interest in speculative views. More than any other people, possibly, they have faith in the marvellous things which science is destined to accomplish, and they willingly listen to men of science, even when they quit the regions of fact for those of opinion. Thus the various theories, to which the progress of natural knowledge has given rise, are received by them, if not with implicit trust, with a kind of feeling, at least, that they may be true.

There is even a disposition to treat doubts of the truth of Christianity as a mark of intellectual vigor, and sometimes as a sign of religious sincerity. Preoccupied with material interests, but yet finding time to read the thoughts of many minds and to hear the discussion of antagonistic opinions and systems, they find it difficult to trust with entire confidence to what they know or believe. It all seems to be relative, and another generation may see everything in a different light. Problems take the place of principles, religious convictions are feeble, the grasp of Christian truth is relaxed, and the result is a certain moral hesitancy and infirmity.

They are not hostile to the churches, but they are more or less indifferent to their doctrines. As each sect has its peculiar creed, the dogmatic position of the church is thought to be of little moment. The important thing is to promote intelligence and virtue. The distinctively sectarian view they look upon as narrow and false, and the good which ecclesiastical organizations do is done in spite of their characteristic doctrines. The note of sectarianism is to them what the note of provincialism is to a man of culture, or lack of breeding to a gentleman. The moral fervor, which sectarians more than others feel, is, they freely grant, a power for good. It has a wholesome influence upon character, and is a support of the virtues which make free institutions possible, and which alone can make them permanent. But it has no necessary connection with theological doctrines, since it is found in earnest believers, whatever their creed. It is the child of enthusiastic faith, and is nourished and kept living by worship, not by dogmatic asseverations. As the power of the churches does not lie in their creeds, to make these creeds a school lesson cannot be desirable, especially when we reflect that the method of religion and the method of science are at variance.

Such, I imagine, are the views of large numbers of Americans, who are not members of any church, but whose influence is strongly felt in political and commercial as well as in social and professional life. And numbers of zealous Protestants are in substantial agreement with them, since they hold that faith is an emotional rather than an intellectual state of mind, and that religion is not so much a way of thinking as a way of feeling and acting. They assume, of course, as the prerequisites of religious belief, the dogmas of the existence of a personal God and of an immortal human soul; but, for the rest, they lay stress upon conduct and piety, not upon orthodox faith. A church must have a creed, as a party must have a platform; but unhesitating confidence in the truth of the doctrines which it thus formulates is not indispensable. American churches tend to ignore creeds. This is due, in a measure, to the growing desire to form a union among the several sects; but it is none the less a sign of waning belief in dogmatic religion. Hence the increasing emphasis which preaching lays upon the moral, aesthetic, and emotional aspects of the religious life. Hence, too, the assumption that the soul of the church may live, though the body be dead.

But, apart from all theories and systems of belief and thought, public opinion in America sets strongly against the denominational school.

The question of education is considered from a practical rather than from a theoretical point of view, and public sentiment on the subject may be embodied in the following words: The civilized world now recognizes the necessity of popular education. In a government of the people, such as this is, intelligence should be universal. In such a government, to be ignorant is not merely to be weak, it is also to be dangerous to the common welfare; for the ignorant are not only the victims of circumstances, they are the instruments which unscrupulous and designing men make use of, to taint the source of political authority and to thwart the will of the people. To protect itself, the State is forced to establish schools and to see that all acquire at least the rudiments of letters. This is so plain a case that argument becomes ridiculous. They who doubt the good of knowledge are not to be reasoned with, and in America not to see that it is necessary, is to know nothing of our political, commercial, and social life. But the American State can give only a secular education, for it is separate from the church, and its citizens profess such various and even conflicting beliefs, that in establishing a school system, it is compelled to eliminate the question of religion. Church and State are separate institutions, and their functions are different and distinct. The church seeks to turn men from sin, that they may become pleasing to God and save their souls; the State takes no cognizance of sin, but strives to prevent crime, and to secure to all its citizens the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property. Americans are a Christian people. Religious zeal impelled their ancestors to the New World, and when schools were first established here, they were established by the churches, and religious instruction formed an important part of the education they gave. This was natural, and it was desirable even, in primitive times, when each colony had its own creed and worship, when society was simple, and the State as yet imperfectly organized. Here, as in the Old World, the school was the daughter of the church, and she has doubtless rendered invaluable service to civilization, by fostering a love for knowledge among barbarous races and in struggling communities. But the task of maintaining a school system such as the requirements of a great and progressive nation demands, is beyond her strength. This is so, at least, when the church is split into jealous and warring sects.

To introduce the spirit of sectarianism into the class-room would destroy the harmony and good-will among citizens, which it is one of the aims of the common school to cherish. There is, besides, no reason why this should be done, since the family and the church give all the religious instruction which children are capable of receiving.

This, it seems to me, is a fair presentation of the views and ideas which go to the making of current American opinion on the question of religious instruction in State schools; and current opinion, when the subject-matter is not susceptible of physical demonstration, cannot be turned suddenly in an opposite direction. When men have grown accustomed to look at things in a certain way, they have acquired a mental habit, which no mere argument, however cogent or eloquent, is able to overcome. To what extent this view of the school question prevails is readily perceived by whoever recalls to mind that not one of the States of the Union has attempted to introduce the denominational system of education, while all the political parties have bound themselves to uphold the present purely secular system. The opinion that the prosperity of the nation depends upon the intelligence and activity of the people, and to no appreciable extent upon the influence of ecclesiastical organizations, has so far prevailed, that the general feeling has come to be that the State has no direct interest in the church, which is the concern merely of individuals. The religious denominations themselves have helped to inspire this sentiment by their jealousies and rivalries. The smaller sects feel that State aid for denominational schools would accrue to the benefit chiefly of the larger; and the others are willing to forego favors which they could not receive without permitting the Catholic Church to participate also in the bounty of the government.

The Catholic view of the school question is as clearly defined as it is well known. It rests upon the general ground that man is created for a supernatural end, and that the church is the divinely appointed agency to help him to attain his supreme destiny. If education is a training for completeness of life, its primary element is the religious, for complete life is life in God. Hence we may not assume an attitude toward the child, whether in the home, in the church, or in the school, which might imply that life apart from God could be anything else than broken and fragmentary. A complete man is not one whose mind only is active and enlightened; but he is a complete man who is alive in all his faculties. The truly human is found not in knowledge alone, but also in faith, in hope, in love, in pure-mindedness, in reverence, in the sense of beauty, in devoutness, in the thrill of awe, which Goethe says is the highest thing in man. If the teacher is forbidden to touch upon religion, the source of these noble virtues and ideal moods is sealed. His work and influence become mechanical, and he will form but commonplace and vulgar men. And if an educational system is established on this narrow and material basis, the result will be deterioration of the national type, and the loss of the finer qualities which make men many-sided and interesting, which are the safeguards of personal purity and of unselfish conduct.

Religion is the vital element in character, and to treat it as though it were but an incidental phase of man’s life is to blunder in a matter of the highest and most serious import. Man is born to act, and thought is valuable mainly as a guide to action. Now, the chief inspiration to action, and above all to right action, is found in faith, hope, and love, the virtues of religion, and not in knowledge, the virtue of the intellect. Knowledge, indeed, is effectual only when it is loved, believed in, and held to be a ground for hope. Man does not live on bread alone, and if he is brought up to look to material things, as to the chief good, his higher faculties will be stunted. If to do rightly rather than to think keenly is man’s chief business here on earth, then the virtues of religion are more important than those of the intellect; for to think is to be unresolved, whereas to believe is to be impelled in the direction of one’s faith. In epochs of doubt things fall to decay; in epochs of faith the powers which make for full and vigorous life, hold sway. The education which forms character is indispensable, that which trains the mind is desirable. The essential element in human life is conduct, and conduct springs from what we believe, cling to, love, and yearn for, vastly more than from what we know. The decadence and ruin of individuals and of societies come from lack of virtue, not from lack of knowledge. “The hard and valuable part of education,” says Locke, “is virtue; this is the solid and substantial good, which the teacher should never cease to inculcate till the young man places his strength, his glory, and his pleasure in it.” We may, of course, distinguish between morality and religion, between ethics and theology. As a matter of fact, however, moral laws have everywhere reposed upon the basis of religion, and their sanction has been sought in the principles of faith. As an immoral religion is false, so, if there is no God, a moral law is meaningless.

Theorists may be able to construct a system of ethics upon a foundation of materialism; but their mechanical and utilitarian doctrines have not the power to exalt the imagination or to confirm the will. Their educational value is feeble. Here in America we have already passed the stage of social development in which we might hold out to the young, as an ideal, the hope of becoming President of the Republic, or the possessor of millions of money. We know what sorry men presidents and millionnaires may be. We cannot look upon our country simply as a wide race-course with well-filled purses hanging at the goal for the prize-winners. We clearly perceive that a man’s possessions are not himself, and that he is or ought to be more than anything which can belong to him. Ideals of excellence, therefore, must be substituted for those of success. Opinion governs the world, but ideals draw souls and stimulate to noble action. The more we transform with the aid of machinery the world of matter, the more necessary does it become that we make plain to all that man’s true home is the world of thought and love, of hope and aspiration. The ideals of utilitarianism and secularism are unsatisfactory. They make no appeal to the infinite in man, to that in him which makes pursuit better than possession, and which, could he believe there is no absolute truth, love, and beauty, would lead him to despair. To-day, as of old, the soul is born of God and for God, and finds no peace unless it rest in him. Theology, assuredly, is not religion; but religion implies theology, and a church without a creed is a body without articulation. The virtues of religion are indispensable. Without them, it is not well either with individuals or with nations; but these virtues cannot be inculcated by those who, standing aloof from ecclesiastical organizations, are thereby cut off from the thought and work of all who in every age have most loved God, and whose faith in the soul has been most living. Religious men have wrought for God in the church, as patriots have wrought for liberty and justice in the nation; and to exclude the representatives of the churches from the school is practically to exclude religion, the power which more than all others makes for righteousness, which inspires hope and confidence, which makes possible faith in the whole human brotherhood, in the face even of the political and social wrongs which are still everywhere tolerated. To exclude religion is to exclude the spirit of reverence, of gentleness and obedience, of modesty and purity; it is to exclude the spirit by which the barbarians have been civilized, by which woman has been uplifted and ennobled and the child made sacred. From many sides the demand is made that the State schools exercise a greater moral influence, that they be made efficient in forming character as well as in training the mind. It is recognized that knowing how to read and write does not insure good behavior. Since the State assumes the office of teacher, there is a disposition among parents to make the school responsible for their children’s morals as well as for their minds, and thus the influence of the home is weakened. Whatever the causes may be, there seems to be a tendency, both in private and in public life, to lower ethical standards. The moral influence of the secular school is necessarily feeble, since our ideas of right and wrong are so interfused with the principles of Christianity that to ignore our religious convictions is practically to put aside the question of conscience. If the State may take no cognizance of sin, neither may its school do so. But in morals sin is the vital matter; crime is but its legal aspect. Men begin as sinners before they end as criminals.

The atmosphere of religion is the natural medium for the development of character. If we appeal to the sense of duty, we assume belief in God and in the freedom of the will; if we strive to awaken enthusiasm for the human brotherhood, we imply a divine fatherhood. Accordingly, as we accept or reject the doctrines of religion, the sphere of moral action, the nature of the distinction between right and wrong, and the motives of conduct all change. In the purely secular school only secular morality may be taught; and whatever our opinion of this system of ethics may otherwise be, it is manifestly deficient in the power which appeals to the heart and the conscience. The child lives in a world which imagination creates, where faith, hope, and love beckon to realms of beauty and delight. The spiritual and moral truths which are to become the very life-breath of his soul he apprehends mystically, not logically. Heaven lies about him; he lives in wonderland, and feels the thrill of awe as naturally as he looks with wide-open eyes. Do not seek to persuade him by telling him that honesty is the best policy, that poverty overtakes the drunkard, that lechery breeds disease, that to act for the common welfare is the surest way to get what is good for one’s self; for such teaching will not only leave him unimpressed, but it will seem to him profane, and almost immoral. He wants to feel that he is the child of God, of the infinitely good and all-wonderful; that in his father, divine wisdom and strength are revealed; in his mother, divine tenderness and love. He so believes and trusts in God that it is our fault if he knows that men can be base. In nothing does the godlike character of Christ show forth more beautifully than in His reverence for children. Shall we profess to believe in Him, and yet forbid His name to be spoken in the houses where we seek to train the little ones whom He loved? Shall we shut out Him whose example has done more to humanize, ennoble, and uplift the race of man than all the teachings of the philosophers and all the disquisitions of the moralists? If the thinkers, from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Pestalozzi, who have dealt with the problems of education, have held that virtue is its chief aim and end, shall we thrust from the school the one ideal character who, for nearly nineteen hundred years, has been the chief inspiration to righteousness and heroism; to whose words patriots and reformers have appealed in their struggles for liberty and right; to whose example philanthropists have looked in their labors to alleviate suffering; to whose teaching the modern age owes its faith in the brotherhood of men; by whose courage and sympathy the world has been made conscious that the distinction between man and woman is meant for the propagation of the race, but that as individuals they have equal rights and should have equal opportunities? We all, and especially the young, are influenced by example more than by precepts and maxims, and it is unjust and unreasonable to exclude from the schoolroom the living presence of the noblest and best men and women, of those whose words and deeds have created our Christian civilization. In the example of their lives we have truth and justice, goodness and greatness, in concrete form; and the young who are brought into contact with these centres of influence will be filled with admiration and enthusiasm; they will be made gentle and reverent; and they will learn to realize the ever-fresh charm and force of personal purity. Teachers who have no moral criteria, no ideals, no counsels of perfection, no devotion to God and godlike men, cannot educate, if the proper meaning of education is the complete unfolding of all man’s powers.

The school, of course, is but one of the many agencies by which education is given. We are under the influence of our whole environment, physical, moral, and intellectual; political, social, and religious; and if, in all this, aught were different, we ourselves should be other. The family is a school and the church is a school; and current American opinion assigns to them the business of moral and religious education. But this implies that conduct and character are of secondary importance; it supposes that the child may be made subject to opposite influences at home and in the school, and not thereby have his finer sense of reverence, truth, and goodness deadened. The subduing of the lower nature, of the outward to the inner man, is a thing so arduous that reason, religion, and law combined often fail to accomplish it. If one should propose to do away with schools altogether, and to leave education to the family and the Church, he would be justly considered ridiculous; because the carelessness of parents and the inability of the ministry of the Church would involve the prevalence of illiteracy. Now, to leave moral and religious education to the family and the churches involves, for similar reasons, the prevalence of indifference, sin, and crime. If illiteracy is a menace to free institutions, vice and irreligion are a greater menace. The corrupt are always bad citizens; the ignorant are not necessarily so. Parents who would not have their children taught to read and write, were there no free schools, will as a rule neglect their religious and moral education. In giving religious instruction to the young, the churches are plainly at a disadvantage; for they have the child but an hour or two in seven days, and they get into their Sunday classes only the children of the more devout.

If the chief end of education is virtue; if conduct is three-fourths of life; if character is indispensable, while knowledge is only useful, then it follows that religion which, more than any other vital influence, has power to create virtue, to inspire conduct, and to mould character should enter into all the processes of education. Our school system, then, does not rest upon a philosophic view of life and education. We have done what it was easiest to do, not what it was best to do; and in this, as in other instances, churchmen have been willing to sacrifice the interests of the nation to the whims of a narrow and jealous temper. The denominational system of popular education is the right system. The secular system is a wrong system. The practical difficulties to be overcome that religious instruction may be given in the schools are relatively unimportant, and would be set aside if the people were thoroughly persuaded of its necessity. An objection which Dr. Harris, among others, insists upon, that the method of science and the method of religion are dissimilar, and that therefore secular knowledge and religious knowledge should not be taught in the same school, seems to me to have no weight. The method of mathematics is not the method of biology; the method of logic is not the method of poetry; but they are all taught in the same school. A good teacher, in fact, employs many methods. In teaching the child grammatical analysis, he has no fear of doing harm to his imagination or his talent for composition.

No system, however, can give assurance that the school is good. To determine this we must know the spirit which lives in it. The intellectual, moral, and religious atmosphere which the child breathes there is of far more importance, from an educational point of view, than any doctrines he may learn by rote, than any acts of worship he may perform.

The teacher makes the school; and when high, pure, devout, and enlightened men and women educate, the conditions favorable to mental and moral growth will be found, provided a false system does not compel them to assume a part and play a rôle, while the true self the faith, hope, and love whereby they live is condemned to inaction. The deeper tendency of the present age is not, I think, to exclude religion from any vital process, but rather to widen the content of the idea of religion until it embrace the whole life of man. The worship of God is not now the worship of infinite wisdom, holiness, and justice alone, but is also the worship of the humane, the beautiful, and the industriously active. Whether we work for knowledge or freedom, or purity or strength, or beauty or health, or aught else that is friendly to completeness of life, we work with God and for God. In the school, as in whatever other place in the boundless universe a man may find himself, he finds himself with God, in Him moves, lives, and has his being.