II. MORAL EDUCATION IN THE COMMON SCHOOLS. BY WILLIAM T. HARRIS, CONCORD, MASS. The separation of Church and State is an acknowledged principle in our national government, and its interpretation from generation to generation eliminates, with more and more of strictness, whatever ceremonies and observances of a religious character still remain attached to secular customs and usages. Inasmuch as religion. in its definition of what is to be regarded as divine, at the same time furnishes the ultimate and supreme ground of all obligation, it stands in the closest of relations to morality, which we may define as the system of duties or obligations that govern the relation of man to himself as individual and as race or social whole. To the thinking observer nothing can be more obvious than the fact that the institutions of society are created and sustained by the moral activity of man. The moral training of the young is essential to the preservation of civilization. The so-called fabric of society is woven out of moral distinctions and observances. The net-work of habits and usages which makes social combination possible, which enables men to live together as a community, constitutes an ethical system. In that ethical system only is spiritual life possible. Without such a system even the lowest stage of society - that of the mere savage could not exist. In proportion to the completeness of development of its ethical system, a community rises from barbarism. It is quite clear that so deep a change in the principle of human government as the separation of Church and State involves the most important consequences to the ethical life of our people. All thoughtful people look with solicitude on the institutions of an educational character in order to discover what means, if any there be, can remain for moral education after its ecclesiastical foundation has been removed. It happens quite naturally that the best people in the community struggle to retain the ecclesiastical forms and ceremonies in the secular. They find themselves unable to discriminate between the provinces of morality and religion. With them education in morality means education in performing religious rites. This view certainly does not harmonize with the political conviction of our people. From year to year we see the religious rites and ceremonies set aside in the legislature, the town meeting, the public assembly, the school. If retained they become empty forms with no appreciable effect. In this sad state of affairs it becomes important to consider all other means of cultivating the ethical sense, and especially to discover how it is that institutions may be emancipated from the direct control of the church. Without entering into this question in its details at the present time, we may remark that the history of Christian civilization shows us a continuous spectacle of the development of institutions into independence. It is a sort of training or nurture of institutions by the Church into a degree of maturity in which they come to be able to live and thrive without the support of mere ecclesiastical authority. But an institution attains its majority only when it has become thoroughly grounded on some fundamental divine principle. The State, for instance, is organized on the principle of justice-the return of each man's deed to himself. On such principles the State may be conducted without fear of collision with the Church or other institutions. The school, too, has certain divine principles which it has borrowed from the church through long centuries of tutelage, and perhaps can be conducted by itself without Church authority and yet be a positive auxiliary to the church and the cause of religion. Let us study these characteristics. The school proposes at first this object, to teach the pupil a knowledge of man and nature; in short, to initiate him into the realm of truth. Certainly truth is divine, and religion itself is chiefly busied with discovering and interpreting the Divine First Principle of the universe and his personal relation to men. In so far, therefore, as truth -real truth in harmony with the Personality of God, and not spurious truth — is taught in the school it is a positive auxiliary to the Church and to religion. But the intellectual pursuit of truth in the school is conditioned upon a deeper principle. Order is the first law, even of Heaven. The government of human beings in a community is a training for them in the forms of social life. The school must strictly enforce a code of laws. The so-called discipline of the school is its primordial condition, and is itself a training in habits essential to life in a social whole; and hence is itself moral training. Let us study the relation of school discipline to the development of moral character, and compare its code of duties with the ethical code as a whole. First let us take an ideal survey of the whole field and see what is desirable, before we examine the results of the school as actually furnished. One may distinguish moral duties or habits which ought to be taught to youth into three classes: (a) Mechanical virtus in which the youth exercises a minimum of moral choice and obeys an external rule prescribed for him. In this, the lowest species of moral discipline, the youth learns self-denial and self-control, and not much besides. (b) Social duties, those which govern the relation of man to man and which are the properly called "Moral" duties. In this form of moral discipline the youth learns to obey principle rather than the immediate will of another or a mechanical prescription. (c) Religious duties, or those based on the relation to God as revealed in religion. In these the youth learns the ultimate grounds of obligation, and gains both a practical principle for the conduct of life and a theoretic principle on which to base his view of the world. In his religious doctrine man formulates his theory of the origin and destiny of nature and the human race and · at the same time defines his eternal vocation, his fundamental duties. The mere statement of this obvious fact is sufficient to indicate the rank and importance of the religious part of the moral duties. Turning now to the school, let us take an inventory of its means and appliances for moral education in the line of these several divisions. Let us remember, too, that morality consists in practise rather than in theory, and that the school can teach morality only when it trains the will into ethical habits, and not when it stops short with inculcating a correct theoretical view of right and wrong, useful as such view may be. In the school we note first the moral effect of the requirement of implicit obedience a requirement necessary within the school for its successful administration. The discipline in obedience in its strict form, such as it is found in the school-room, has four other applications which remain valid under all conditions of society: (a) obedience towards parents; (b) towards employers, overseers, and supervisors, as regards the details of work; (c) towards the government in its legally constituted authority, civil or military; (d) towards the divine will, however revealed. - In each of these four forms there is and always remains a sphere of greater or less extent within which implicit obedience is one's duty. In the three first named this duty is not absolute, but limited the sphere continually growing narrower with the growth of the individual in wisdom and self-directive power. In the fourth form of obedience to the divine will the individual comes more and more to a personal insight into the necessity of the divine law as revealed in Scripture, in nature, and especially in human life; and he becomes, through this, emancipated relatively from the direct personal control of men, even of the wisest and best, and becomes rather a law unto himself. He outgrows mere mechanical obedience and arrives at a truly moral will in which the law is written on the heart. Obedience as a habit to what is prescribed by an authority is obviously a training that fits one for religion, even if religion has no direct part in such training. Hence the school, even when perfectly secular, in securing implicit obedience, is in so far an auxiliary of the church. The pillars on which school education rest are behavior and scholarship. Deportment or behavior comes first as the sine qua non. The first requisite of the school is |