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nineteenth century the common schools were un-churched entirely.

When the schools were secularized and the State took charge of America's greatest institution, the School, the clergy, that had used it as a means for so many years of propagating its theological ideas, was robbed of its best and most fruitful yield.

I think that made certain orthodox clergymen mad. They haven't got over it yet. They are forever calling the schools bad names and blessing them with right proper ecclesiastical invectives.

Horace Mann gave them the right answer —an answer that needs repetition with each new revival of the struggle. The reply was provoked principally by a certain ecclesiastic, a most picturesque spokesman for the Fundamentalists of his day, a certain Rev. Matthew Hale Smith. (It is of no significance that his name was Smith; suffice it to say Mann characterized him as "one of the wild beasts of Ephesus," the "untamable hyena," and "a child of sin and Satan," referring, I take it, to certain unmistakable vestiges of Smith's progenitors together with the theologue's own explanation and doctrine of the nature of man.)

The Rev. Mr. Smith's sermon on "The Ark of God on a New Cart" was almost as epoch making in its stirring qualities as Jonathan Edward's exposition of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." The "new cart" was the recent "deadly heresy" textbooks drawn by oxen (beasts of rather a low order type, like Scopes), and the ark was stricken (the prevailing juvenile depravity as evidenced by the "Hell in the High Schools" proved it), as indeed it must be, since it was no longer borne aloft on the shoulders of the priests of God. Specifically Mr. Smith charged that the young people of the day were denied religious training by certain modern reformers and consequently the schools had become corrupt. An effort was being made, he said, to take out of the schools the Bible and all religious instruction, to make them "a counterpoise to religious instruction at home and in the Sabbath Schools." The Board of Educa

tion, he charged, was abetting in this, by allowing individuals to disseminate through the land, "crude and destructive principles," "at war with the Bible." (Apparently there are principles other than evolution "at war with the Bible.") Moreover, he charged the Board was "accepting books that inculcate the most deadly heresy—even universal salvation."

Of course the minister was wrong, wrong in the secular matters pertaining to the management of the schools and in the character of the books selected for the children to read. Horace Mann told him so in no uncertain terms, but the part of his reply that concerns us most is his vigorous denunciation of the policy of religious instruction in the schools. A part of it can be reproduced; the lapse of time has not weakened its effectiveness.

It is easy to see that the experiment would not stop with having half a dozen conflicting creeds taught by authority of law in the different schools . . One sect of the same town or vicinity.. will have the ascendency today, another tomorrow. This year there will be three Persons in the God-head; next year but one. . . This year, the everlasting fires of Hell will burn to terrify the penitent; next year, and without any repentance, its eternal flames will be extinguished. . . This year the ordinance of baptism is inefficacious without immersion; next year one drop of water will be as good as forty fathoms. . . . In controversies involving such momentous interests, the fiercest spirit will rage, and all the contemporaries of heaven be will be) such strifes and persecutions on the quespoisoned by the passions of earth . . . (There tion of total depravity as to make all men depraved at any rate; and the number of Persons in the God-head in heaven, as to make little children atheists upon earth.

If the question, "What theology shall be taught in school?" is to be decided by districts or towns, [he might have said "States” or “counties” as in the instance of Tennessee or Rhea County] then all the prudential and superintending school committees must be chosen with express reference to their faith; the creed of every candidate for teaching must be investigated; and when litigations arise and such a system will breed them in swarms-alas, true prophet, thy words were

winged], an ecclesiastical tribunal, some star chamber, or high commission court must be created to decide them. If the governor is to have power to appoint the judges of this spiritual tribunal, he also must be chosen with reference to the appointments he will make, and so, too, must the legislators who are to define their power, and to give them the purse and sword of the State, to execute their authority. Call such officers by the name of judge and governor, or cardinal or pope, the thing will be the same. The establishment of the true faith will not stop with the school room. Its grasping jurisdiction will extend over all schools, over all private faith and public worship, until at last, after all our centuries of struggle and of suffering, it will come back to the inquisition, the faggot, and the rack. This does not sound very different from the remarks of Clarence Darrow of a few months ago:

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church.

At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one, you can do the other.

A mere recitation of facts is nothing, an interpretation of them is everything. Are we to evaluate the return of a century to its starting point in the mildly reminiscent mood of him who reflects tritely that history repeats itself, to suppose that it teaches us nothing more than that fundamentalism cannot sleep longer than a hundred years, or that Dayton, Washington, Minnesota, Georgia, are airy echoes from the vaulted chambers of the past where the rancorous and vanquished spirits of the dead centuries "sit on granite thrones together" and now

"rise again With twenty mortal murders on their crowns And push us from our stools?"

Or may we assume that the creative forces in religion were at work again? May we not suppose that the wresting of the schools

from the wrangling forces of Protestantism was the work of God, that it was evidence of a new and better spirit in religion, a return of the Puritan with a hand for the constructive work of his day, and that the very establishment, growth, and permanency of this religious life, were assured by its creative act? Wherever there is progressive life there is vital religion. The trend of the century in our schools has been a triumph for religion. When the schools passed under the aegis of the State they went in the direction of a true religion. The conflict of a century ago was not a conflict between State and Church at the expense of religion; it was a conflict. between the State and Church with a victory for religion. The schools might have become the spoils of the discordant forces of sectarianism, but a liberal secularized them and, in the very act, took them to his own encampment.

Before we consider how this is so let me

digress to say religious wars, when a party to an impending conflict is a liberal, are incredible. The objective of the liberal is not of a self-centered character and his spirit of toleration protects him in the heat of controversy. His opponents cannot strike because he has no interest in "a duel to the death." The religious wars were provoked by the religion of the bigots on both sides, and when men become genuinely liberal there will be no more wars of any kind anywhere. Two liberals can easily divide their forces, they can take their irreconcilable differences to separate encampments and there will be peace between them; but two bigots cannot make an easy division of quarters, they are by habit of mind antagonists, imperialists of the spirit, with an objectionable sense of ownership, whose proprietary interests are forever winding and insinuating themselves into the other fellow's territory. I never could symphathize with the man who accepts an invitation to a discussion of religion with the air of one receiving a challenge to a fight and when he assumes the attitude of a pugilist I shut up shop and go and hide in a place where it is quiet and cool.

The early nineteenth century leaders in education little realized they were fighting the cause of liberal religion. They were not out after converts; they waged no war of aggression for souls. Their interest for the children of the State was in no sense a selfish one; they sought only to defend. And in their desire to protect the next generation from the ravages of a fierce sectarian spirit they unconsciously delivered them into the hands of the liberal's God.

In support of this case I offer in evidence the aim and purpose of religious education, the utter inability of the established churches to satisfy its requirements, and the superior means and methods at the disposal of the common school in this field.

The aim of religious education is the interpretation and direction of life in terms of its spiritual and moral values. The fact of life is nothing, the interpretation and direction of it are everything. In the case of our young people it is the salvation of the race, for salvation is incarnation. It is the inward appropriation of worthy ethical and spiritual ideals with all their social implications. The outward realization of these ideals in society would be perfection, the inward appropriation of them is salvation. What do the critics of the young expect of them, salvation or perfection, education or complete development? Young people must be led to think straight, to think high, to think well, and their salvation is accomplished, for thoughts develop into character and character into action in the way a man follows a wheel barrow which he pushes.

Our young people must be taught to think straight in regard to the great spiritual and moral values of life. If the education of our schools is accomplishing this for them it is functioning religiously. Attitude is everyAttitude is everything. Attitude is soul, personality, the man, and attitude is philosophy, and philosophy is religion, when it puts sense and worth, dignity and meaning, joy and hope, into life, when it translates a tread-mill existence on the meaningless surface routine of life into a thing of holy purpose, beauty, and enthusiasm.

I do not think the established churches are in any sense as able to train our youth to think and act straight along spiritual and ethical lines as are the public schools. Deny as you will, our churches are sectarian institutions. The marks of their heredity are everywhere upon them. They are so very compartmental in their organization our young people are suspicious of them; this would be so even if they were not crudely sectarian in spirit. Moreover, the young people of our day do not go to Sunday Schools voluntarily in any degree proportionate with the population. Considerable more than half of our population are not identified with any church, and it is seldom that a church is able to keep in its Sunday School a young man or woman who has passed fourteen. Long ago it was asserted that a remarkable capacity to resist knowledge is a characteristic of youth and what right have we to suppose that it will show a special predilection for religious knowledge? Contrast with this for the moment the tremendous increase in the popularity of the high school and the present tendency to extend the policy of compulsory education.

The church schools are for the most part deficient in professional supervision, frequently unmanned entirely, and without a practical means of securing good teachers. They are very weak in discipline and in pedagogic methods. Appeals are made constantly by pastors for qualified teachers from among the staff of our common schools who 'ought to serve" but who dislike to do on Sunday the thing they must do every day in the week and under very adverse conditions

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conditions that make it impossible for them to have the same degree of success. From an educational point of view the church of today is as impotent as were the common schools of the last of the eighteenth century. The only exception perhaps is the case of the fairly well-organized Community Church schools, supervised by a Director of Religious Education, and our modern schools of Religion under no church supervision and affiliated with our state universities as in the case of the University of Michigan.

The purpose of religious education from the point of view of the clergy is too often a narrow one. It is limited to an exposition of Scripture. It means Bible classes, a singing of hymns, usually a whole lot of disorder, and some picnics. Sometimes there are classes in church polity, the history of "my church," instruction in the tenets of the faith; at other times questionable dances and movies have been brought into the parish house "to modernize the church" and "to hold on to the young people." I myself have attended these dances and I could not help but observe that here was a whole lot of a kind of pastime that my principal long ago prohibited on the floor of our own gymnasium. Except for the dances and the movies the Sabbath Schools of 1925 have not advanced one whit in three hundred years and they are now doing very much what they did when the clergy set their wits to oppose "the old deluder, Satan, whose one chief project was to keep men from a knowledge of the Scriptures."

We now come to the point of this paper. Are we to suppose that since the Church and the home have failed to meet the end in the field of religious education that it has been an utterly neglected phase of education? Is the religious element completely excluded because the schools are completely secularized? Because the Bible and the study of religious literature has been prohibited are teachers and principals facing the problem of the ancient Greek-relying, that is, upon an education that is preëminently rational to produce character in the child?

I think not. The whole trend of education in the schools has been in the direction of a genuine and worthy religious development. What means do the churches withhold from the schools for the accomplishment of this end that might serve to thwart it? I think only one. Certainly in reserving to themselves the right to impart doctrine they have been badly fooled. Doctrine is a term men like to apply to religious philosophy. Call it what you will, learning vital truths about the soul, about God, about sin, about good

and evil, could never be reserved exclusively to any single institution that has its bounds anywhere within the borders of life itself. To reserve these things is to reserve the universe from the zenith to the horizon and back again both ways. There is no church coterminous with the multiplicity of issues that stir men's souls, and it is very certain that the common school is somewhere within the realm of the great Invisible Church. This is not an attempt to get lost in a maze of metaphysics. The fact remains that a boy on the carpet "in the office" face to face with a benignant and just principal will be indoctrinated into what is involved in good and bad conduct in a way that will kindle in his heart a distinctly religious emotion so completely will the lesson penetrate into his very vitals. He will learn something about righteousness and it won't be couched in pietistic phrases, thereby weakening its effectiveness with him.

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The terminology of the pietist weakens his point of contact with his patients, especially young people. They do not understand the "lingo." Churchmen have inherited unfortunate names for things. Naturally born young men shun people who teach in a goody-good tone about "sin and salvation," 'righteousness,' "faith," "forgiveness," and "damnation." They do not take to "sermons." But in a school things are different: they get their sermons with telling effectiveness from assembly rostrums and in the class rooms, they learn the way of the righteous and they walk therein, they are taught to love and they do love in the way of the good old "ayanaw" of the Gospels. In fact, no good school man can do his work without religion; every school house is a temple and every school room a sanctuary. Regularly in a public high school that I know there can be seen an assembly of a thousand pupils sobering without a word of warning into a worshipful stillness of the heart, listening to a reading of the Bible, uniting in prayer, and singing with an intensity, a volume, a relish, that comes only from the heart of immortal youth. The man who denies that the "right spirit" is here re

newed within them is deaf to the sense and sounds of reverence.

Of course it is not all so. There is the school man who never escapes from the mechanism of his System. He is the efficiency expert. His school is a soulless thing, and he is satisfied if it runs smoothly. There are hordes of little things that are drawn in and driven out, little lost squads, whole companies of superior ones, irregular companies of damaged ones, platoons, marshalled about all day with a military pride and precision. This principal is a genius in program making. His problems are all matters of business management, he likes to organize, to schedule, and he runs a factory. I well remember such an institution almost under the eaves of a great university, two thousand little workers filed in at eight o'clock, every teacher was a "traffic cop" and he took his place on the jump at every bell signal, and at one o'clock the place was emptied regularly to receive eighteen hundred more little citizen things who needed. training in the lockstep of their older brethren. The principal of this school can never claim the title of a "Schoolmaster in the Great City."

The objection is made that respect for law and order, teaching good citizenship, the big business of the school, is not teaching religion. Pupils conform out of necessity; they are not "converted," they are only suppressed in obedience to enforced regulations. Every teacher knows this is a fallacy. Order, respect for law, discipline, selfcontrol, every attitude that makes for success in the school room, is a condition of the heart or it is nothing. The control of the school room is an emotional control; it is in no sense due to a magician's machination or a police department. Witness the immediate loss of control when an injustice is done and the hostility in the spirit of things when the Master loses his temper. As a matter of fact, our young people, so wholly are they the natural sons of God, can be controlled only when they are sure that the teacher is converted to righteousness, justice, love, patience, and truth.

The control of a school is an enterprise in which the highest and holiest resources of the young person's moral nature are enlisted. There is no such thing as an automatic son of God but there is such a thing as a school of a thousand pupils self-governed because the very best ideals in social relations have been presented to them with an attractiveness that has taken a lasting hold upon their consciences.

No worthwhile teacher of English literature can escape the demands in his subject for religious and moral training. It is not the purpose of this subject to point morals or teach religion but both are inevitable, and the effectiveness of the instruction is increased because it is incidental. What teacher can interpret The Vision of Sir Launfal, and escape religion? How can one present Stevenson's moral fables, Markheim, for instance, and avoid a discussion of conscience, the Better-Self-"The hand of God, stretched forth against sin"? To teach Milton and not to teach religion would require a pedagogical freak of no small dimensions. Carlyle's Essay on Burns and Burns himself contain more philosophy of religion with more lessons on maladjustments in social relations than all the catechisms combined. What class ever read any of George Eliot without getting into religion? No senior class ever read the minor poems of Browning without looking into the inner life of men, or Prospice without discussing the immortality of the soul. Does a high school boy ever study Macbeth without being impressed with the evil effects of high crime upon character, without understanding that the ways of the transgressor are hard, that his life

Is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing?

The doctrines of the Church have been superseded by the doctrines of the School. The preacher of two hundred years ago who objected to the teaching of the law of gravitation on the grounds that it "took from God that direct action on His works so constantly ascribed to Him in Scripture and

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