II. But many who admit the importance of moral training, and even its necessity in order to the welfare of the nation, will argue that this is not the work of the State, that the "government is exclusively secular, as much so as a bank corpora tion or a railway company," * and it must, therefore, depend upon the family, the Church, and the Sunday-school to train its future citizens in morals and religion. This reasoning has a surface plausibility, but contains a poorly disguised fallacy which is fatal to the nation. It makes assumptions which are wholly unwarrantable and contrary to facts.

The claim that the nation is exclusively secular, is not true in the sense that it has no individuality of character, no moral sense, no ethical principles, no religious belief, no moral responsibility. All these it has, and must have, or miserably perish of imbecility and inward rottenness. There is no proper analogy between the government and a "bank corporation" or a "railway company." The grounds upon which the existence of each rests and the objects legitimately sought by each are as widely separated as the poles. The latter are carried on by private enterprise for individual ends, personal gain being a legitimate object in view; the former is the central source of power under whose authority all corporations exist, and the chief object of which is to promote the well-being of its subjects. To compare things as unlike as these is to confound reason and destroy all rational distinctions.

The theory that the government ought to be or can be entirely secular, that is neutral, in regard to all matters of religion is utterly untenable. Such an attitude on the part of government is absolutely impossible. What kind of a government would that be that had no mind, no opinions, no will, no expression of purpose in respect to the fundamental principles and practices upon which its very safety and perpetuity depends? The advocates of neutrality and absolute secularism cannot fail to see the utter impracticability of their theory, and so they prefer to theorize rather than to follow legitimately the resistless logic of facts, and see to what position their theory must inevitably lead the nation. They can hardly fail to see that its professed neutrality can mean nothing else than direct antagonism to the real ends for which it exists. Those ends * Rev. Dr. Spear, "Princeton Review," March, 1878, p. 377.

are of the highest moral character, and they stand most intimately related to theistic religion, not to say Christianity. We have already seen that government has an acknowledged moral end in educating its youth, and it cannot escape the moral responsibility of legitimately and logically carrying out that end to its completion; it cannot honestly shift this responsibility upon other parties. It taxes the people for a given object, confessedly a moral one, and it cannot in justice to its subjects turn to them and say, "We expect you as individuals to do the work for which we have exacted a tax from you. We call the object a moral one, and it is, but we will attend to the intellectual part of our work and leave the moral to you; we will teach the principles of language and mathematics, you must teach the principles of ethics and worthy living." Such an attitude is unworthy of a great and enlightened State; it is imbecility and cowardice, personified and enthroned.

But is the State warranted in assuming that the moral education of its future citizens will be properly attended to by families or other organizations if neglected by its agents, the public school teachers? Possibly it will in some families, but so also would the same families furnish their children the necessary mental culture if that were neglected by the State, and would it not be equally wise and proper to rely upon the family or individual for the one as for the other? As a question of facts, is it true that the young people of our country are receiv ing, from any source whatever, the moral training requisite for the safety of the nation and the highest interests of society? Is it not rather true that one of the greatest perils to society lies in the fact that such vast numbers, of our young men especially, are coming upon the stage where life's responsibilities and issues are no longer play, but a solemn tragedy, with so little development of moral manhood, so slight a curb of moral restraint to hold in check the baser nature?

Precisely here is our peril most menacing. And it is folly to suppose that any imagined or actual increase of intelligence is rendering this peril less. Rather let us acknowledge with frankness, though with sorrow, that the danger from this source never was so threatening as now, and seems increasing with each year of our national history. If ever moral instruction were necessary in our nation, much more is it an imperative

necessity now. The dangerous and immoral elements of society seem to be constantly becoming more disproportioned to the better classes. Nor can it be truthfully affirmed that this arises wholly from the influx of foreign population. Our own nativeborn youth, as a rule, lack the moral fiber, the sturdy strength, the genuine manliness and lofty integrity, which come from true moral training persistently applied through all the years of early youth and opening manhood. The State, in relying upon the family for this training, makes too large a presumption upon the general morality and fidelity of parents. Dr. Peabody, of Harvard College, in contrasting the past with the present in respect to parental training, much to the discredit of the latter, says: "A very large proportion of the pupils in our cities and populous towns come from houses utterly destitute of culture, and of the means and the spirit of culture, where a book is never seen, and reading is with the adult members a lost art, or one never acquired. There are schools in which four-fifths or more of the pupils are of this class." He might have painted the moral aspect of the home picture in still darker colors. Nor is it in the lowest classes of society alone that the moral teaching of the family is wholly inadequate to the child's need. Herbert Spencer, speaking of the subject in its general aspects, says: "The management of children, and more especially the moral management, is lamentably bad. Parents either never think of the matter at all, or else their conclusions are crude and inconsistent."

And yet the State is to intrust the moral training of its future citizens wholly to such agents as these. But is it not the duty of parents to attend to the moral and religious instruction of their children? Certainly; and so it would be their duty to provide them intellectual culture if the State made no provision for it. So it is the duty of all to obey the laws without police force or courts of justice or prisons; but the State does not in these matters presume on every one's doing his duty, and so it makes provision for him in case of his failure in this respect. Why does it not take into consideration undeniable facts respecting the inadequate moral training of its youth, and make preventive as well as punitive provision for the welfare of society? The fact is, there is too much shifting of responsibility in this entire matter of the moral and religious instruction

of the young. The State commits it to the family, the family relies upon the Church, the Church intrusts it to the Sundayschool, and between these several agencies, with their indifference or inefficiency, the one transcendent work of the republic, the proper education of its youth, is most negligently and imperfectly achieved.

There is something inspiring in Sparta's training of her youth for the one object she wanted to compass, that of making hardy soldiers. For this purpose the boy was taken at seven years of age, and kept in the hands of the State until he was sixty. He was fed on black broth at the public tables, toughened by exposure, inured to hunger, thirst, fatigue, scourging, too loyal and too brave ever to utter a word of complaint. Not an example by any means of a perfect education, but worthy, nevertheless, of careful study. Cannot an enlightened Christian State, far on in the wiser ages, exhibit at least equal wisdom and zeal in the education of her more favored youth for the higher ends she seeks to compass, and the nobler arena of life into which they are to pass?

It ought to be added, also, that the theory of providing exclusively secular education by the State exerts a most unfavorable influence upon our youth, tending to demoralize and atheize them. This attitude of the State cannot fail to be interpreted by young and susceptible minds as one of indifference to morality and religion. With the State assuming such an attitude, and the natural disrelish of the young for moral instruction and restraint, the parent and the religious teacher, however willing and capable they may be, find it almost impossible to impress these higher truths on the mind that is indurated rather than made more susceptible by its purely intellectual culture. Five or six days of the week devoted exclusively to secular instruction, with rarely or never an appeal to the higher nature of a child, is a poor preparation for that higher instruction, be it from mother or minister. The receptivity of his moral nature is gradually lessened by the overshadowing pre-eminence given to mental culture, and his indifference to all moral and religious truth constantly increases by a kind of logical sequence under this fearfully one-sided and irrational method of training. If the Bible is not honored in the school-room, it will not be likely to receive much attention in the pupil's chamber; if God is not

recognized as authority there, he will not be often in the pupil's thought elsewhere; if moral and religious truths find no place in the daily instruction from the teacher, the parent and Sunday-school teacher will have a hard and ungracious task to find any place to crowd these truths into the pre-occupied mind in the occasional half-hour reluctantly yielded to them for such a purpose. And so it happens, by the practical working of laws which are as inexorable as destiny, that the moral nature of multitudes of young people is an uncultivated waste; and the State, pursuing such a policy, will annually pour out upon society multiplied thousands of youth as unqualified for the duties of life and as dangerous to all the best interests of the nation as if they had never received any training at the public

expense.

This theory of pure secularism in education is revolutionary. Whatever merits it may claim, it is in direct antagonism to the history, the spirit, and genius of our common-school system. It is an unquestioned historical fact, well-known by all intelligent persons, that the common school owes its origin to the intense religious spirit of its founders. It is the child of Christianity, and the Bible is its fountain head. If we refer to that famous original order of the General Court of Massachusetts, in 1647, by which every township of fifty householders was required to establish a school, we find its inspiration in the emphatic recognition of God and the Bible. Thus originated and thus has been developed a system of education, permeated and inspired with the highest moral and religious ideas-a system which has given us, as a nation, a history of unparalleled growth and prosperity; a system which has achieved for us greatness and honor unprecedented; a system which, in its essential features, is the admiration of the civilized world. Is it, then, the part of wisdom and statesmanship to strike away the very foundations of this vaunted institution, and smite it with paralyzing force by one fell revolutionary blow from the destructive hand of atheistic secularism? If we consent to such a revolutionizing departure from the honored past, let us do it with open eyes and clear understanding of the logical consequences. Let us consider what this secularization of the government, and of the public schools especially, means, and what will be the inevitable results. It is not a question of teaching sectarian tenets, nor of reading a