The Bible in the Public Schools/the Question of the Hour

Arguments in the Case of John D. Minor et al. versus the Board of Education of the City of Cincinnati et al. Superior Court of Cincinnati. With the Opinions and Decisions of the Court. Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co.

The Bible and the School Fund. By RUFUS W. CLARK, D. D. Boston : Lee and Shepard.

A NEW storm is fairly upon us. It has been a long time grumbling in the distance, but now the loud thunder rolls over our heads, the lightning flashes into our very eyes, the big drops have begun to fall, and everybody whose business calls him to face it must reckon upon a tolerable drenching before he again sees the peaceful domestic hearth. The Catholic hierarchy, stimulated by the hope of inducing the state to divide the school fund, and set off a portion of it to their distinctive use, keep up a portentous howl over the injustice done the children of Catholics by the formal reading of the Bible in the common schools. And the Protestants, under pretext of the notorious enmity borne and sworn by the Catholic priesthood to the principles of civil and religious liberty, insist that the state shall maintain the reading of the Bible in the common schools as the safeguard of those principles. But the alternative is idle. For suppose it to be true that the blind fealty which the Catholic bishops pledge to the see of Rome makes them virtually the enemies of the human race, certainly the way to diminish their prestige, and abridge the power they already possess over their ignorant followers, is not to give them a respectable grievance, or colorable ground of complaint against any one else, but to leave them resolutely alone, that they may show themselves for what they are in the broad light of our modern day, and so perish at last of men’s practical contempt or indifference. But so long as this obligatory reading of the Bible is kept up in the common schools, they have that exact ground of quarrel they desire with the state of things around them, in order to cover their spiritual indigence from sight, and attract a chance public sympathy. Let the state, then, resolutely vacate this plausible pretext, by ceasing to enforce the statute complained of, or rather by taking it off the statute-book forever, and we shall hear no more of the claim of the Catholics to a distinctive portion of the school fund, that is, to the state’s recognition.

Of course all this will be very objectionable to Dr. Clark and his fellow-zealots. It is obviously Dr. Clark’s idea that the Bible will cease to exert any influence in favor of civil and religious liberty the moment it is excluded from the public schools. At least all his reasonings proceed upon this tacit postulate. We have diligently read his little book, and we can discover nothing whatever in it which does not run into the following syllogism : The state is bound to provide its offspring with moral and religious principles ; now the Bible is identified with those principles ; the state, therefore, is bound to make familiarity with the Bible a necessity of common-school education. Both the major and the minor premise of this conclusion are inadmissible. It is not true, in the light of modern science, that it is the duty of the state to provide its subjects with moral and religious culture. Neither is it true, in the light of our modern conscience, that the Bible is at all identified with such culture. No one, indeed, can deny that the Bible has done an inappreciable service to mankind in stimulating the free evolution of human life in every sphere of its manifestation. But this is heaven-wide of maintaining that the existence of such freedom any longer needs the authentication of the Bible. The Bible, doubtless, was the fixed star which cheered and guided human hope during the long night of its struggle with priestly despotism. But now that that despotism has given place to the right of private judgment, or the consecration of our secular consciences, every man possesses a mariner’s compass in his private bosom, exempting him from any necessity to consult the stars. If we believe the fundamental truth of Christianity, heaven has come down to earth to reproduce itself evermore in all the features of our homely natural experience ; and no man has any need henceforth to seek a heaven outside of himself and his kind.

But it is the major premise of this syllogism which invites special denial. The state is not bound to provide its children with moral and religious principles. It is bound to provide them with just and equal laws, and to leave their moral and religious culture to the benign social atmosphere thus engendered. The state has absolutely no responsibility for the spiritual welfare of its subjects, but only for their material welfare ; and this it promotes in no other way than by resolutely eliminating every vestige of privilege, ecclesiastical or political, which it finds surviving among them, and so removing every obstacle to the free evolution of their spontaneous life, their long latent but really infinite social and æsthetic force. It is surprising that Dr. Clark and those who reason with him do not see how directly they are playing into the hand of their adversaries by the view they take of the state’s function. For if the state is bound to furnish religious training to its children, then our Catholic fellow-citizens have exactly the same right with any other to have their ideas respected and represented.

But, in opposition to what we have here said, we may be pointed to our prisons and scaffolds, and asked whether these institutions do not argue on the part of the state a just sense of its responsibility for at least the moral welfare of its subjects ? To this we reply, that the state undoubtedly punishes Catholic and Protestant both alike, whenever they overtly injure the person or property of their neighbor. But why ? Simply because the state alone represents the principle of force in the community, or is alone chargeable with the care of its material interests; and accordingly, whenever any of its citizens is found usurping the state’s prerogative and forcibly helping himself at the expense of his neighbor, the state is bound to avenge the affront, and restore equilibrium by the summary punishment of the offender. The state represents the principle of force or necessity in the community, and this exclusively; but it does so only on behalf of those higher interests of freedom with which the life of the community is identified, so that whenever these interests are outraged by any person, the state is pledged to restore harmony by the removal of the evil-doer. But surely this is a very different office from conveying moral instruction to its subjects. The state is simply indifferent to the morals of its subjects, provided they do not result in any actual injury to person or property; in that case the state is bound to interfere, and to interfere remorselessly, until every man’s freedom to lead a peaceable and honest life becomes universally respected. A man may, indeed, freely cherish in his private bosom any conceivable amount of selfishness or ill-will to his kind ; but so long as this unholy and unhappy temper of mind begets no actual injustice or injury to others, the state exhibits the same kindly providence towards him that it does to all the world.

The title of the first book under notice sufficiently describes its character. All our readers have been made familiar by the newspapers with the recent controversy before the local courts in reference to the right of the Board of Education of Cincinnati to exempt the common schools of the State from the operation of the statute enjoining the reading of the Bible in those schools. The volume before us brings the controversy down to its present point of suspense ; and we have found the various pleadings pro and con interesting reading. But the whole question at issue is prejudged, as it appears to us, by our acknowledged constitutional maxims. Dr. Clark’s book is extremely loose in point of logic, though there is a good deal of incidental right sentiment to be found in it. He is ludicrously inconsequent with himself when he supposes that the exclusion of Biblereading as a school exercise is going to abate the public reverence of the Bible. Surely every friend of the Bible would be bound in his judgment to become only all the more active and energetic in diffusing the influence of its vital principles.