Religion and the Schools

I

THE place of religion in popular education is not a new problem, but it bids fair to be one of considerable urgency in the near future. In all the more advanced nations the government has assumed the responsibility for the education of the people; and, at the same time, in most of these nations, the government has been gradually withdrawing its hand from the direction of the religious life of the people. As a necessary consequence of both these tendencies the religious element in popular education has been constantly diminishing. In our own country we may say that religious teaching has practically disappeared from the public schools. By many good citizens this fact is greatly deplored. All our Roman Catholic neighbors point to it as a radical defect in our system of popular education, and assert that it is having grave consequences in the godlessness and immorality of the generations thus neglected; and many earnest Protestants substantially agree with them.

The non-Catholic elements in our population are, however, divided in sentiment upon this question, many of them maintaining that this exclusion of religious teaching from the public schools is the only possible policy; that, because of the conflicting views concerning religion, the state can by no means undertake to determine what shall be taught, and that such an attempt would violate the spirit of our Constitution, which forbids the government to impose upon its citizens any religious observances. Not only by secularists and agnostics, but by many stanch churchmen is this denial of the right of the political power to prescribe religious instruction or practice of any kind strongly maintained. parochial schools are generally confined to the cities and large towns; in the rural districts the Catholic children attend the common schools. The church authorities strictly require the erection of separate schools wherever possible; but they recognize the difficulty of maintaining them among sparse populations, and in such cases permit their children to make use of the local schools. ‘It has been estimated,’ says one authority, ‘ that from one fourth to one third of the number of Catholic children of school age live in country districts. In towns and cities, therefore, where alone it is possible, generally speaking, to build and maintain Catholic schools, it may be said that all but about one fourth to one sixth of the Catholic population attending school is being educated in the parish schools. The number of children in the parish schools is also steadily increasing.’ ¹ The parochial schools are sometimes ‘pay’ schools, supported by fees collected from the parents; but more often they are a charge upon the parish, and are made free to the pupils. Most of the teachers belong to religious orders; the average salary of females is from $200 to $300, and of males, $300 to $400. That is, the salaries are about half as large as those of public-school teachers. ‘It has been estimated,’ says the Catholic Encyclopedia, ‘that the average annual per capita cost of parishschool education in the United States is eight dollars.’ This would mean that the 1,237,251 pupils in the parish schools during 1909-10 cost approximately for that year $9,898,008. The education of the same pupils in the public schools for the same year would, according to the estimate referred to, cost approximately $30,511,000; and if the annual interest on the necessary property investment were added, the total would be upwards of $34,000,000.

II

The Roman Catholics, for their part, carry their objection to the non-religious character of our public schools so far that they have withdrawn a large proportion of their children from the lower grades, and are educating them at their own expense in parochial schools. According to late figures there are now in such schools more than 1,000,000 pupils, under the care of 20,000 teachers, at an annual cost of more than $15,000,000 ²,— the property devoted to this purpose amounting to $100,000,000. It is a great price that our Roman Catholic brethren are willing to pay, that their children may be religiously educated.

Most of these parochial schools are elementary schools; it is deemed especially important that the younger children be thoroughly instructed in the principles of religion; it is assumed that those thus grounded in the faith will be less likely to be drawn away from it in the later stages of their pupilage. Great efforts are being made, however, by the Catholics to develop their secondary schools. It is also true that the

The reasons given by the Roman Catholics for this withdrawal of their children are briefly these. Religion is the foundation of character, and the first essential of education. It can no more be separated from education than light can be separated from color. It is the supreme interest in the training of the child. It requires to be made a constant element in all the processes of teaching. Morality cannot be adequately taught apart from religion. It is by no means sufficient to teach religion one day in seven; it must be made an integral part of the life of every day. All the relations of teacher and pupil, and of the pupils with one another, should be hallowed by it. Many of the subjects taught in the school cannot be correctly taught apart from their religious implications. Because the state cannot teach religion, the state cannot adequately conduct the work of educating its youth. For agnostics and for non-Catholics, to whom these interests of religion are not vital, the state may maintain secular schools; but Roman Catholics must not entrust the souls of their children to such defective care.

This puts a considerable burden on the Catholic citizens, who are taxed, of course, to maintain the public schools. They maintain that this is an injustice, and they are asking for relief. It does not seem to be practicable to remit that portion of the tax which is expended on the schools, and the alternative is a plea for the subsidizing of Catholic parish schools from the public treasury. Concerning this we are told that there is not entire unanimity among Catholics; that there are those who object to such subvention on the ground that the schools would thus be in danger of losing their independence, since state aid would necessarily mean some measure of inspection and regulation by the public authorities. Rather than risk this interference they would continue to bear their present burden. Most of the Catholic leaders, however, appear to be willing to face that peril, and the demand for state aid to parochial schools is likely soon to be articulate and urgent.

III

The Lutherans are also to be reckoned with in this matter of public education. They agree substantially with the Roman Catholics with respect to the primacy of religion among the essentials of education. They hold that a training from which definite religious instruction is omitted is radically defective. This, at least, is true of the Central and Western synods, comprising more than half of the 2,123,245 com municant members. The Eastern synods are less strenuous in this demand. But among the Central and Western congregations of this church there were last year no less than 6085 parochial schools, with 295,581 pupils. Each of these schools is a purely congregational enterprise; it is supported, as the pastor is supported, by the voluntary contributions of the communicants. Fees are charged, however, in some cases.

In some places, as in my own city, the parochial school coöperates with the public-school system. There are several Lutheran churches, but there is only one parochial school, and its course of instruction covers only the seventh and eighth grades. Up to and including the sixth grade, the children attend the public school; then they pass to the parochial school, where the course of study is the same as in the public schools, but there is added thereto ‘religious instruction, embracing Bible history, catechism, hymns, and Bible reading’; at the end of the eighth grade the pupils are admitted to the examinations of the public schools and then pass into the high school. In such cases the Lutherans content themselves with keeping their children separate from the rest for only a portion of the elementary period; with two years of systematic religious instruction they are fain to be satisfied. But in a large majority of the western congregations the curriculum of the parochial schools covers the entire eight elementary grades.

In their attitude toward the state, however, the Lutherans differ widely from the Roman Catholics. With them there is no question as to the entire separation of state and church. They maintain that the state has no right to teach religion, and that there must be no attempt at religious instruction in the public schools. Religion must be left wholly to the family and the church. For this purpose the parochial schools are provided. But the Lutherans refuse all state subventions. The burden of maintaining religious instruction for their children they will bear. They do not decry the public schools; they insist that the state must furnish them, and they gladly bear their share of that expense; but the education of their own children they prefer to keep, so far as possible, in their own hands.

IV

I have tried to state as fairly as possible the position of both these large groups upon the troublesome question. What shall be said about the points raised by these dissentients against our system of public education?

It will be observed that I have quoted no serious charges against the efficiency of the schools as teaching organizations, or against the moral character of the pupils trained in them. Such charges are sometimes made by fervid orators and heated partisans, but in the sober discussions of the principles at issue to which we are confining ourselves, not much emphasis is laid on these complaints. It is true that various social disturbances and moral irregularities are sometimes pointed to as evidence that society is decadent, and this decadence is laid at the doors of our system of public education. But in the first place it is by no means clear that on the whole the world is growing worse; and in the second place it is far less evident that whatever failure exists is to be charged mainly to defects in our public schools. Other and deeper causes are in plain sight. The trouble is in the homes far more than in the schools. The schools are not doing all that they might do to give us better citizens, but they are doing much, and their service must not be undervalued. My own belief is that, saying nothing about the intellectual gains which the pupils make in the public schools, they come forth, as a rule, from their pupilage with higher ideals, better principles, and greater fitness for the duties of citizenship than they would have had if they had spent all those years in the society of their own parents. This is far from being true of some of them, but I believe that it is true of the great majority.

The attempt to put upon the public schools the blame for whatever defects may be charged upon public morality is not justified by the facts. The public schools are doing much to sustain and invigorate public morals. In many of the institutions in which teachers are trained, careful instruction is given in the teaching of morals. Religious Education, the journal of the Religious Education Association, gives, in its numbers for 1910 and 1911, extended and careful reports of the methods used in several states for the systematic instruction of the pupils in the principles of morality. In those states where no such direct instruction is given, the emphasis is laid upon indirect teaching; the belief being that moral principles are involved in all the relations of the pupils with each other and with their teachers, and that every act and every exercise of the schoolroom comes under moral law.

It may safely be said that many schools in which morals are never taught from textbooks, or by formal exercises, furnish a most stimulating drill in the higher and finer moralities every day. Many of us know teachers, who, without much preaching, convey, in all their intercourse with their pupils, the influences and qualities which purify and invigorate character. A considerable acquaintance with teachers impresses me with the belief that the feeling of their responsibility for the moral welfare of their pupils, and their appreciation of the values of character, are steadily deepening among them. No profession is so sacred that shallow and self-seeking persons do not find a place in it; but I believe that as much seriousness and devotion may be found among the teachers of our common schools as among any other class of persons — the clergy not excepted.

It is not true that the public schools are undermining public morality. Nor is it fair to speak of them as godless, if that phrase connotes impiety. They are un-religious, but they are not irreligious. They do not teach religion, but they are not responsible for the lack of religion, if such a lack can be demonstrated, nor for the ignorance of religious subjects which, it must be confessed, is widespread and deplorable.

It is not the business of the public schools to teach religion. Originally, doubtless, in all Christian lands, it was the primary function of the schools. They were organized and controlled by the churches; they taught the Bible and the creeds and the catechisms: what little instruction they gave in what we call the secular branches was ancillary to the higher purpose of imparting to the children the knowledge of God which is necessary to salvation. That was even true of the first public schools in New England. The government of Massachusetts was a theocracy; church and state were one; the schools supported by taxation were designed to give religious instruction. But with the separation of the church from the state this ceased to be the function of the public school, and for more than a century religious instruction in the common school has been purely incidental; the responsibility for that has been definitely placed upon the church and the home.

V

When religious society was more homogeneous, in the days which some of us remember, it was possible to have at the opening of the school day some brief devotional exercises — the reading of the Bible, and, in some instances, a prayer by the teacher. Through all my boyhood this was the custom in the common school; and when I began to teach school, in New York and Massachusetts, during the sixth decade of the last century, that duty devolved on me. The impression left on my mind is that the service was rather perfunctory; it did not have, nor was it expected to have, any marked effect upon the life of the school; it was a decency to be observed, that was all.

Certain it is that no valuable knowledge of the Bible was gained from that hasty and desultory reading; nor was there religion enough in that exercise to leaven, to any perceptible extent, the life of the school.

Whether there was more religion in those days than in these may be an open question; of a certain type of pietism there was, no doubt, much more. The type of religious experience has changed; people have different ways of expressing their faith and hope and love; I should like to believe that there is quite as much of the real thing now as ever there was.

But one thing is undeniable: knowledge of the Bible is far less general now than it was in the days of my childhood. That amazing familiarity with the sacred Book with which John Richard Green credits the people of England in the days of the Commonwealth, had persisted until my boyhood among the sons of the Puritans and the Scotch Irish in New England and in New York State. It was not universal, but it was general. The kind of tests by which college students and students in secondary schools are frequently, in these days, made to display an ignorance of the Bible which is astounding, could have been passed with credit by the majority of country boys and girls sixty or seventy years ago. But this thorough acquaintance of earlier generations with the Bible was not due, to any considerable extent, to the public school. All that we learned about the Bible in school would have added very little to our store of religious knowledge. It was in our churches and our Sunday schools, but chiefly in our homes, that most of us learned what we knew about the Bible.

The great majority of us went to church twice every Sunday, and the preaching was largely Biblical and expository. Sunday school gathered all the children together between the morning and afternoon services; and the Sunday-school class-exercise was occupied almost wholly with the recitation of verses from the Bible, committed to memory by the pupils. Lesson leaves, lesson helps, question books, were unknown in my earliest boyhood; the Bible was the only book used in the Sunday school. Some Biblical book was studied in course, and the task assigned was the committing to memory of a verse a day, seven verses a week. The teacher simply heard his pupils recite the verses. One by one they rose before him and repeated the words of the lesson. Much was made of accuracy in the recitation; such sacred words must not be haltingly or blunderingly spoken. Many of the teachers asked few or no questions; their function was fulfilled when they had ‘heard the verses’ and collected the pennies.

It will be seen that it was not even to the Sunday school that the children of an elder day were chiefly indebted for their knowledge of the Bible. The work was practically all done at home. The learning of the Sunday-school lesson was attended to by the parents, usually on Saturday afternoon or Saturday evening.

Recalling my own experience, which was by no means exceptional, I committed to memory and recited in Sunday school, between my seventh year and my sixteenth, the whole of the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, portions of the Epistles, the story of Joseph, from the thirty-seventh chapter of Genesis to the close of the book (omitting the thirty-eighth chapter), with quite a number of the Psalms; and not one verse of all this did I learn in Sunday school; it was all committed to memory at home. It was not possible that I should forget this task; those who had the care of me made sure that my lesson was ready every Sunday morning.

Family worship, also, in those old times, was not universally, but was quite generally, practiced; morning and evening the whole family assembled and a chapter was read, usually ‘verse about,’ each child with a Bible taking his turn in the reading. The reading was always in course, and in this way the entire Bible was read through several times during my boyhood. Ordinarily we skipped the lists of names in the Chronicles, but once we labored through most of them, with some uncertainties of pronunciation — perhaps for the reason which a friend of mine once gave me: ‘If I should happen to meet one of those old duffers in heaven, it would be rather awkward to have to confess that I had never heard of him.’

In most of the Puritan families of the early day the Westminster Shorter Catechism was also memorized; and when the children were required to look up the proof texts in the Bible it became necessary to know where Job and Galatians and Hosea and Romans could be found. If a list of a dozen books of the Bible were placed in the hands of pupils of our modern Sunday schools, not one in ten of them would answer correctly the question of the location of these books in the Old or the New Testament. I make that statement on the strength of tests which have been applied to pupils of more than average intelligence. Seventy years ago such ignorance would have been considered astounding.

Another cause that contributed to the popular knowledge of the Scriptures in an earlier generation was the prevalence of sectarian controversy. Many points of doctrine were hotly debated. The mode of baptism was always under discussion; the points at issue between Calvinists and Arminians were never out of sight; the Universalists had to defend themselves constantly against charges of heresy; the Seventh-Day Baptists and Adventists kept the pot boiling. Much of the preaching of those days was controversial. Great debates on doctrinal points drew crowded audiences in city and country. All this controversial discussion was based on the Bible; practically the only appeal was to Scripture; the inerrancy of the Book was universally assumed; the correct answer to the question, What does the Bible say? was supposed to be the end of controversy. The study of the Bible by laity and clergy, and by old and young, was greatly stimulated by these sectarian debates.

Such were the reasons why the people of the first half of the nineteenth century were so familiar with the Bible. It was not in the public schools that they obtained this knowledge; other influences promoted it, but it was mainly the product of family religion.

VI

If we could put back into the public schools all the Biblical instruction that ever was there it would not lessen to any perceptible extent the ignorance of the Bible which now prevails; and so far as public virtue depends on Biblical knowledge it would not materially improve existing conditions. What we should have to do in order to restore the popular knowledge of the Bible which was common seventy years ago, would be to put the Bible into the place of honor which it then held in the home and to create the interest in Biblical themes which then swayed a large part of the population.

That the perfunctory reading of a few verses from the Bible every morning in school will produce any material improvement in the intelligence of the people upon Biblical subjects, or in public morality, it is not reasonable to expect. For it is evident that such a ceremony would be less effective today than it was in the earlier time. Then it was quite in harmony with the prevailing customs, and with the life of the homes; now it would be less welcome to pupils, the great majority of whom come from homes in which there are no such observances.

Moreover it is clear that such a provision would by no means satisfy those who have withdrawn their children from the schools because they wish to give them a religious education. Neither the Roman Catholics nor the Lutherans will be satisfied with anything short of thorough and systematic instruction in the beliefs and tenets of their respective churches, given by their own teachers. Such a pis aller as the reading of a few verses of the Bible would not meet their demands.

Nevertheless existing conditions are far from satisfactory. Three facts are greatly to be deplored: —

First, the existing popular ignorance of the Bible. This is a fact, and the reasons for lamenting it are various and obvious.

Second, the weakening of the religious sanctions for morality which the neglect of the Bible indicates, and, in part, explains.

Third, the social separation of our democracy into unsympathetic groups — a separation which is forced by religious differences.

All these are highly undesirable conditions. No good man can confront any one of them without profound regret. Can anything be done to remove them?

The ignorance of the Bible is to be deplored for other than religious reasons. Its cultural value is very great. We have been learning during the last half century that a knowledge of English literature is an indispensable element in public education; that ‘in getting to know,’ as Matthew Arnold contended, ‘the best that has been said and thought in the world,’ we broaden our horizon and purify our ideals, and thus prepare ourselves for the duties of citizenship. Our colleges and universities have been enforcing this truth upon us by their requirements for admission.

But if a knowledge of literature is indispensable to the education of a citizen, acquaintance with the English Bible is surely fundamental for that knowledge. All our best English literature is shot through and through with Biblical quotations, maxims, metaphors, characters, allusions; the one book with which a reader needs to have familiar acquaintance is the English Bible. It is ridiculous for any one to undertake to teach English literature who does not know his Bible at least as well as he knows his Shakespeare. On the pages he is undertaking to elucidate he will meet the Bible five times where he will meet Shakespeare once. For purposes of critical exposition, it is certainly quite as necessary for him to understand Jacob as to understand Shylock; familiarity with Job is of greater practical value than familiarity with Paradise Lost.

In the interest, therefore, of general intelligence, the exclusion of the Bible from the curriculum of our public schools is a capital pedagogical blunder. It has a value as literature which no other book possesses. The range and variety of the subjects which it treats, the purity and perfection of its English style, make it the best of all possible textbooks in English literature. Some selection and adaptation, of course, is necessary in its treatment, — as in that of most other literary classics; but it is the one book which no master of English can by any possibility ignore.

Professor William Lyon Phelps of Yale University has said: ‘If I were appointed a committee of one to regulate the much-debated question of college entrance examinations in English, I should . . . erase every list of books that has been thus far suggested, and I should confine the examination wholly to the Authorized Version of the Bible. ... I would refuse to allow any candidate to enter a university until he had satisfactorily passed an examination on the Bible. The Bible has within its pages every single kind of literature that any proposed list of English classics contains. It has narrative, descriptive, poetical, dramatic, and oratorical passages. . . . Priests, atheists, skeptics, devotees, agnostics, and evangelists are all agreed that the Bible is the best example of English composition that the world has ever seen. It contains the noblest prose and poetry with the utmost simplicity of diction.’³

Colonel C. W. Earned, Professor at West Point, fully endorses Professor Phelps’s proposition, and pointedly asks, ‘Why is it that, entirely aside from its religious bearings, this book is not found worthy as literature, as history, as philosophy, of a place among those fundamental elements of knowledge which are compulsory in all institutions of learning?’⁴

Such testimony can be quoted from scores of the great teachers of English literature. Is it not plain that the banishment from American public schools of a book concerning which such things can be truly said, is a grave mistake? Is there not good reason to demand, in the interest of ordinary intelligence, that the Bible be given a much larger place than has ever yet been accorded to it, in our system of public instruction?

That some incidental moral and religious benefit would result from the study of it as literature, it is natural to hope. The study of any great literature ought to have such an effect. But of course it could not be taught in our public schools as a textbook of religion. It could be taught there only as other literature is taught; the doctrinal implications would have to be ignored. For the religious teaching of our children we shall be compelled to make use of other agencies.

Is there any reason to hope that such an employment of the Bible, for purposes mainly cultural, could be introduced into our schools? I am loath to conclude that there is not; I would rather think that the reasonableness of it might appeal to all intelligent persons, and that some way might be found of giving to all our children the fair fruit of this noble literature.

VII

In North Dakota and in Colorado attempts have been made to arrange for Biblical studies to be conducted outside the schools, credit for such studies to be given by the school authorities on the completion of the course. A syllabus of Bible study has been prepared and published by the State School Board of North Dakota, covering the geographical and historical facts of both Testaments, the great narratives and the great characters, with a number of passages to be memorized; this can be studied in Sunday school or at home, and to every high-school student who passes an examination based on this syllabus and conducted by the school authorities, a half-credit is given on his high-school course. The course is elective, but with the active coöperation of ministers and Sunday-school superintendents a goodly number of students might be persuaded to take it. The cultural value of the Bible is not, by this method, greatly emphasized ; the intention is rather to make the pupil intelligent upon the main facts included in the Biblical literature.

It is evident, however, that we have not yet in sight any plan by which the segregation of the Roman Catholic and the Lutheran children can be prevented, so long as the people of those communions remain in their present state of mind. Such cultural study of the Bible as I have advocated would not answer their demands; and such a device as that resorted to in North Dakota would be regarded as wholly inadequate. The Lutheran authorities have, I understand, repudiated the North Dakota plan.

Several attempts have been made to provide a modus vivendi by which the church schools should be incorporated in the educational system. In Poughkeepsie and a few other cities and towns in New York the school board leased, for a nominal rent, the Catholic school buildings, agreed to keep them in repair, prescribed the courses of study, retained the nuns in charge as teachers, and paid their salaries out of the public treasury. The instruction required by the public-school board was given; whatever other instruction the teachers wished to give they were at liberty to impart. The arrangement continued for several years and appeared to be satisfactory; but the legality of it was doubtful, and the state Superintendent of Public Instruction finally abrogated it, and his decision was confirmed by the Supreme Court.

A similar arrangement was made by Archbishop Ireland in the cities of Faribault and Stillwater, Minnesota; only in these cases it was stipulated that the religious instruction should be given outside the regular school hours. This was not satisfactory to the Catholics, and there was much controversy about it. Pope Leo XIII gave his approval to the plan, under certain limitations, and it is still in operation in various western localities.

It does not, however, appear to be probable that these attempted adjustments will prove satisfactory on any large scale. The Lutherans, for their part, — those of them who are supporting parochial schools,—appear to be entirely satisfied with the existing situation. They are bearing the burden of elementary education for their children, and they are willing to bear it. They will not agree that the state shall meddle with religion in any way, and they want no aid from the state in maintaining their schools. So far as elementary education is concerned, they are outside the educational life of the community and they prefer to stay outside. Respecting the high schools, they are less rigid; many of their pupils pass from the parochial schools to the high schools; but up to the fourteenth year they endeavor to keep their children apart from the children of their neighbors, during school hours.

The Roman Catholics also relax their inhibition somewhat at the end of the elementary period; many of the parochial pupils pass to the public high schools. But they complain of the injustice of being compelled to maintain the elementary schools at their own expense, and claim a share of the public money. The plan which they urge is substantially that adopted in England, where, in addition to the board schools, provided and wholly controlled by the public authorities, voluntary schools, under denominational control, are also aided by taxation. A considerable amount of supervision of these denominational schools is also exercised by government authorities; the state undertakes to see that the preparation of its young people for citizenship is effectively carried on; but the schools are left free to conduct religious education in their own way. It should be said that in the English schools provided and managed wholly by the state, religion is taught, quite systematically; the curriculum of these schools includes a fair amount of instruction in the Bible, and in the elementary principles of revealed religion. There has been a strong demand in England for a purely secular system of public education, but public opinion in that country has, thus far, successfully resisted that demand.

For some such arrangement as that which prevails in England the Roman Catholics of the United States are disposed to contend. But the deep-rooted antagonism to any form of alliance between the church and the state has, hitherto, effectually negatived every such proposition. With such a miscellaneous swarm of faiths and cults and creeds as confronts us upon these shores, it does not seem practicable to recognize any as specially entitled to recognition by the state. There are a good many of them who would like to separate themselves from the community and have their tenets taught at the public expense. When once the principle was established, there would be no lack of sects which would make haste to avail themselves of its provision. Where should we draw the line? The log-rolling would be quickly organized and the educational pork-barrel would soon assume dimensions. The practical difficulty of extending assistance to religious denominations for the maintenance of their religious beliefs seems well-nigh insuperable.

VIII

Must we then face the probability of a permanent division of our population upon this most vital interest of our communal life? Are our children, in their school-days, to be separated into unsympathetic and unfriendly groups, suspicious of each other, never singing the national songs together, never feeling the thrill of a common emotion as the great days of old are recalled and the great deeds are recited? Nations whose traditions are feudal, and whose social system rests on caste, may be content to have their youthful populations separated by such lines of division; but it is hard to understand how they can be tolerated in a democracy like ours. And it seems deplorable that so many children should grow up among us who owe no debt of gratitude for their education to the land of their birth — to whom such a passionate devotion as that of Mary Antin must always be a thing unknown. Should not good citizens consider well whether or not they ought wholly to sever this tie between the lives of their children and their native land?

For my own part I have always been grateful that my children were permitted to grow up with Catholic and Jewish and Irish and Italian boys and girls, that a Catholic boy was my boy’s seatmate in school and his most intimate friend; that little Catholic girls were playmates of my little girls. My children learned in this way sympathy and toleration; is it not a lesson that all children need to learn? And can we afford to establish and perpetuate an educational system which makes all this impossible? Is there not something here very sacred and precious which we ought to preserve?

I confess that I have no ready-made solution of this problem. I see the difficulties; I believe that I understand, to some extent, the scruples which make these Christian brethren insist on the policy which they have adopted. But I wonder whether it is not possible to find some line of accommodation by which we might, without sacrificing anything essential to faith, strengthen and preserve the spirit of community which these educational divisions threaten to destroy.

Is it not an infinite pity — nay, is it not a burning shame — that our religion, which ought to be the bond of peace, the principle of integration in our social life, should be the wedge that divides us, the force that prevents us from dwelling together in unity ? Something is the matter with the religion of which this is true.

It must be remembered, however, that no arrangement respecting our public schools is possible, by which the problem of religious education can be adequately solved. When we have done the best we can possibly do through the state, the largest part of that work will remain undone. My own belief is that the work of reviving and restoring the agencies of religious education has been seriously retarded by the discussion about replacing the Bible in the public schools. In pushing that agitation the real work to be done has been largely overlooked. For nothing is clearer than that our entire reliance for this work must be placed upon the church and the home.

It is with the home, of course, that the primary responsibility rests, and here we are confronted with the appalling fact that home-life has become almost an impossible thing to a large proportion of our population. The first thing to be sought is such a reordering of our social life as shall permit larger numbers of our people to live in homes wherein family religion can be cultivated.

No doubt the sense of responsibility for the religious education of their children greatly needs to be deepened in the minds of most parents. That burden has in large measure been shunted upon the day school and the Sunday school, and this is the fundamental cause of whatever religious decadence now exists.

The church is responsible for enforcing upon parents this obligation. If the church would but give to this business of developing family life half the time and money and energy which it devotes to sensational evangelisms, we should soon see very different conditions in this country. Much has been done, during the past decade, by the Religious Education Association, to enforce upon the churches their responsibility for the religious education of the children of the state, but it is still indifferently apprehended by the great majority of

them. To say that this is the one thing which the church of this generation needs would not be true: the church is in crying need of a number of things; but this is one of them.