they are allowed to go. And they ought to be able to go a long way without invading the exclusive domain of the religious denominations.

Let the Bible be read in the schools and let songs of praise be sung, until some external authority tells them they must stop. Let the schools be a little more forceful in control, and a little more specific in commanding obedience and respect. Let them seek with new earnestness to create motive in the mind of the child. Let them accentuate the vital need which men and women have to work; and the vital importance to themselves that they shall lend a hand to others and give service to the village and the city, the state and the nation. Let them never forget that there can be no real strength, either moral or physical, without the opportunity to do, and without both doing what is rational and right and resisting what is senseless or wrong. And let them realize, more and more keenly, that the way to put all this into the hearts and heads of children is by the teachers thinking it and by the schools acting upon it themselves. Above all, let them remember that character must go with intelligence, and that character is not a mere matter of form but a drawing out of the spirit into helpful relations with the world.

"All are but parts of one stupendous whole
Whose body nature is, and God the soul."

And whatever the schools do, let them do it with a purpose to give no offense to any whose thought and outlook are not exactly like their own.

All manner of schools, of every kind and under all auspices, constitute the educational system of America. That system is the freest, and the most flexible and adaptable of the educational systems of the world. It is developing broad and strong scholarship. Its doors swing to every one. It is showing what a people can do for their own advancement, and what it has already done is the best proof of what it can yet do.

There is no ground for apprehension. We have a sense of humor and the courage of our situation. We are developing institutions to promote our every thought. There is overwhelming good, unmeasured progress, and little, mighty little, that is bad in our laws and institutions. We inherited much from the mother country, and we have gathered much from all countries; but we have done more for ourselves than any other land ever did for us. And, "We, the people," have done it. No monarch, no lords, no

man on horseback, no sect, and no professional or other class, have either been asked to permit, or allowed to limit us in doing it. The Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation declared in the name of the states; but in the Constitution "we, the people," established the more perfect union. And the laws of the Union and the constitutions and laws of all the states declare so plainly that they come from the same great source, that no representative or officer of any standing can be so blind as to fail to see it, or so stupid as to obstruct the opinion of the country. There is no fiction about it; it is serious, pervasive, continuing fact. And how could the people exercise all of this freedom, and bear all of this burden, without the mixing and the training of common schools, reaching from the kindergarten to the university?

And how can a people exercise all of this freedom, and create all of this opportunity, without either growing in grace or going to the bad? Surely there will be no middle ground. We shall never be an inane, insipid people. We have done much to distinguish ourselves; we shall do much more. There is no doubt about the road we shall take. There is no ground for skepticism about the moral purpose of the plain people. There is much more goodness than badness among us. It will keep us in the middle of the road, and guide us to a success which will enlarge spirituality, as well as liberty, in all the world.

This is a poor country for one who lives wholly in himself. It is a good country for all who trust in God and have confidence in men and women. There is no better religious teacher in America than my friend Henry Van Dyke, and we are all glad to join in the refrain of the song he wrote upon his last voyage from Europe.

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Oh, it's home again, and home again, America for me,

My heart is turning home again to God's countrie,

To the land of youth and freedom, beyond the ocean bars
Where the air is full of sunshine, and the flag is full of stars.

So it's home again and home again, America for me,

My heart is turning home again to God's countrie,

To the blessed land of Room Enough, beyond the ocean bars
Where the air is full of sunshine, and the flag is full of stars."

THE CHURCH INFLUENCE IN EDUCATION

We are under a tolerant and hospitable roof today. This would not be a university if it limited discussion or excluded any rational opinion. It could not be the university of a splendid free state in which a common religion is the predominant bond of union, if it were to do anything to submerge religious feeling, or to subvert religious theory. On the other hand, it is to discriminate between what is of God and what is of man; and it is to analyze what is only human opinion although it concerns religious things.

There have been and there are many religions. None of them is to be tabooed so long as its fruits are good. People often, and scholars sometimes, differ over mere names, or because of opposing sympathies, traditions, and outlooks. The glory of the American State University is that it is as religious as the people who sustain it, and that its reasoning about religion is as tolerant as the constitution of the state for which it stands. Here of all places feeling should have free flow, and any errors which usage and habit have brought down to us should be hammered out on the anvil of rational and generous discussion. On the other hand, this is no place for insipidity or inanity. We believe in something beyond flesh and blood; something that is beyond the earth and sun, beyond the planets and the stars. Let it be something that will sustain men and women; something that bears a rational relation to life and progress, and something that is worthy of a university.

Conceit must not limit the meaning of education. There is an education of the heart as well as an education of the mind; there is an education of the body which ought to go with the healthful training of the intellectual powers, as well as with the healthful governance of the emotions. Education is not confined to what is found in books or taught in schools. It would be a pity if it were. The greater part of education comes from environment and contacts from the external influences which bear down upon us. Experience is a great teacher. One may turn the rough ore into iron beams, or steel rails, or razor blades, or cambric needles, or watch springs; it all depends upon the kind and extent of the treatment. It is the tempering and the hammering that fix the value of the finished product. It is so with the human faculties. Address at University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, Sunday, November 7,

1909.

The influence of the schools has a momentous bearing upon the development of the mind and soul- momentous in itself, and still more momentous because it prepares the ground for all other influences, and makes other contacts fruitful. But the other influences may outnumber and outweigh the influences of the schools. The whole world is relative. What we are depends very largely upon the road we have traveled, the persons to whom and the things to which we have been related.

The education of the nation is measured by the extent to which the life of the people has been energized. National energy is generated by the contacts which result from freedom of movement, freedom of thought, and freedom of expression among the people. Mere knowledge may not be power. Action produces power. Great movements among the people have invariably sharpened their wits and advanced their civilization. There is nothing so discouraging as stagnation. Slavery in whatever form to ignorance, to caste, to superstition, to kingly or military power is the greatest enemy of education. When a nation is in bondage of any kind the will of the individual counts for little and the national thought is weak. Nothing but a movement of intense energy and of wide proportions can break the bonds, liberate the truth, and open the way for national feeling, for intellectual and spiritual development, and for individual action.

Great national movements follow neither sentiment, nor passion, nor caprice. They rest upon the impulses of the heart and the convictions of the mind. They are moved by the spirit of the Almighty God working in the lives of men. Conscience movements never fail. They may be delayed, but they always accumulate in numbers as they gain in power, and they succeed in the end.

Christianity is the prevailing religion of America, and an American university can not help seeing that Christianity has been more potent than any other force in breaking the bonds of ignorance and superstition, of greed and caste, in which the world's people were held through long cycles of time. Educationally as well as religiously considered, the birth of Christ is the most wonderful and consequential event in all the world's history.

Before that time all is involved in mystery. Two or three bright spots appear upon the great, dark sea of uncertain history. We know that the Persians and Egyptians left evidences of mechanical skill, but the pyramids are proof of the absolute power of the monarch rather than of the intellectual virility of the people. We know that Greece made great advances in art, but we know, also,

that four fifths of her people were slaves to one fifth, and that her temples crumbled because her moral and civic conditions could not sustain them. We know about the Roman republic, the growth of the Roman law, and the power of the Roman legions; but we know, also, that the Roman republic was a republic in name only; that the law was the harsh instrument of absolutism; and that the strength of the legions rested, not upon conscience, but upon accustomed obedience to the commands of the master. The common life of each of these peoples was honeycombed with the most degrading and undisguised immorality. No matter what some of them did; no matter what many of them did at the behest of a few, the plane of their lives was low and the trend of their thought was vicious and brutal. They worshipped idols, and the gods they set up were cunning, depraved and brutal. Their conceptions of God are the revelation of themselves. Besides these two or three points upon the map of the ancient world where the breaking day first began to dawn, all was ignorance and barbarism. All the known world was upon the borders of the Mediterranean, and all beyond was as black as the darkest night upon the waters of that great, blue sea.

But a star shone over the hills of Bethlehem. It heralded not only the birth of a Savior, but it marked the advent of a new force which was to break bonds and conquer superstition, and educate men more thoroughly and rapidly than all the other forces the world had yet known. The Savior came to fulfill prophecy and die upon the cross, and then His disciples were to take the instrument of His death as the emblem of their faith, and, multiplying as they went, they were to carry the banner of the cross over every sea and into every clime, and extend the new force around and around and around the world, until its energizing influence should impel the self-consciousness of men to work out the world's regeneration and enlightenment.

We can not see electricity, but we know that there is such an agent for we see its results. We can not see magnetism, but we know what it does. We can not see the human conscience, but do we doubt that there is such a thing? We see the results of truth. We know about the organization and operations of the early church, narrated both by biblical and profane history. We know how strong the truth was, and how effective that church was, because they aroused bitter persecutions and yet endured. We see an endless line of martyrs for conscience sake, and in turn we see that the blood of the martyrs multiplies the followers of the Nazarene.