INFIDEL ASPECT AND TENDENCY

OF THE EXCLUSION OF

Religion from a Common School Education.

IT has been the conviction of some of the wisest men that ever lived, that an education may be infidel, and therefore immoral, in its tendency, without a shade of positive infidel teaching, by the bare fact of entirely ignoring and excluding Christianity. Certainly, there are no direct moral lessons in mathematics or any of the sciences, unless the light of religion is brought to play upon them. Morality itself, according to the sentiment we have quoted from Washington, is based upon religion, and if religion be excluded, morality is also. The most perfect knowledge of physical law will not restrain the passions; the sanctions of religion are essential for that. But really, to ignore

and exclude religion is to teach that it is not necessary, if it be not also directly to teach that there is no such thing, no one true religion, in regard to which there is any certainty that it is the truth, any more than all forms of religion under heaven are the truth. Is there not, must there not be, necessarily, inevitably, an infidel influence in such teaching?

There is power and truth in this declaration. It is not bigotry, it is not attachment to sectarianism, but it is true religious knowledge and feeling, that produces this sentiment, this conviction, on the part of those churches that entertain it; and they are not few. They do believe that where you carefully divorce and exclude all religious teaching from secular teaching, and permit only the last, the inculcation is that of a potential infidelity; and if this becomes a characteristic of our school system, and the grand rule for cutting and drying it, is to be the careful expulsion of the religious element, under politicians for commissioners and superintendents, the churches will not support it, and will refuse to be taxed

for it. They will never consent that the Government, merely because it allows the people to tax themselves for free schools, shall set up such a tyrannical expurgation of the Bible and religion from the system of the education of their children.

But here you are prompt to answer, algebra is not infidel; reading, writing, arithmetic, are not infidel; there can be no irreligion in one's A B C's. No! but if to each one of these branches, and to the learning of them, is attached the prohibition, you shall not couple with them any religious teaching, you shall not read nor teach the Scriptures along with them; this ban of excommunication leaves a positive taint upon the school. The jealousy and exclusion of religion and of the Scriptures attaches unconsciously to all the branches taught under such an interdiction; an instinctive repulsion is taught, on the part of all the school exercises, habits, discipline, against religious light and liberty. The pressure of such a negative may not be felt or acknowledged definitely, at present, on any one point; but in the long run, and as a whole, it must be of

prodigious and pernicious power. It acts as a standing, perpetual insinuation, argument, and warning, against the Word of God. Taken in connection with a multiplicity of other influences and efforts of infidelity to weaken the hold of the Scriptures on the public mind, the mass of the community will be poorly prepared to withstand the insidious attack. The general voice of the nation will seem to be against the Word of God, and it will be presented in the attitude of an object of the fear and jealousy of the country. This is an effect quite inevitable from any such guarded exclusion of it from a system of free public education; any candid mind must be convinced of this on a moment's reflection. Suppose that in Austria, for example, any copy of the American Constitution, and all allusions to it, and to the system of free government founded upon it, were forbidden in all the schools, so that any teacher who should undertake to enlighten a class concerning it, or to teach the wisdom of its principles, would be subject to an ignominious dismissal from his office; could it be otherwise than that such guarded exclusion should

impress a general sense of something dangerous and pernicious in that constitution and system of government? Would it not be passing strange for a people professing a conviction of the supreme excellence of that system, to enact such edicts against it? Could the effect be possibly otherwise than injurious towards it? There are cases in which a studied silence and omission are the greatest reproach.

It is hardly needful to refer to authorities on this subject; it would be superfluous, were it not for the amazing extent to which an anti-Christian sophistry has carried captive a portion of the public mind. "The Christian principles," says John Foster, "cannot be true, without determining what shall be true in the mode of representing all those subjects with which they hold a connection. He who has sent a revelation to declare the theory of sacred truth, and to order the relations of all moral sentiments with that truth, cannot give his sanction at once to this final constitution, and to that which disowns it. God therefore disowns that, which disowns the religion of