NECESSITY OF A Christian Common School Education FOR A LIVING AND PROGRESSIVE CIVILIZATION. It was a very profound remark of the great German Poet and Historian, Schiller, that “it is not enough that all intellectual improvement deserves our regard only so far as it flows back upon the character; it must in a manner proceed from the haracter; since the way to the head must be open through the heart." The world, therefore, is wholly wrong in this matter of education, when it administers its own medicaments only, its own elements, its own food, and nothing higher, its own knowledge without the celestial life of knowl edge. Power it gives, without guidance, without principles. It is just as if the art of shipbuilding should be conducted without helms, and all ships set afloat to be guided by the winds only. For such are the immortal ships on the sea of human life without the Bible; its knowledge, its principles, ought from the first to be as much a part of the educated, intelligent constitution, as the keel or rudder is part and parcel of a well-built ship. Religious instruction, therefore, and the breath of the sacred Scriptures, ought to be breathed into the child's daily life of knowledge, and not put off to the Sabbath, when your children are addressed from the pulpit, or a small portion of the young are gathered into Sabbath Schools. Above all the elements of knowledge, that of religion is for all. If in their daily schools, children were educated for eternity, as well as time, there would be more good citizens, a deeper piety in life, a more sacred order and heaven-like beauty in the republic, a better understanding of law, a more patient obedience of it. If our education would be one that States can live by, and flourish, it must be ordered in the Scriptures. Romanism, in its attacks against the Word of God, forms a rallying point for all the infi delity and atheism of a country. Whoever and whatever hates the light of the Bible, will shout encouragement to the sect that dares make a crusade against it. All elements of darkness and of evil will come trooping to its assistance. The time for prayer and vigilance, therefore, against its advances, is now. Byand-bye, the genius of a protective piety that has slumbered, may awake when it is too late to avoid great disaster. Some errors are so subtle and dangerous in their nature, that if you do not take them in their infancy, but allow them to accumulate, you afterwards dare not approach them. You must have a Safety Lamp, or you cannot securely examine them. If you carry the open torch of Truth, they will explode, like the pestiferous mine-gas, and blow you up. If men do not take care, this will be the case with Romanism in its inveterate and deadly antagonism against the Scriptures; there will be such an accumulation of this despotic element, that loves the darkness and hates the light, that it will be as much as a man's life is worth, even to examine it; it has been so in other countries, and some day, if we let it work successfully against the Bible in our schools, it will make an explosion that will shatter our whole system. Meanwhile, let us beware of the false confidence, that because in a past generation we have had the Bible at the foundation, we can now afford to dispense with it. Let us beware of the delusion that a civilization which began in Christianity, can be progressive without Christianity, or that a freedom, which was the gift of heaven and heavenly truth, can be permanent, separated from heaven. "When in the seventeenth century," says the Chevalier Bunsen, "Europe emerged out of the blood and destruction into which the Pope and the Romish or Romanizing dynasties had plunged it, the world, which had seen its double hope blighted, was almost in despair both of religious and of civil liberty. The eighteenth century, not satisfied with the conventional theodicea of that genius of compromise, Leibnitz, found no universal organ for the philosophy of history, except the French Encyclopedic School; and this school had no regenerating and reconstructive idea, save that of perfectibility and progress. But what is humanity without God? What is natural religion? What is progress without its goal? These philosophers were not without belief in the sublime mission of mankind, but they wanted ethical earnestness as much as real learning and depth of thought. They pointed to civilization as to the goal of the race which mankind had to run. But civilization is an empty word, and may be, as China and Byzantium show, a caput mortuum of real life, a mummy dressed up in the semblance of living reality."* * Hyppolitus and his Age. Vol. 2, p. 8. |