become as weak as any other people. Take away the Bible, and like Italy, Austria and Russia, we would need a despot on a throne, and a standing army of half a million, to keep the populace in subjection.'

With the Bible, men can govern themselves, and despots are superfluous; without the Bible, they are a natural product and necessity of society. Hence the malignant instinct of priestly and monarchical despotism against the Word of God; what have we to do with thee? art thou come hither to torment us before the time? Nothing would more surely lengthen out the lease and life of despotism, than a scheme for the education of children, which should sedulously exclude all Biblical or Christian instruction. Mr. Webster cites a law case, decided in England, in 1842, in the following summary: "Courts of equity, in this country, will not sanction any system of education, in which religion is not included." The freedom and good government of a country are then and there only practically secured, where all the children are educated in the knowledge of the Scriptures.

Custom and Opinion in Massachusetts.

THE common law and opinion in Massachusetts, as well as the statute, protect the right of the Bible and of religious instruction in common schools. It is to be hoped that the effort of the Romanists against the Bible cannot there be successful, though the disastrous experiment of its banishment may be tried in some cases for a season. But if once expelled, its restoration is well-nigh hopeless. Obsta principiis. It was Mr. Choate who exclaimed, in one of his orations: "Banish the Bible from our public schools? Never! so long as a piece of Plymouth Rock remains big enough to make a gun-flint out of!" This is the feeling of true patriotism, for our liberty rests upon the instruction of our children in

Divine truth, and "he is the freeman whom the truth makes free."

"So pervading and enduring is the effect of education upon the youthful soul," says Horace Mann, speaking of a common school education, "that it may well be compared to a certain species of writing ink, whose color at first is scarcely perceptible, but which penetrates deeper and grows blacker by age, until, if you consume the scroll over a coal-fire, the characters will still be legible in the cinders. Hence I have always admired that law of the Icelanders, by which, when a minor child commits an offence, the courts first make judicial inquiry whether his parents have given him a good education; and if it be proved they have not, the child is acquitted and the parents are punished. In both the old colonies of Plymouth and of Massachusetts Bay, if a child over sixteen and under twenty-one years of age, committed a certain capital offence against father or mother, he was allowed to arrest judgment of death upon himself, by showing that his parents, in the language of

the law, 'had been very unchristianly negligent in his education.'"*

And what if the State had been very unchristianly negligent in his education? What if the State have withheld from him, or have suffered to be withheld, during the only course of education provided for him by the State, all knowledge of the Word of God, and of the sanctions of religion enforced in that Word?

Speaking again of common schools, and of that religious training necessary for the reason and conscience under a sense of responsibility to God, Mr. Mann remarks: "But if this is ever done, it must be mainly done during the docile and teachable years of childhood. Society is responsible, clergymen are responsible, all are responsible, who can elevate the masses of the people. The conductors of the public press, legislators and rulers, are responsible. In our country and in our times, no man is worthy the honored name of statesman, who does not include the highest practicable education of the people in all his plans of adminis

*Lectures by Horace Mann, Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education.

tration. If this dread responsibility for the fate of our children be disregarded, how can we expect to escape the condemnation, 'Inasmuch as ye have not done it to one of the least of them, ye have not done it unto me.""

"As educators, as friends and sustainers of the common school system, our great duty is to prepare these living and intelligent souls; to awaken the faculty of thought in all the children of the Commonwealth; to impart to them the greatest practicable amount of useful knowledge; to cultivate in them a sacred regard to truth; to keep them unspotted from the world, that is, uncontaminated from its vices; to train them up to the love of God and the love of man; to make the perfect example of Jesus Christ lovely in their eyes; and to give to all so much religious instruction as is compatible with the rights of others and the gains of our government; and when the children arrive at years of maturity, to commend them to that inviolable prerogative of private judgment and of self-direction, which in a Protestant and Republican country, is the acknowledged birth-right of every human being."