Introduction.

WITHIN a few years, and at the instigation of the sect of Roman Catholics, a powerful effort has been made, and is still making, to divide and break up our system of free common schools. The effort is to be continued and urged with all the energy, authority, and perseverance of the papal power in our country.

Connected with this effort, and fundamental to it, is the attempted exclusion of the Bible and the Christian religion from our whole system of free common school instruction. To advance this effort, arguments have been constructed against the sacred Scriptures as a sectarian book, and much plausible sophistry has been spread through the community, to the effect that justice to the Roman Catholics requires that we should, for their sake, exclude the

Bible at their will, and give to them the

expurgating the school literature according to their sectarian canons, precisely after the type of that despotic power which is wielded in the Vatican. This would be to place every other sect in the community in subordination to theirs, and to legislate in behalf of their conscience, and against the conscience of all Christian societies and persons, that reverence the word of God, and claim the right of its presence and influence in the system of common school education.

We propose to show that such a course would be contrary to Divine law, and to all just and equal human law; contrary to the obligations of benevolence; contrary to the rights, and injurious to the welfare of the whole country; contrary to the principles of civil and religious freedom; contrary to long settled Christian precedent and custom, and to the expressed will, wishes, and judgment of the Christian community; contrary to our best local statutes; contrary to the decisions of the wisest statesmen, the most illustrious patriots, and the most learned jurists of our land; and contrary to the history and fundamental principles and provisions of our free school system, as established by the State and supported by the people.

We propose to show, on the other hand, that while it is essential to forbid sectarianism in the public schools, it is as essential to bring them under the teachings and power of true religion; that religion should not be driven out under cover of repelling sectarianism; that it is as clearly the right and duty of the State to instruct the children in religious, as it is in secular truth; keeping out sectarianism by keeping in the Bible, and preventing bigotry by making religion free, and bringing all the children under the same celestial light; that the Bible in our schools is the birth-right of all the children, but especially of those who can have no other education but such as the State gives them; that the government is bound, in justice to the overwhelming Christian majority whom it taxes for the support of common schools, to place the Bible and the common truths of Christianity in the course of free common school education; that this is a right of the Christian conscience which cannot justly be refused at the demand of any sect; that it is essential to the security of our laws and institutions, and to the preservation both of civil and religious liberty; that its exclusion would alienate the affections and support of the whole Christian community from the common school system; that education in our country has

been grounded in the Bible from the beginning, and that its banishment would be a measure of defiance to the Supreme Being, and of inevitable danger and disaster to the republic.

The Argument against the Scriptures driven to its Absurdities.

THE right to teach the Scriptures, and to have them read in the public schools, is founded on the fact that they are the Word of God for the instruction of mankind. A revelation from Heaven for all mankind is the property of no sect, and cannot be called sectarian; consequently no sect has any right of conscience to object against it. If the introduction of it is contrary to conscience, if the reading of it is an act of intolerance towards those, or the conscience of those, who object against it, then the promulgation of it as an authoritative revelation, is an intrusion upon conscience, and by this argument God himself is represented as doing violence to conscience in enforcing his own Word upon all men, on pain of eternal penalties if they do not receive it.