Moral and civic instruction

no substitute for religious teaching

the religious element withdrawn, and without the motive of religion to explain them, as barren as the desert of Sahara. This proposition hardly needs argument. "The religiosity of man is a part of his psychical being. In the nature and laws of the human mind, in its intellect, sympathies, emotions, and passions, lie the well-springs of all religions, modern or ancient, Christian or heathen. To these we must refer, by these we must explain, whatever errors, falsehood, bigotry, or cruelty have stained man's creeds or cults; to them we must credit whatever truth, beauty, piety, and love have glorified and hallowed his long search for the perfect and the eternal.

"The fact is that there has not been a single tribe, no matter how rude, known in history or visited by travellers, which has been shown to be destitute of religion under some form."1

But it is also urged that a satisfactory substitute for religious training is to be found in moral and civic instruction. This view is widely held in France and has led to some rather absurd consequences. So scholarly a writer as Mr. Thomas Davidson has just now

1 Brinton, Religions of Primitive Peoples (New York, 1897), p. 30.

urged this view upon us Americans. He is able to do so, however, only by completely identifying religion and philosophy-and (as I think) a bad philosophy at that-in his definition of religion. But, in fact, the field of moral and civic instruction is quite distinct from man's religious life; it belongs to the institutional aspect of civilization. The moral aspect of life has long since come to be closely related to the religious aspect, but nevertheless the two are quite different. A religion, indeed, may be quite immoral in its influences and tendencies. It may lead to cruelty and sensuality, and yet be a religion. There have been not a few such. To confuse religion with ethics is to obscure both. Religion must be apprehended as something distinct and peculiar if it is to be apprehended at all. Matthew Arnold was absolutely wrong when he wrote: "Religion is ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling; the passage from morality to religion is made when to morality is applied emotion." It is still easier to make clear and enforce the distinction between morality and religion, if we substitute for the general term religion the highest type of all religions, Chris

i "American Democracy as a Religion," International Journal of Ethics, October, 1899.

Opportunity of the Sundayschool

tianity. It is Christianity, of course, which we have in mind when speaking of religion.

My argument thus far has aimed to make it clear that religious training is an integral part of education, that in this country the State school does not and cannot include religious training in its programme, that it must therefore be provided by other agencies and on as high a plane of efficiency as is reached by instruction in other subjects, and that moral and civic training is no possible substitute for religious teaching. The agencies at hand. for religious teaching are the family and the church, and, in particular, the special school, the Sunday-school, maintained by the church for the purposes of religious training.

The Sunday-school is in this way brought into a position of great responsibility and importance, for it is, in fact, a necessary part of the whole educational machinery of our time. It must, therefore, be made fully conscious of the principles on which its work rests and of the methods best suited to the attainment of its ends.

The Sunday-school must, first of all, understand fully the organization, aims, and methods of the public schools; for it is their ally. It must take into consideration the progress of

the instruction there given in secular subjects, and must correlate its own religious instruction with this. It must study the facts of child life and development, and it must base its methods upon the actual needs and capacities of childhood. It must organize its work economically and scientifically, and it must demand of its teachers special and continuous preparation for their work. It must realize that it is first and above all an educational institution and not a proselytizing one, and that the inherent force of the truth which it teaches is far greater than any attempted bending of that truth to special ends. It must cease to be merely a part of the missionary work of the parish, and become a real factor in the educational work of the community. It must give more time to its work, and the traditional division of time on Sunday will have to be gradually readjusted in order to make a serious Sunday-school session possible. A Saturday session may also be planned for. It must recognize that ordinarily no single parish or congregation can make proper provision for the religious training of all the young people under its care. The very largest parishes and congregations may be able to maintain a fully equipped Sunday-school for children from five

to eighteen, but the smaller parishes and congregations in towns and cities must learn to combine for their common good. Each parish or congregation may readily and ought always to maintain a Sunday-school of elementary grade, but several adjoining parishes or congregations must combine in order to organize and support a proper course of religious instruction for children of secondary-school age and beyond, say from thirteen to eighteen years. In a whole city, unless it be New York or Chicago or Philadelphia, one, or at most two, training-classes for Sunday-school teachers should be sufficient. Furthermore, Sundayschool teachers, like all other teachers, should be paid. They should be selected because of competence and special training; they should be led to look upon their work not as philanthropy, not even as missionary work, but as something which is larger than either because it includes both, namely education. The several Christian bodies, as long as they remain distinct, will naturally maintain their own separate Sunday-school systems; but within any given branch of the Christian church, be it Protestant Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, or other, all of the principles just stated can be applied. Sunday-schools so organized could be given