The Essential Requisites in a Common School

Education.

CASE OF THE DEAF AND DUMB.

A COMMON School education at the expense of the State would be based upon a wrong principle, if it ignored or excluded any knowl edge admitted to be essentially important for all intelligent creatures, everywhere, under all circumstances, as members of the State. A common school education should be such, that whatever is essential to the well-being and good citizenship of the pupil, should be taught there, in its principles at least, should be accessible there, as if no other means of instruction were to be ever in his power. A common school education ought to teach so much of Christianity and the Word of God, that a child could be saved by it, if he never knew any more of it, nor from any other source.

A common school education ought not to rely upon the hope or possibility of anything essential to the well-being and good citizenship of the pupil, being taught anywhere else, and on account of that possibility to exclude that vital element.

There is, in point of fact, a multitude of persons, whose children are never taught religion at home, not even the existence and attributes of God, the laws of moral probation for mankind, nor even the being of a Saviour. They never see a Bible, never hear its lessons, never listen to a verse of it. From such, in legislating the Bible out of schools, from a professed regard to the largest religious liberty, you take away the only opportunity of coming to a knowledge of the nature of Christianity and the Word of God, in the most important and critical of all periods for laying the foundations of the character. It would be treason in the State towards the intelligent and immortal creatures thus thrown upon its care, to withhold from them what is most essential to their welfare.

The amount of immigration alone, into our

country, and of the increase in this way of a population-element needing to be taught, is upwards of four hundred thousand a year. Of what infinite importance that an education which, to say the least, does not ignore and exclude Christianity and the Bible, be given to these! of what importance that the thousands of children not likely in any other way to become acquainted with the Bible at all, learn something of it in the common school; learn at least that there is such a volume as the Word of God, and know something of the beauty and power of its sacred lessons. It is admitted on all hands that we are in great danger from the dark and stolid infidelity and vicious radicalism of a large portion of the foreign immigrating population. What, then, can be done to ward off this danger, and how can we reach the evil at its roots, applying a wise and conservative radicalism to defeat the working of that malignant, social, anti-Christian poison? How can the children of such a population be reached, except in our free public schools? If the Bible be read in them, its daily lessons cannot but be attended by the

Divine blessing, and in many instances may beget such a reverence for the Word of God, and instil such a knowledge of its teachings, that the infidelity of their home education shall be effectually counteracted. And if the religious influence that prevails in our best school-books be thrown around them, that influence, constant and familiar, though in no respect sectarian, will be as a guiding and transfiguring light in the formation of their opinions and the education of their feelings.

But exclude the Bible from the schools, and accompany that exclusion, as to be logically consistent you must, with a dephlogistication of your school-books, to expurgate from them the whole religious element, and where will the children of this class of our population learn anything better than the gloomy and destructive infidelity of their parents and associates? The Bible does not spring up as a guardian angel in the beer-shops, and the exclusion of the Bible and of all "religious bias" from the common schools is really giving them over into the power of the Tempter, without a solitary warning in their education that can

put them on their guard, without an instruction by which they can distinguish between truth and error, without an influence or a weapon of protection or defence.

The State provides for the religious instruction of the deaf and dumb. By what right or authority can it do this, and not be guilty of an intolerant oppression of the consciences of those who do not desire such instruction, if there be not the same right and authority to institute the teaching or reading of the Bible in the common schools? The Institution for the Deaf and Dumb is under the same general laws as the common schools, and the people's money is appropriated for its support; and if a religious bias, or the reading of the Bible, is a wrong to conscience in the public schools, so it is there. But who would dare lift up a voice against that institution of mercy, on the ground that it is sectarian, intolerant, and oppressive to the conscience? Yet it is but a public school; and in regard to all knowledge of the Word of God, many of the children in our streets, who have ears to hear, and tongues to ask and to answer, are as destitute and vacant,