Part 1 — RELIGION IN EDUCATION.

In every century there has arisen some question which, by reason of its intrinsic importance, or immediate influence on society, may be called the problem of the age. Our century, though differing in so many respects from all the others, is not, however, an exception to this seeming law of history. Not a few long-standing grievances have been righted, knotty political intricacies severed, and brilliant scientific triumphs achieved; yet important as was the emancipation of 1829 or the disestablishment of 1869, the laying of the transmarine cable, or the cutting of Suez, we believe with the Dublin Review that the great problem of our age is the adjustment of the oft-debated educational question. Much has been said, many editorials have been written, and pamphlets published on this subject. It has afforded a noble theme for such orators as Lacordaire, Montalembert, and Archbishop Hughes; and a trying task for the skill and practical wisdom of such eminent statesmen as Thiers, Lord Derby, and Gladstone. We know no better proof of the vital importance of education, than the active part thus taken in its discussion by men of every religious persuasion and political shade. In fact, few questions affect so directly the welfare and interests of the people; and assuredly in this country there is none of more moment as regards the well-being and permanence of our national institutions.

Two centuries ago, Leibnitz declared the proper training of youth to be "the foundation of human happiness;" in the last century, Washington called it the "pillar" of society; and in our own, Bishop Dupanloup assures us that it and it alone "forms the greatness of a nation, maintains its splendor, and prevents decay." But it may be argued that intellectual discipline without the coöperation of any religious element will produce these great and inestimable results. This we deny. Did polite literature, for instance, save the most refined nation of antiquity? Listen to the masters of the lyre bewailing the degradation of their countrymen, and sighing for a purer and loftier virtue than any their religion could inspire. Did the plastic arts? Phidias and Apelles will return the melancholy answer. The eloquence of the orator? The noblest appeals of duty, the most patriotic harangue or spirit-stirring philippic palled alike upon a degenerate race. The wisdom of the legislator? All the sagacity of Solon and Lycurgus could but retard the downfall of the country. In fine, did philosophy? Its schools were often sinks of immorality, and vice. A few great minds, indeed, rose above the absurd creations of mythology, and taught the precepts of natural morality; but, like the dragon-fly of the tropics, they flitted across the night of paganism, lights to themselves and mere ornaments of the surrounding darkness. No wonder that the Grecian states declined, that their last day soon "quivered on the dial of their doom," and that they went down into a night which never knew a morrow. The Romans once added to the speculative wisdom of the Greeks an almost heroic practice of all the natural virtues. Yet they, too, were swept by a torrent of vice into the common tomb of nations; and only a few broken columns remain to-day to tell the traveller what was once the seat of a world-wide empire.

Separate religion, then, from education, as Mr. John Stuart Mill would fain do; banish it entirely from the class-room, and you will have taken the most effective means of insuring proximate dissoluteness and ultimate ruin. Even the author of Lothair recognizes that "without religion the world must soon become a scene of universal desolation." If, when children are asked how they are occupied in school, they cannot say with the Joas of Racine,

"J'adore le Seigneur, on m'explique sa loi,"

sooner or later, we may have to say with Abner,

"Juda est sans force, Benjamin sans vertu."

Intellectual culture, therefore, even in its highest perfection, can gain at best but an ephemeral triumph. It cannot perpetuate the civilization to which a people in the meridian of their greatness may attain; and it certainly has never raised a fallen empire, nor poured a quickening stream through the veins of a superannuated nation. This inefficiency can be accounted for only by the absence of that pure and sublime faith which commanded the respect of the hordes that poured from the north, to batter down the last remains of a gigantic fabric, as well as of that sublime moral code which tamed these rude nomads and raised them from a savage state to the loftiest heights of Christian civilization.

The term education is from the Latin e and duco, meaning literally to lead or draw out. Some writers have attempted to define it "the drawing out or development of the mental faculties." This may be a "scientific" view of head-culture; but as a definition of education, it is defective and very unphilosophical. Defective, because it embraces only a part; unphilosophical, because it substitutes the secondary for the essential. We maintain that instruction is but a branch of education, to which religion is as the parent stem. If we consult the masters of thought, and those who shape the destinies of nations, we shall be surprised to find how unanimously they hold moral training paramount to intellectual culture, and how strongly they insist on making the latter always subservient to the former. The better to substantiate our assertion against the cavillings of sceptics, we will give a few quotations, selecting only from Protestant authors. The end of education, according to Milton, "is to fit man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices both public and private of peace and war." "The hard and valuable part of education," says Locke, "is virtue; this is the solid and substantial good which the teacher should never cease to inculcate till the young man places his strength, his glory, and his pleasure in it." "The educating of a young man," writes Lord Kames, "to behave well in society is of still greater importance than making him a Solomon in knowledge;" and "We shall never know," says Sir Walter Scott, "our real calling or destiny, unless we have taught ourselves to consider every thing else as moon-shine compared with the education of the heart." And Lord Derby: "Religion is not a thing apart from education, but is interwoven with its whole system; it is a principle which controls and regulates the whole mind and happiness of the people." And Guizot: "Popular education, to be truly good and socially useful, must be fundamentally religious."

Thus, then, the essential element of education—its pith and marrow, so to speak—is the religious element. To exclude it from the school-room is, therefore, a crying injustice to the rising generation and a crime against society.

It is not one portion of the "triple man," but the whole—the physical, intellectual, and moral being—the body, the mind, the head—that must be cultivated and "brought up." Neglect any one part of man's nature, and you at once disturb the equilibrium of the whole, and produce disorder; educate the body at the expense of the mind and soul, and you will have only animated clay; educate the intelligence at the expense of the moral and religious feelings, and you but fearfully increase a man's power to effect evil. You store the arsenal of his mind with weapons to sap alike the altar and the throne, to carry on a war of extermination against every holy principle, against the welfare and the very existence of society.

Catiline, the polished patrician, was more dreaded by the Roman senate than the steel of his hired assassins. The French revolution, the most violent outbreak that ever convulsed society, was ushered in by a blaze of genius; but, like the high intelligence of the "archangel ruined," it brought desolation and death in its fiery track. Science without religion is more destructive than the sword in the hands of unprincipled men. "Talent if divorced from rectitude," says Channing, "will prove more of a demon than a god." It is these enlightened infidels that arrest the progress of true civilization and prepare those terrible catastrophes which deluge a country with blood. Who were the leaders in the work of destruction and wholesale butchery in the Reign of Terror? The nurslings of lyceums in which the chaotic principles of the "philosophers" were proclaimed as oracles of truth. Who are those turbulent revolutionists who now long to erect the guillotine by the Tuileries? And who are those secret conspirators and their myrmidon partisans who have sworn to unify Italy or lay it in ruins? Men who were taught to scout the idea of a God and rail at religion; to consider Christianity as a thing of the past and a legion of "isms" as the regenerators of the future; men who revel in wild chimeras by night, and seek to realize their mad dreams by day.

The frightful excesses to which irreligion directly leads so struck one of the most frantic revolutionists of 1793 that, yet dripping with blood, he mounted to the pediment of a temple and with a pencil wrote this memorable inscription, "The French nation recognizes the existence of a Supreme Being;" and a few hours before ascending the scaffold to suffer the just penalty of his enormities, he cried out to his countrymen, "The republic can only be established on the eternal bases of morality." Terrible confession wrung from a regicide in the most impious moment of history!

Robespierre proclaimed the truth. The only safety for a commonwealth, the only source of greatness and prosperity for a nation, as well as of tranquillity and happiness for the individual, is religion. When men reject its heavenly guidance, duty becomes as void of meaning to them as "honor" was to a well-known Shakespearean character, the most sacred obligations dwindle down into mere optional practices, and the moral code itself soon becomes little more than the bugbear of the weak-minded. "The safeguard of morality," says De Tocqueville, "is religion;" and he concludes a chapter of his American Republic with the following pertinent remark: "Religion is the companion of liberty in all its battles and triumphs; the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its claims; it is the safeguard of morality, and morality is the best security of law as well as the surest pledge of freedom."

The philosophers of the eighteenth century, by their monstrous errors and shameless depravity, have shown but too clearly that science without religion

"Leads to bewilder, and dazzles to blind."

These vaunted esprits forts had entered the realms of learning and returned as conquerors laden with treasures; but instead of consecrating the spoil to the service of the true, the good, and the beautiful, they paid it as a votive tribute to the evil genius of license and disorder. The world then saw these very men to whom princes had offered the incense of adulation enthrone an impure goddess on the altar of the Most High, and fall prostrate before a public harlot.

If further proof were needed of the immoral tendency of science separated from religion, we could silently point to the nameless abominations of the Communists, Fourierists, and other such vile and degraded fraternities; we could dwell on the cold-blooded murders and frightful suicides that fill so many domestic hearths with grief and shame; the scarcely concealed corruption of public and professional men; the adroit peculation and wilful embezzlement of the public money; those monopolizing speculations and voluntary insolvencies so ruinous to the community at large; and, above all, those shocking atrocities so common in unbelieving countries—the legal dissolution of the matrimonial tie and the wanton tampering with life in its very bud. These humiliating facts are sufficient to convince any impartial mind that there can be no social virtue, no morality, no true and lasting greatness without religion.

Here we meet the question, When should these salutary doctrines be inculcated? As well might it be asked when the builder should lay the foundation of his edifice, or the farmer sow his field. If religious principles be not laid broad and deep in childhood, there is great danger that the superstructure will topple and fall. Youth has been called the seed-time of life; and experience as well as reason proves the same law to hold good in mental as in material husbandry; "What you sow that you shall reap." Men do not seek grapes from thorns, nor figs from thistles. Yet, by a strange inconsistency, some would expect virtuous youths from godless schools. But the order of nature cannot be reversed. Like generates like.

In childhood the mind is simple and docile; the soul, pure and candid; and the heart may easily be cast into any mould. It is of the highest importance for parents and educators to bear in mind that the first impressions are the last forgotten. The pious child may in after-life, in an evil hour, be led astray by the force of passion or bad example, but at least, when the fires of youth have cooled with advancing age, there is great probability that he will return again to virtue and piety. With great truth the poet has said,

One of the greatest thinkers of our age, thoroughly convinced of the paramount importance of early moral training, would have the air of the school-room, as it were, impregnated with religion. "It is necessary," says Guizot, "that natural education should be given and received in the midst of a religious atmosphere, and that religious impressions and religious observances should penetrate all its parts." It would, indeed, be well if those who advocate the exclusion of religion from our schools would read and maturely weigh these words of the illustrious Protestant statesman and historian. A little further on occurs the following remarkable passage: "Religion is not a study or an exercise, to be restricted to a certain place and a certain hour; it is a faith and a law which ought to be felt everywhere, and which in this manner alone can exercise all its beneficent influence upon our minds and lives." In the same spirit Disraeli says, "Religion should be the rule of life, not a casual incidence." It is then absurd to devote six days of the week to the teaching of human learning, and trust to a hurried hour in the Sunday-school for the imparting of religious knowledge. By such a system, we may make expert shop-boys, first-rate accountants, shrewd and thriving "earth-worms," as Bishop Berkeley says; but it would be presumption to think of thus making good citizens, still less virtuous Christians.

To-day more than ever we need a thorough religious education. The enemies of Christianity are now making war upon its dogmas more generally and craftily than at any former period. Their attacks, for being wily and concealed, are all the more pernicious. The impious rage of a Voltaire, or the "solemn sneer" of a Gibbon, would be less dangerous than this insidious warfare. They disguise their designs under the appearance of devotion to progressive ideas, hatred of superstition and intolerance, all the better to instil the slow but deadly poison. By honeyed words, a studied candor, a dazzle of erudition, they have spread their "gossamer nets of seduction" over the world. The press teems with books and journals in which doctrines subversive of religion and morality are so elegantly set forth that the unguarded reader, like Roger in Ariosto, is very apt to be deceived by the fascination of false charms, and to mistake a most hideous and dangerous object for the very type of beauty. The serpent stealthily glides under the silken verdure of a polished style. Nothing is omitted. The passions are fed and the morbid sensibilities pandered to; firmness in the cause of truth or virtue is called obstinacy; and strength of soul, a refractory blindness. The bases of morality are sapped in the name of liberty; the discipline of the church, when not branded as sheer "mummery," is held up as hostile to personal freedom; and her dogmas with one or two exceptions are treated as opinions which may be received or rejected with like indifference.

Nor is this irreligious tendency confined to literary publications; it finds numerous and powerful advocates in men of scientific pursuits, who, like Belial in Milton, "strive to make the worse appear the better cause." The chemist has never found in his crucible that intangible something which men call spirit; so, in the name of science, he pronounces it a myth. The anatomist has dissected the human frame; but failing to meet the immaterial substance—the soul, he denies its existence. The physicist has weighed the conflicting theories of his predecessors in the scales of criticism; and finally decides that bodies are nothing more than the accidental assemblage of atoms, and rejects the very idea of a Creator. The geologist, after investigating the secrets of the earth, triumphantly tells us that he has accumulated an overwhelming mass of facts to refute the biblical cosmogony and thus subvert the authority of the inspired record. The astronomer flatters himself that he has discovered natural and necessary laws which do away with the necessity of admitting that a divine hand once launched the heavenly bodies into space and still guides them in their courses; the ethnographer has studied the peculiarities of the races, he has met with widely-different conformations, and believes himself sufficiently authorized to deny the unity of the human family; in a word, they conclude that nothing exists but matter, that God is a myth, and the soul "the dream of a dream."

Thus do men attack these sacred truths which, in the words of Balmes, "cannot be shaken without greatly injuring and finally destroying the social edifice." What, then, must be done to save society from the perils that menace it—to stem the tide that bids fair to sweep away eventually even civilization itself? What is the remedy for the profligacy that disgraces some of our crowded centres, and the demoralization that is fast gangrening our rural districts? There is one, and we believe there is but one. Let the rising generation be "brought up" in a "religious atmosphere." If we Christianize our youth, we may be sure of having a virtuous and a virile people; for it is an ethical truth, that "the morals are but the outward forms of the inner life."

The Father of our country, then, was right, when he said, in his farewell address to the American nation, that religion and morality are the "props" of society and the "pillars" of the state. History tells in its every page that the decline and downfall of nations have ever been caused by immorality and irreligion.

Our national institutions, our prosperity and civilization depend for their permanence and perpetuity not so much on the culture of the arts, sciences, literature, or philosophy, as on the general diffusion of the salutary and vivifying principles of religion.

Let us then infuse good morals by the most powerful of all means, Christian education; let doctrine be taught simultaneously with science; let the class-room be impregnated with the sweet and life-giving aroma of Christianity, and we shall soon check the torrent of infidelity, avert impending evils, and prepare the golden age of our republic.

TRANSLATED FROM THE REVUE MILITAIRE FRANCAISE.