Is
a really secularized education either possible or admissible?
First,
No people of any age, religion, or civilization, before ours, has
ever thought so. Against the present attempt, right or wrong, stands
the whole common sense of mankind. Pagan, Papist, Mohammedan, Greek,
Protestant, have all hitherto rejected any other education than one
grounded in religion, as absurd and wicked. Let Mr. Webster be heard
against the Girard will, which enjoined, in order to exclude
Christianity from his college, that no minister should ever enter its
walls. The argument against the will here was, that the trust it
proposed to create was, in this, so opposed to all civilized
jurisprudence, as to make it outside the law, and so void- So
formidable did the point seem to lawyers, that Mr. Horace Binney, of
the defense, went to England to ransack the British laws of trusts.
It was in urging this point that Mr. Webster uttered the memorable
words:
'In
what age, by what sect, where, when, by whom, has religious truth
been excluded from the education of youth? Nowhere. Never!
Everywhere, and at all times, it has been regarded as essential. It
is of the essence, the vitality of useful instruction!'
And
this was not the assertion of Mr. Webster, the politician, but of the
learned lawyer, face to face with able opponents, and making one of
the most responsible forensic efforts of his life. He knew that he
was uttering the weighty voice of history and jurisprudence. Let
another witness be heard, of equal learning and superior character.
(John B. Minor, LL. D., University of Virginia.) 'It must be
acknowledged to be one of the most remarkable phenomena of our
perverted humanity, that among a Christian people, and in a
Protestant land, such a discussion' (whether the education of youth
may not be secularized) 'should not seem as absurd as to inquire
whether schoolrooms should be located under water or in darksome
caverns! The Jew, the Mohammedan, the follower of Confucius, and of
Brahma, each and all are careful to instruct the youth of their
people in the tenets of the religions they profess, and are not
content until, by direct and reiterated teaching, they have been made
acquainted with at least the outline of the books which contain, as
they believe, the revealed will of Deity. Whence comes it that
Christians are so indifferent to a duty so obvious, and so obviously
recognized by Jew and Pagan?'
We
are attempting then an absolute novelty. But may not the tree be
already known by its fruits? State education among Americans tends to
be entirely secularized. What is the result? Whence this general
revolt from, the Christian faith in this country, so full of
churches, preachers, and a redundant Christian literature, so
boastful of its Sabbaths and its evangelism? What has prepared so
many for the dreary absurdities of materialism? Why do the journals
which seek a national circulation think it their interest to affect
irreligion? Why so many lamentations over public and popular
corruptions? He who notes the current of opinion sees that the wisest
are full of misgivings as to the fruits of present methods. As a
specimen, let these words, from the Governor of (Massachusetts, at a
recent anniversary, be taken: 'He' (Gov. Rice) 'lifted up a warning
voice, with respect to the inadequacy and perils of our modern
system
of one-sided education, which supposed it could develop manhood and
good citizenship out of mere brain culture.'
Second,
True education is, in a sense, a spiritual process, the nurture of a
soul. By spiritual, the divines mean the acts and states produced by
the Holy Ghost, as distinguished from the merely ethical. The nurture
of these is not human education, but sanctification. Yet education is
the nurture of a spirit which is rational and moral, in which
conscience is the regulative and imperative faculty; whose proper
end, even in this world, is moral. But God is the only Lord of the
conscience; this soul is his miniature likeness; his will is the
source of obligation to it; likeness to him is its perfection, and
religion is the science of the soul's relations to God. Let these
statements be placed together, and the theological and educational
processes appear so cognate that they cannot be separated. Hence it
is that the common sense of mankind has ever invoked the guidance of
the minister of religion for the education of youth; in India the
Brahmin, in Turkey the Imam, in Jewry the Rabbi, and in Christian
lands the pastor. So, everywhere, the sacred books have always been
the prime text-books. The only exception in the world is that which
Rome has made for herself by her intolerable abuse of her powers.
Does the secularist answer that this sacerdotal education results in
a Boeotian character and puerile culture? Yes, where the sacred books
are false Scriptures, but not where it is the Bible which is the
textbook. So that these instances prove that the common sense of
mankind has been at bottom correct, and has only been abused in some
instances, by imposture.
The
soul is a spiritual monad, an indivisible, spiritual unit, without
parts, as without extension. Those powers, which we name as separate
faculties, are only modes of function with which this unit is
qualified, differentiated by the distinctions of the objects on which
they operate. The central power is still one. From these truths it
would appear that it cannot be successfully cultivated by patches. We
cannot have the intellectual workman polish it at one place, and the
spiritual at another. A succession of objects may be presented to the
soul, to evoke and discipline its several powers; yet the unity of
the being would seem to necessitate a unity in its successful
culture.
It
is the Christian ideas which are most stimulating and ennobling to
the soul. He who must needs omit them from his teaching is robbed of
the right arm of his strength. Where shall he get such a definition
of virtue as is presented in the revealed character of God? Where so
ennobling a picture of benevolence as that presented in Christ's
sacrifice for his enemies? Can the conception of the interstellar
spaces so expand the mind as the thought of an infinite God, an
eternal existence, and an everlasting destiny? Every line of true
knowledge must find its completeness in its convergency to God, even
as every (beam of daylight leads the eye to the sun. If religion be
excluded from our study, every process of thought will be arrested
before it reaches its proper goal. The structure of thought must
remain a truncated cone, with its proper apex lacking. Richard Baxter
has nervously expressed this truth.
Third,
If secular education is to be made consistently and honestly
non-Christian, then all its more important branches must be omitted,
or they must submit to a mutilation and falsification, far worse than
absolute omission. It is hard to conceive how a teacher is to keep
his covenant faithfully with the State so to teach history,
cosmogony, psychology, ethics, the laws of nations, as to insinuate
nothing favorable or unfavorable touching the preferred beliefs of
either the evangelical Christians, Papists, Socinians, Deists,
Pantheists, Materialists, or Fetisch worshippers, who claim equal
rights under American institutions. His paedagogics must
indeed be 'the play of Hamlet, with the part of Hamlet omitted.'
Shall the secular education leave the young citizen totally ignorant
of his own ancestry? But how shall he learn the story of those
struggles, through which Englishmen achieved those liberties which
the colonies inherited, without understanding the fiery persecutions
of the Protestants under 'Bloody Mary,' over which the Pope's own
Legate, Cardinal Pole, was sent to preside? How shall the sons of
Huguenot sires in New York, Virginia, or Carolina know for what their
fathers forsook beautiful France, to hide themselves in the Northern
snows or the malarious woods of the South, and read nothing of the
violation of the 'Edict of Nantes,' the 'Dragonnades,' and the
wholesale assassination of St. Bartholomew's day, in honor of which
an 'infallible' predecessor of the Pope sang Te Deurns and
struck medals? Or, if the physicist attempt to ascend farther in
man's history, can he give the genesis of earth and man, without
intimating whether Moses or Huxley is his prophet? Or can the science
of moral obligation be established in impartial oversight of God's
relation to it, and of the question whether or not his will defines
and grounds all human duty? Or can a Grotius or a Vattel settle the
rights of nature and nations without either affirming along with the
Apostles that 'God hath made of one blood
all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and
hath determined the times before appointed and the bounds of their
habitation,' or else denying it with the infidel ethnologist? How
much of the noblest literature must be ostracized, if this plan is to
be honestly carried out? The State teacher must not mention to his
pupil Shakespeare, nor Bacon, nor Milton, nor Macaulay. The
Expurgatotrus of free democracy will be far more stringent
than that of despotic Rome! But it is not necessary to multiply these
instances. They show that Christian truths and facts are so woven
into the very warp and woof of the knowledge of Americans, and
constitute so beneficial and essential a part of our civilization,
that the secular teacher, who impartially avoids either the
affirmation or denial of them, must reduce his teaching to the bare
giving of those scanty rudiments, which are, as we have seen, not
knowledge, but the mere signs of knowledge. Does
some one say that practically this showing is exaggerated, for he is
teaching some purely secular course, without any such maiming of his
subjects or prejudicing of Christianity? If his teaching is more than
a temporary dealing with some corner of education, the fact will be
found to be that it is tacitly anti-Christian; overt assaults are not
made; but there is a studied avoidance which is in effect hostile.
There can be no neutral position between two extremes, where there is
no middle ground, but 'a great gulf fixed.'
Fourth,
Of all rightful human action the will is the executive and the
conscience the directive faculty. Unless these be purified and
enlightened, to enhance the vigor of the soul's other actions by
training is but superfluous mischief. If in a ship the compass be
lost and the pilot blind, it is better that there should not be a
great force to move her machinery. The more energetic its motion, the
greater is the likelihood the ship will speedily be upon the
breakers. Surely this is sufficient to show to the reflecting mind
that right moral inculcation cannot be separated at any point or for
any time from the intellectual, without mischief.
One
very obvious and yet not the weightiest application of this truth is
to the discipline of the school itself. No training of any faculty
takes place without some government. On what moral basis shall the
teacher who wholly suppresses all appeal to religion rest that
authority which he must exercise in the school-room? He will find it
necessary to say to the pupil, 'Be diligent. Be obedient. Lie not.
Defraud not,' in order that he may learn his secular knowledge. But
on whose authority? There is but one ground of moral obligation, the
will of God, and among the people of this country he who does not
find the disclosure of that will in the Scriptures, most often finds
it nowhere. But this teacher must not inculcate this Bible. Then his
mere might must make his right, or else the might of the parent, or
of the magistrate, to whose delegated authority he points back. Or
his appeal may be to mere self-interest.
Will
this government be wholesome for a youth's soul?
But
from a pupil the youth becomes a citizen. He passes under wider and
more complex obligations. The end of the State schooling is to fit
him for this. The same question recurs, with transcendent moment, On
what basis of right shall these duties rest? As a man, it is
presumable he will act as he was taught while a boy. Of course then
the grounds of obligation employed with him in school should be the
ones he is to recognize in adult life. In the State school a
non-Christian standard alone could be given him. He cannot be
expected now to rise to any better; he may sink to a lower, seeing
the ground then given him had no foundation under it. That is to say,
young Americans are to assume their responsibilities with pagan
morals, for these are just what human reason attains from the
non-Christian standard. Will this suffice to sustain American
institutions? One may say: Natural theism may deduce quite a high
ethical code, as witness the Greek philosophy. So could a man who
rightly construed the data of his consciousness be an atheist;
even the atheist might find in them proof that conscience ought to
govern. But he does not, nor does the pagan reason act as
Epictetus speculated .Let us begin to legislate for the people
as they ought to be, and we shall have a fine card-castle. In
fact, Americans, taken as we find them, who do not get their moral
restraints from the Bible, have none. If, in our moral training of
the young, we let go the 'Thus saith the Lord,' we shall have no hold
left. The training which does not base duty on Christianity is, for
us, practically immoral. If testimony to this truth is needed, let
the venerable Dr. Griffin, of a former generation, be heard. 'To
educate the mind of a bad man without correcting his morals is to put
a sword into the hands of a maniac.' Let John Locke be heard. 'It is
virtue, then, direct virtue, which is the hard and valuable part to
be aimed at in education.'... 'If virtue and a well-tempered soul be
not got and settled so as to keep out ill and vicious habits,
languages and science, and all the other accomplishments of
education, will be to no purpose but to make the worse or more
dangerous man.' Let Dr. Francis Wayland be heard. 'Intellectual
cultivation may easily exist without the existence of virtue or love
of right. In this case its only effect is to stimulate desire; and
this, unrestrained by the love of right, must eventually overturn the
social fabric which it at first erected.' Last, let Washington be
heard, in his farewell address, where he teaches that the virtue of
the citizens is the only basis for social safety, and that the
Christian religion is the only adequate basis for that virtue.
But,
is not mental culture per se elevating? It is hard for us to
give up this flattery, because hitherto education has been more or
less Christian. The minister has been the American school-master. But
are not the educated the more elevated? Yes. For the reason just
given, and for another; not that their mental culture made them seek
higher morals, but their (and their parents') higher morals made them
seek mental culture! We are prone to put the cart before the horse.
Again I cite evidence. James Anthony Froude, a witness by no means
friendly to orthodoxy, quoting Miss Florence Nightingale,
emphatically endorses her opinion, that the ordinary, as the natural
effect of the mere communication of secular knowledge to youths, is
only to suggest the desire for more numerous, and, for the bulk of
men whose destiny is inevitably narrow, illicit objects of desire.
But they plead: In teaching the youth to know of more objects of
desire you also teach him to know more restraining considerations.
The fatal answer is that knowledge does not rule the heart, but
conscience (if anything does); mere knowledge, without God's fear,
makes desire grow faster than discretion. Says Sir Henry Buiwer: 'I
do not place much confidence in the philosopher who pretends that the
knowledge which develops the passions is an instrument for their
suppression, or that where there are the most desires there is likely
to be the most order, and the most abstinence in their
gratification.'
Again,
the soul should grow symmetrically. Let the boughs of a tree grow,
while the roots (without actual disease) stand still; the first gale
would blow it over, because of the disproportion of its parts.
Fifth,
We need the best men to teach our children. The best are true
Christians, who carry their religion into everything. Such men
neither can nor will bind themselves to hold so influential a
relation to precious souls for whom Christ died, and make no effort
to save them. So the tendency must be towards throwing State schools
into the hands of half-hearted Christians or of contemptuous
unbelievers. Can such be even trusted with an important secular task?
Railroads persist in breaking the Sabbath; so they must be served on
the track exclusively by profane Sabbath-breakers or truckling
professors of religion. The consequence is, they are scourged with
negligent officials, drunken engineers, and defaulting cashiers. So
the State will fall into the hands of teachers who will not even
teach secular learning honestly; money will be wasted, and the
schools will become corrupting examples to their own pupils of
slighted work and abused trusts.
Sixth,
To every Christian citizen, the most conclusive argument against a
secularized edneation is contained in his own creed touching human
resiponsibility. According to this, obligation to God covers all of
every man's being and actions. Even if the act be correct in outward
form, which is done without any reference to his will, he will judge
it a shortcoming. 'The ploughing of the wicked is sin.' The
intentional end to which our action is directed determines its moral
complexion supremely. Second, Our Savior has declared that there is
no moral neutrality: 'He that is not with him is against him, and he
that gathereth not with him scattereth abroad.' Add now the third
fact, that every man is born in a state of alienation from God; that
practical enmity and atheism are the natural outgrowth of this
disposition; that the only remedy for this natural disease of man's
spirit is gospel truth. The comparison of these truths will make it
perfectly plain that a non-Christian training is literally an
anti-Christian training.
This
is the conclusive argument. The rejoinder is at tempted; that
Christians hold this theology as church members, and not as citizens;
and that we have ourselves urged that the State is not an evangelical
agent, and its proper business is not to convert souls from original
sin. True, but neither has it a right to become an anti-evangelical
agency, and resist the work of the spiritual commonwealth. While the
State does not authorize the theological beliefs of the Christian
citizens, neither has it a right to war against them. While we have
no right to ask the State to propagate our theology, we have a right
to demand that it shall not oppose it. But to educate souls thus is
to oppose it, because a non-Christian training is an anti-Christian
training. It may be urged again, that this result, if evil, will not
be lessened by the State's ceasing to teach at all, for then the
training of youth will be, so far as she is concerned, equally
non-Christian. The answer is, that it is one thing to tolerate a
wrong as done by a party over whom we have not lawful control, but
wholly another to perpetrate that wrong ourselves. For the State thus
to do what she ought to condemn in the godless parent, though she be
not authorized to interfere would be the sin of 'framing mischief
by a law' the very trait of that 'throne of iniquity' with which
the Lord cannot have fellowship.
It
is objected again, that if the State may govern and punish, which are
moral functions, she may also teach. If we are prepared for the
theocratic idea of the State, which makes it the universal human
association, To Ilau of human organisms, bound to do
everything for society from mending a road or draining a marsh up to
supporting a religion, then we can conclude thus. But then
consistency will add to State schools a State religion, a beneficed
clergy, a religious test for office, and State power wielded to
suppress theological as well as social error. Again, while secular
ruling and punishing are ethical functions, they are sufficiently
grounded in the light of natural theism. But teaching is a spiritual
function—in the sense defined - and for teaching beings fallen, and
in moral ruin, natural theism is wholly inadequate, as witness the
state of pagan society. Christian citizens are entitled (not by the
State, but by one higher, God) to hold that the only teaching
adequate for this fallen soul is redemption. But of this the
State, as such, knows nothing. As God's institute for realizing
secular justice, she does know enough of moral right to be a praise
to them that do well and a terror to evil-doers.
The
most plausible evasion is this: Since education is so comprehensive a
work, why may there not be a 'division of labor?' Let the State train
the intellect and the Christian parent and the Church train the
conscience and heart in the home and the house of worship. With this
solution some Christians profess themselves satisfied. Of course such
an arrangement would not be so bad as the neglect of the heart by
both State and parent.
Points
already made contain fatal answers. Since conscience is the
regulative faculty of all, he who must not deal with conscience
cannot deal well with any. Since the soul is a monad, it
cannot be equipped as to different parts at different times and
places, as a man might get his hat at one shop and his boots at
another; it has no parts. Since all truths converge towards God, he
who is not to name God, must have all his teachings fragmentary; he
can only construct a truncated figure. In history, ethics,
philosophy, jurisprudence, religious facts and propositions are
absolutely inseparable. The necessary discipline of a school-room and
secular fidelity of teachers call for religion, or we miss of them.
And no person nor organism has a right to seem to say to a
responsible, immortal soul, 'In this large and intelligent and even
ethical segment of your doings you are entitled to be godless.' For
this teaching State must not venture to disclaim that construction of
its own proceeding to its own pupil. That disclaimer would be a
religious inculcation.
But
farther: Why do people wish the State to interfere in educating?
Because she has the power, the revenues to do it better. Then, unless
her intervention is to be a cheat, her secularized teaching must be
some very impressive thing. Then its impression, which is to be
non-Christian, according to the theory, will be too preponderant in
the youth's soul, to be counterpoised by the feebler inculcation of
the seventh day. The natural heart is carnal, and leans to the
secular and away from the gospel truths. To the ingenuous youth,
quickened by animating studies, his teacher is Magnus Apollo, and
according to this plan he must be to his ardent young votary wholly a
heathen deity. The Christian side of the luminary, if there is one,
must not be revealed to the worshipper! Then how pale and cold will
the infrequent ray of gospel truth appear when it falls on him upon
the seventh day! In a word, to the successful pupil under an
efficient teacher, the school is his world. Make that godless,
and his life is made godless. If it be asked again: Why may not the
State save itself trouble by leaving all education to parents? The
answer is, Because so many parents are too incapable or careless to
be trusted with the task. Evidently, if most parents did the work
well enough, the State would have no motive to meddle. Then the very
raison d'etre of the State school is in this large class of
negligent parents. But man is a carnal being, alienated from
godliness, whence all those who neglect their children's mental,
will, a fortiori, neglect their spiritual, culture. Hence we
must expect that, as to the very class which constitutes the
pretext for the State's interposition, the fatally one-sided
culture she give will remain one-sided. She has no right to
presume anything else. But, it may be asked: Is not there the church
to take up this part, neglected by both secularized State and godless
parent? The answer is, The State, thus secularized, cannot claim to
know the Chuch as an ally. Besides, if the Church be found
sufficiently omnipresent, willing, and efficient, through the
commonwealth, to be thus relied on, why will she not inspire in
parents and individual philanthropists zeal enough to care for the
whole education of youth? Thus again, the whole raison d'etre for
the State's intervention would be gone. In fact the Church does not
and cannot repair the mischief which her more powerful, rich, and
ubiquitous rival, the secularized State, is doing in thus giving,
under the guise of a non-Christian, an anti-Christian training. It is
also well known to practical men that State common schools obstruct
parental and philanthropic effort. Thus, parents who, if not
meddled with, would follow the impulse of enlightened Christian
neighbors, their natural guides, in creating a private school for
their children, to make it both primary and classical, now always
stop at the primary. 'The school tax must be paid anyhow, which is
heavy, and that is all they can do.' Next, children of poor parents
who showed aspiration for learning found their opportunity for
classical tuition near their homes, in the innumerable private
schools created by parental interest and public spirit, and kindly
neighborhood charity never suffered such deserving youths to be
arrested for the mere lack of tuition. Now, in country places not
populous enough to sustain 'State High Schools,' all such youths,
must stop at the rudiments. Thus the country loses a multitude of the
most useful educated men. Next, the best men being the natural
leaders of their neighbors, would draw a large part of the children
of the class next them upward into the private schools created for
their own families, which, for the same reason, were sure to be
Christian schools. The result is, that while a larger number of
children is brought into primary schools, and while the statistics of
the illiterate are somewhat changed, to the great delectation of
shallow philanthropists, the number of youths well educated in
branches above mere rudiments, and especially of those brought under
daily Christian training, is diminished. In cities (where public
opinion is chiefly manufactured; high schools may be sustained, and
this evil obviated so far as secular tuition goes. But in the vast
country regions, literary culture is lowered just as it is extended.
It is chiefly the country which fills the useful professions—town
youths go into trade.
The
actual and consistent secularization of education is inadmissible.
But
nearly all public men and divines declare that the State schools are
the glory of America, that they are a finality, and in no event to be
surrendered. And we have seen that their complete secularization is
logically inevitable. Christians must prepare themselves then, for
the following results: All prayers, catechisms, and Bibles will
ultimately be driven out of the schools. But this will not satisfy
Papists, who obstinately—and correctly were their religion
correct—insist that education shall be Christian for their
children. This power over the hopes and fears of the demagogues will
secure, what Protestants cannot consistently ask for, a separate
endowment out of the common funds. Rome will enjoy, relatively to
Protestantism, a grand advantage in the race of propagandism; for
humanity always finds out, sooner or later, that it cannot get on
without a religion, and it will take a false one in preference to
none. Infidelity and practical ungodliness will become increasingly
prevalent among Protestant youth, and our churches will have a more
arduous contest for growth if not for existence.
Perhaps
American Protestants might be led, not to abandon but to revise their
opinions touching education, by recalling the conditions under which
the theory of State education came to be first accepted in this
country. This came about in the colonies which at the same time held
firmly to a union of Church and State. The Massachusetts and
Connecticut colonies, for instance, honorable pioneers in State
education in this country, were decidedly theoretic in their
constitution. The Reformed religion was intimately interwoven. So all
the Protestant States of Europe, whose successful example is cited,
as Scotland and Prussia, have the Protestant as an established
religion. This and State primary education have always been parts of
one consistent system in the minds of their rulers in Church and
State. A secularized education, such as that which is rapidly
becoming the result of our State school system, would have been
indignantly reprobated by the Winthrops and Mathers, the Knoxs,
Melvilles, and Chalmers, and, it is presumed, by the Tholucks and
even Bismarcks of those commonwealths, which are pointed to as
precedents and models. It is submitted, whether it is exactly candid
to quote the opinions and acts of all these great men, for what is,
in fact, another thing from what they advocated? Knox, for instance,
urged the primary education of every child in Scotland by the State.
But it was because the State he had helped to reconstruct there was
clothed with a recognized power of teaching the Reformed religion
(through the allied Church), and because it was therefore able, in
teaching the child to read, also to teach it the Scriptures and the
Assembly's Catechism. Had Knox seen himself compelled to a severance
of Church and State (which he would have denounced as wicked and
paganish), and therefore to the giving by the State of a secularized
education, which trained the intellect without the conscience or
heart, his heroic tongue would have given no uncertain sound. Seeing
then that wise and good men in adopting and successfully working this
system, did so only for communities which united Church and State,
and mental and spiritual training, the question for candid
consideration is: What modifications the theory should receive, when
it is imported into commonwealths whose civil governments have
absolutely secularized themselves and made the union of the secular
and spiritual powers illegal and impossible?
The
answer may, perhaps, be found by going back to a first principle
hinted in the outset of this discussion. Is the direction of the
education of children either a civic or an ecclesiastical function?
Is it not properly a domestic and parental function? First, we read
in holy writ that God ordained the family by the union of one woman
to one man, in one flesh, for life, for the declared end of 'seeking
a godly seed.' Does not this imply that he looks to parents, in whom
the family is founded, as the responsible agents of this result? He
has also in the fifth Commandment connected the child proximately,
not with either presbyter or magistrate, but with the parents, which,
of course, confers on them the adequate and the prior authority. This
argument appears again in the very order of the historical genesis of
the family and State, as well as of the visible Church. The family
was first. Parents at the outset were the only social heads existing.
The right rearing of children by them was in order to the right
creation of the other two institutes. It thus appears that naturally
the parents' authority over their children could not have come by
deputation from either State or visible Church, any more than the
water in a fountain by derivation from its reservoir below. Second,
the dispensation of Divine Providence in the course of nature shows
where the power and duty of educating are deposited. That ordering is
that the parents decide in what status the child shall
begin his adult career. The son inherits the fortune, the social
position, the responsibility, or the ill-fame of his father. Third,
God has provided for the parents social and moral influences so unique,
so extensive, that no other earthly power, or all others together,
can substitute them in fashioning the child's character. The home
example, armed with the venerable authority of the father and the
mother, repeated amidst the constant intimacies of the fireside,
seconded by filial reverence, ought to have the most potent plastic
force over character. And this unique power God has guarded by an
affection, the strongest, most deathless, and most unselfish, which
remains in the breast of fallen man. Until the magistrate can feel a
love, and be nerved by it to a self-denying care and toil, equal to
that of a father and a mother, he can show no pretext for assuming
any parental function.
But
the best argument here is the heart's own instinct. No parent can
fail to resent, with a righteous indignation, the intrusion of any
authority between his conscience and convictions and the soul of his
child. If the father conscientiously believes that his own creed is
true and righteous and obligatory before God, then he must
intuitively regard the intrusion of any other power between him and
his minor child, to cause the rejection of that creed, as a
usurpation. The freedom of mind of the child alone, when become an
adult, and his father's equal, can justly interpose. If this
usurpation is made by the visible church, it is felt to be in the
direction of popery, if by the magistrate, in the direction of
depotism.
It
may he said that this theory makes the parent sovereign, during the
child's mental and moral minority, in the moulding of his opinions
and character, whereas, seeing the parent is fallible, and may form
his child amiss, there ought to be a superior authority to
superintend and intervene. But the complete answer is, that inasmuch
as the supreme authority must be placed somewhere, God has
indicated that, on the whole, no place is so safe for it as the hands
of the parent; who has the supreme love for the child and the
superior opportunity. But many parents nevertheless neglect or
pervert the power? Yes, and does the State never neglect and pervert
its powers? With the lessons of history to teach us the horrible and
almost universal abuses of power in the hands of civil rulers, that
question is conclusive. In the case of an unjust or godless State,
the evil would be universal and sweeping. Doubtless God has deposited
the duty in the safest place. The competitions of the State and the
Church for the educating power have been so engrossing that we have
almost forgotten the parent, as the third and the rightful
competitor. And now many look at his claim almost contemptuously.
Because the civic and the ecclesiastical spheres are so much wider
and more populous than his, they are prone to regard it as every way
inferior. Have we not seen that the smaller circle is, in fact, the
most original and best authorized of the three? Will any thinking man
admit that he derives his right to marry, to be a father, from
the permission of the State? Yet there is an illusion here, because
civic constitutions confer on the State certain police functions, so
to speak, concerning marriage and families. So there are State laws
concerning certain ecclesiastical belongings.But
what Protestant concedes therefrom that his religious rights were
either conferred, or can be rightfully taken away, by civil
authority? The truth is, that God has immediately and authoritatively
instituted three organisms for man on earth, the State, the visible
Church, and the Family, and these are co-ordinate in rights and
mutual independence. The State or Church has no more right to invade
the parental sphere than the parent to invade theirs. The right
distribution of all duties and power between the three circles would
be the complete solution of that problem of good government which has
never yet been solved with full success. It is vital to a true theory
of human rights, that the real independence of the smallest yet
highest realm, that of the parent, be respected....
Let
us suppose, then, that both State and Church recognize the
parent as the educating power; that they assume towards him an
ancillary instead of a dominating attitude; that the State shall
encourage individual and voluntary efforts by holding the impartial
shield of legal protection over all property which may be devoted to
education; that it shall encourage all private efforts; and that in
its eleemosynary character it shall aid those whose poverty and
misfortunes disable them from properly rearing their own children.
Thus the insoluble problems touching religion in State schools would
be solved, because the State was not the responsible creator of the
schools, but the parents. Our educational system might present less
mechanical symmetry, but it would be more flexible, more practical,
and more useful. - R.L. Dabney,
Secularized Education, Discussions Volume 4
