parochial schools are generally confined to the cities and large towns; in the rural districts the Catholic children attend the common schools. The church authorities strictly require the erection of separate schools wherever possible; but they recognize the difficulty of maintaining them among sparse populations, and in such cases permit their children to make use of the local schools. 'It has been estimated,' says one authority, 'that from one fourth to one third of the number of Catholic children of school age live in country districts. In towns and cities, therefore, where alone it is possible, generally speaking, to build and maintain Catholic schools, it may be said that all but about one fourth to one sixth of the Catholic population attending school is being educated in the parish schools. The number of children in the parish schools is also steadily increasing.'1

The parochial schools are sometimes 'pay' schools, supported by fees collected from the parents; but more often they are a charge upon the parish, and are made free to the pupils. Most of the teachers belong to religious orders; the average salary of females is from $200 to $300, and of males, $300 to $400. That is, the salaries are about half as large as those of public-school teachers. It has been estimated,' says the Catholic Encyclopedia, that the average annual per capita cost of parishschool education in the United States is eight dollars.' This would mean that the 1,237,251 pupils in the parish schools during 1909-10 cost approximately for that year $9,898,008. The education of the same pupils in the public schools for the same year would, according to the estimate referred to, cost approximately $30,511,000; and if the annual interest on the necessary property investment were added, the total would be upwards of $34,000,000. 1 The Catholic Encyclopedia, xiii, 579.

The reasons given by the Roman Catholics for this withdrawal of their children are briefly these. Religion is the foundation of character, and the first essential of education. It can no more be separated from education than light can be separated from color. It is the supreme interest in the training of the child. It requires to be made a constant element in all the processes of teaching. Morality cannot be adequately taught apart from religion. It is by no means sufficient to teach religion one day in seven; it must be made an integral part of the life of every day. All the relations of teacher and pupil, and of the pupils with one another, should be hallowed by it. Many of the subjects taught in the school cannot be correctly taught apart from their religious implications. Because the state cannot teach religion, the state cannot adequately conduct the work of educating its youth. For agnostics and for non-Catholics, to whom these interests of religion are not vital, the state may maintain secular schools; but Roman Catholics must not entrust the souls of their children to such defective

care.

This puts a considerable burden on the Catholic citizens, who are taxed, of course, to maintain the public schools. They maintain that this is an injustice, and they are asking for relief. It does not seem to be practicable to remit that portion of the tax which is expended on the schools, and the alternative is a plea for the subsidizing of Catholic parish schools from the public treasury. Concerning this we are told that there is not entire unanimity among Catholics; that there are those who object to such subvention on the ground that the schools would thus be in danger of losing their independence, since state aid would necessarily mean some measure of inspection and regulation by the public authorities. Rather than risk

this interference they would continue to bear their present burden. Most of the Catholic leaders, however, appear to be willing to face that peril, and the demand for state aid to parochial schools is likely soon to be articulate and urgent.

III

The Lutherans are also to be reckoned with in this matter of public education. They agree substantially with the Roman Catholics with respect to the primacy of religion among the essentials of education. They hold that a training from which definite religious instruction is omitted is radically defective. This, at least, is true of the Central and Western synods, comprising more than half of the 2,123,245 communicant members. The Eastern synods are less strenuous in this demand. But among the Central and Western congregations of this church there were last year no less than 6085 parochial schools, with 295,581 pupils. Each of these schools is a purely congregational enterprise; it is supported, as the pastor is supported, by the voluntary contributions of the communicants. Fees are charged, however, in some cases.

In some places, as in my own city, the parochial school coöperates with the public-school system. There are several Lutheran churches, but there is only one parochial school, and its course of instruction covers only the seventh and eighth grades. Up to and including the sixth grade, the children attend the public school; then they pass to the parochial school, where the course of study is the same as in the public schools, but there is added thereto 'religious instruction, embracing Bible history, catechism, hymns, and Bible reading'; at the end of the eighth grade the pupils are admitted to the examinations of the public schools and then pass into the high school. In such

cases the Lutherans content themselves with keeping their children separate from the rest for only a portion of the elementary period; with two years of systematic religious instruction they are fain to be satisfied. But in a large majority of the western congregations the curriculum of the parochial schools covers the entire eight elementary grades.

In their attitude toward the state, however, the Lutherans differ widely from the Roman Catholics. With them there is no question as to the entire separation of state and church. They maintain that the state has no right to teach religion, and that there must be no attempt at religious instruction in the public schools. Religion must be left wholly to the family and the church. For this purpose the parochial schools are provided. But the Lutherans refuse all state subventions. The burden of maintaining religious instruction for their children they will bear. They do not decry the public schools; they insist that the state must furnish them, and they gladly bear their share of that expense; but the education of their own children they prefer to keep, so far as possible, in their own hands.

IV

I have tried to state as fairly as possible the position of both these large groups upon the troublesome question. What shall be said about the points raised by these dissentients against our system of public education?

It will be observed that I have quoted no serious charges against the efficiency of the schools as teaching organizations, or against the moral character of the pupils trained in them. Such charges are sometimes made by fervid orators and heated partisans, but in the sober discussions of the principles at issue to which we are confining

ourselves, not much emphasis is laid on these complaints. It is true that various social disturbances and moral irregularities are sometimes pointed to as evidence that society is decadent, and this decadence is laid at the doors of our system of public education. But in the first place it is by no means clear that on the whole the world is growing worse; and in the second place it is far less evident that whatever failure exists is to be charged mainly to defects in our public schools. Other and deeper causes are in plain sight. The trouble is in the homes far more than in the schools. The schools are not doing all that they might do to give us better citizens, but they are doing much, and their service must not be undervalued. My own belief is that, saying nothing about the intellectual gains which the pupils make in the public schools, they come forth, as a rule, from their pupilage with higher ideals, better principles, and greater fitness for the duties of citizenship than they would have had if they had spent all those years in the society of their own parents. This is far from being true of some of them, but I believe that it is true of the great majority.

The attempt to put upon the public schools the blame for whatever defects may be charged upon public morality is not justified by the facts. The public schools are doing much to sustain and invigorate public morals. In many of the institutions in which teachers are trained, careful instruction is given in the teaching of morals. Religious Education, the journal of the Religious Education Association, gives, in its numbers for 1910 and 1911, extended and careful reports of the methods used in several states for the systematic instruction of the pupils in the principles of morality. In those states where no such direct instruction is given, the emphasis is laid upon indirect teaching;

the belief being that moral principles are involved in all the relations of the pupils with each other and with their teachers, and that every act and every exercise of the schoolroom comes under moral law.

It may safely be said that many schools in which morals are never taught from textbooks, or by formal exercises, furnish a most stimulating drill in the higher and finer moralities every day. Many of us know teachers, who, without much preaching, convey, in all their intercourse with their pupils, the influences and qualities which purify and invigorate character. A considerable acquaintance with teachers impresses me with the belief that the feeling of their responsibility for the moral welfare of their pupils, and their appreciation of the values of character, are steadily deepening among them. No profession is so sacred that shallow and self-seeking persons do not find a place in it; but I believe that as much seriousness and devotion be found among the teachers of our common schools as among any other class of persons the clergy not excepted.

may

It is not true that the public schools are undermining public morality. Nor is it fair to speak of them as godless, if that phrase connotes impiety. They are un-religious, but they are not irreligious. They do not teach religion, but they are not responsible for the lack of religion, if such a lack can be demonstrated, nor for the ignorance of religious subjects which, it must be confessed, is widespread and deplorable.

It is not the business of the public schools to teach religion. Originally, doubtless, in all Christian lands, it was the primary function of the schools. They were organized and controlled by the churches; they taught the Bible and the creeds and the catechisms: what little instruction they gave in what we call the secular branches was ancillary

to the higher purpose of imparting to the children the knowledge of God which is necessary to salvation. That was even true of the first public schools in New England. The government of Massachusetts was a theocracy; church and state were one; the schools supported by taxation were designed to give religious instruction. But with the separation of the church from the state this ceased to be the function of the public school, and for more than a century religious instruction in the common school has been purely incidental; the responsibility for that has been definitely placed upon the church and the home.

When religious society was more homogeneous, in the days which some of us remember, it was possible to have at the opening of the school day some brief devotional exercises the reading of the Bible, and, in some instances, a prayer by the teacher. Through all my boyhood this was the custom in the common school; and when I began to teach school, in New York and Massachusetts, during the sixth decade of the last century, that duty devolved on me. The impression left on my mind is that the service was rather perfunctory; it did not have, nor was it expected to have, any marked effect upon the life of the school; it was a decency to be observed, that was all.

Certain it is that no valuable knowledge of the Bible was gained from that hasty and desultory reading; nor was there religion enough in that exercise to leaven, to any perceptible extent, the life of the school.

Whether there was more religion in those days than in these may be an open question; of a certain type of pietism there was, no doubt, much more. The type of religious experience has

changed; people have different ways of expressing their faith and hope and love; I should like to believe that there is quite as much of the real thing now as ever there was.

But one thing is undeniable: knowledge of the Bible is far less general now than it was in the days of my childhood. That amazing familiarity with the sacred Book with which John Richard Green credits the people of England in the days of the Commonwealth, had persisted until my boyhood among the sons of the Puritans and the Scotch Irish in New England and in New York State. It was not universal, but it was general. The kind of tests by which college students and students in secondary schools are frequently, in these days, made to display an ignorance of the Bible which is astounding, could have been passed with credit by the majority of country boys and girls sixty or seventy years ago. But this thorough acquaintance of earlier generations with the Bible was not due, to any considerable extent, to the public school. All that we learned about the Bible in school would have added very little to our store of religious knowledge. It was in our churches and our Sunday schools, but chiefly in our homes, that most of us learned what we knew about the Bible.

The great majority of us went to church twice every Sunday, and the preaching was largely Biblical and expository. Sunday school gathered all the children together between the morning and afternoon services; and the Sunday-school class-exercise was occupied almost wholly with the recitation of verses from the Bible, committed to memory by the pupils. Lesson leaves, lesson helps, question books, were unknown in my earliest boyhood; the Bible was the only book used in the Sunday school. Some Biblical book was studied in course, and the task

assigned was the committing to memory of a verse a day, seven verses a week. The teacher simply heard his pupils recite the verses. One by one they rose before him and repeated the words of the lesson. Much was made of accuracy in the recitation; such sacred words must not be haltingly or blunderingly spoken. Many of the teachers asked few or no questions; their function was fulfilled when they had heard the verses' and collected the pennies.

It will be seen that it was not even to the Sunday school that the children of an elder day were chiefly indebted for their knowledge of the Bible. The work was practically all done at home. The learning of the Sunday-school lesson was attended to by the parents, usually on Saturday afternoon or Saturday evening.

Recalling my own experience, which was by no means exceptional, I committed to memory and recited in Sunday school, between my seventh year and my sixteenth, the whole of the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, portions of the Epistles, the story of Joseph, from the thirty-seventh chapter of Genesis to the close of the book (omitting the thirty-eighth chapter), with quite a number of the Psalms; and not one verse of all this did I learn in Sunday school; it was all committed to memory at home. It was not possible that I should forget this task; those who had the care of me made sure that my lesson was ready every Sunday morning.

Family worship, also, in those old times, was not universally, but was quite generally, practiced; morning and evening the whole family assembled and a chapter was read, usually 'verse about,' each child with a Bible taking his turn in the reading. The reading was always in course, and in this way the entire Bible was read through several

times during my boyhood. Ordinarily we skipped the lists of names in the Chronicles, but once we labored through most of them, with some uncertainties of pronunciation - perhaps for the reason which a friend of mine once gave me: 'If I should happen to meet one of those old duffers in heaven, it would be rather awkward to have to confess that I had never heard of him.'

In most of the Puritan families of the early day the Westminster Shorter Catechism was also memorized; and when the children were required to look up the proof texts in the Bible it became necessary to know where Job and Galatians and Hosea and Romans could be found. If a list of a dozen books of the Bible were placed in the hands of pupils of our modern Sunday schools, not one in ten of them would answer correctly the question of the location of these books in the Old or the New Testament. I make that statement on the strength of tests which have been applied to pupils of more than average intelligence. Seventy years ago such ignorance would have been considered astounding.

Another cause that contributed to the popular knowledge of the Scriptures in an earlier generation was the prevalence of sectarian controversy. Many points of doctrine were hotly debated. The mode of baptism was always under discussion; the points at issue between Calvinists and Arminians were never out of sight; the Universalists had to defend themselves constantly against charges of heresy; the Seventh-Day Baptists and Adventists kept the pot boiling. Much of the preaching of those days was controversial. Great debates on doctrinal points drew crowded audiences in city and country. All this controversial discussion was based on the Bible; practically the only appeal was to Scripture; the