CHAPTER X.

THE STATE A ROBBER.—VIOLATION OF OUR CONSTITUTION AND COMMON LAW.

We have seen, so far, that the irreligious, godless system of the Public Schools tends directly to turn the youth of both sexes into the worst kind of infidels; to make them disregard good principles, and hold iniquity in veneration; to do away, not only with all revealed religion, but even with the law of nature; to make them practise fraud, theft, and robbery almost as a common trade; to make them regardless of their parents and of all divinely constituted authority; we have seen that this godless system of education is the most powerful means to create confusion, not only in religion, but also in government and in the family circle; to increase the number of apostates, and make of these apostates members of such secret societies as aim at the overthrow of governments and all good order, and Christian religion itself.

Truly, this godless system of education, if carried out to its logical consequences, will disrupt society, destroy the right of the Christian family entirely, bring back on the world the barbarism, tyranny and brutality of Pagan antiquity, and make slaves and victims of its children and their posterity forever!

Who does not feel most indignant at the State for having introduced such a godless system of education? And for the support of this system of education—of this prolific mother of children of anti-Christ—we are enormously tithed and taxed! Horrible!

I have shown that the State in America is Christian; that it cannot profess or play infidel. What right, then, has a Christian State to compel Christians to support infidel schools? Is not this compulsory support most violative of constitutional and religious rights? According to the Constitution of the State, "no human authority can control or interfere with the rights of conscience." Now, the direction and control of the education of our children is clearly not only a duty, but a "right of conscience." This right, of course, belongs to all denominations, whether few or many. By what authority, then, does the State impose an established system of education at our expense against this constitutionally guaranteed right of conscience? I would like to know wherein this differs from an established church, such as has been lately removed, after having been imposed for centuries by State supremacy on the Irish people, without their consent.

It is, in fact, much worse; for though the Episcopal Church was not in accordance with the religious belief of a majority, yet it was, nevertheless, a Christian Church of a sect of high orthodox pretensions. But these "Public Schools," for whose support we and all other Christian denominations are taxed, are, by their own confession, utterly irreligious. The early Christians refused to burn even a little gum-rosin (incense) before the Pagan idols, and preferred rather to go to the lions; but we Christians, in this late day, and in what is boastingly called "Free America," are forced to pay taxes to support what is worse than heathen idols—schools from which the name of God is excluded, and, to our shame, we submit.

Referring to the wrong done to Catholics who cannot, in conscience, send their children to these schools, Judge Taft, of Ohio, said not long ago:

"This is too large a circumstance to be covered by the Latin phrase, 'De minimis non curat lex.' These Catholics (paying their proportion of the taxes) are constrained, every year, on conscientious grounds, to yield to others their right to one-third of the school-money, a sum averaging, at the present time, about $200,000 every year. That is to say, these people are punished every year, for believing as they do, to the extent of $200,000; and to that extent those of us who send our children to these excellent common schools become beneficiaries of the Catholic money. What a shame for Protestants to have their children educated for money robbed from Catholics! Mercantile life is supposed to cultivate, in some, a relish for hard bargains. But if it were a business matter, and not a matter of religious concern, could business men be found willing to exact such a pecuniary advantage as this? I think it would shock the secular conscience!"

The State, in creating free schools, is like the Turkish Bashaw's mode of making pork cheap. He first compelled the Jews to buy it at a rate fixed by himself; but the Jews had no use for it, so it was left for every one to pick up at will. Indeed, what is a school worth when a man will pay a premium to be exempt from sending his children to it? The State, boasting of its splendid Public Schools, is also like that poor fellow who wore a gold watch and boasted of it. "Where did you get it?" he was asked. "I got it as a present," he answered. Then he related how one day he met with a rich man: "I knocked him down," he said, "put my foot on his throat, and said: 'Give me your watch, or I kill you.' So he gave it to me." "Pay your taxes for the erection and support of our Public Schools," says the lord State to the poor and to the rich, "or I sell your property." What a shame! The Catholics ask no favor, but they insist on their rights. In this country, whose discoverer was a Catholic—in this country, where the principle of religious toleration was first established by a Catholic nobleman, the famous and chivalric Calvert, Earl of Baltimore—in this country, whose people are largely indebted for their freedom to the armed cooeperation and generous aid of Catholic France—in this country, whose constitutional freedom has been struck down by the malevolent Puritanism which in one breath declares that Catholics are opposed to education, and in the next insists that they shall be deprived of the means necessary for its maintenance—in this country, I say, we Catholics are entitled to equal rights, and to a fair share, to a just apportionment of the annual amount raised by taxation for the support of our charitable and educational institutions. We ask only what is fair, what is just, what is right; and we base our demand upon principle, and not upon the ground of favors granted or received.

If the State taxes us, as a religious and Christian people, for the education of our children, it must give us a Christian education. If it cannot, or will not do that, it must cease to tax us, and leave the education of our children to ourselves. If the Christian gives to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, he has a right to demand of Caesar that he allow him to give to God what belongs to God.

Again, the Constitution says, "That no person shall be compelled to erect, support, or attend any place of public worship, nor support any minister of the gospel, or teacher of religion," etc.; and it says, "That no private property ought to be taken or applied to public use without just compensation." Now let us apply these constitutional principles to State-schools, and see if our compulsory support of them is not violative of our constitution as well as common law. Why is it "that no person shall be compelled to erect, support, or attend any place of public worship, nor support any minister of religion"? Simply because he "don't want to"; and he don't want to, "because it is against his conscience"; and "no human authority," says the Constitution, "can control or interfere with the rights of conscience"; that is all the reason, and no other. The State believes that all places of worship, and ministers of the gospel, are good; but, knowing that there is a difference of opinion among the people on that subject, wisely leaves such matters to their choice, and will not take private property for public use without compensation. Why, then, is private property taken for Public Schools without compensation? We cannot use them in conscience, and we have seen there is no lawful power or authority to "control or interfere with conscience." I ask, then, if I am not right in stating that our compulsory support of an odious and infidel system of Public Schools, against our conscience and against our consent, is not far worse than the support of any form of church establishment?

Moreover, according to the Constitution, "No preference can ever be given by law to any church, sect, or mode of worship." This section is often quoted as the authority and reason for excluding religious teachings from the Public Schools; but, strange enough, it is flagrantly violated by the present system, giving a preference by law to the unbelievers, and thereby discriminating against the believers of all sects and denominations. For, after all, there can be but two churches, or, if you please, sects, in the eye of the State—the believers and unbelievers. To the former belong the various Christian denominations, and to the latter those who deny and protest against all religious faith and belief. Those certainly are the last, and for that reason, if for no other, are the best or worst (as people may choose to view them) sect. It is, then, this last product, this "caput mortuum" of all sects and believers of every shade and kind, that is favored by the no-belief system of education.

"Though the State may not give any preference to any church or sect," it is not, on that account, authorized to ignore and reject all; but, on the contrary, is obliged in justice to assist all or none, as, by this course alone, it avoids giving preference to any. This is what the law contemplates, and the only course that comports with reason and justice. If it suits the last sect—the unbelievers or no-believers—to exclude morals or religion from schools, all right; let them keep on as at present. But if it suits the various other churches or sects to modify the system to suit their conscientious views and beliefs, to apply their own proportion of the school tax for that purpose, it is their undeniable and lawful right.

There is one view in which the public will agree in regard to the Public Schools: it is that they cost too much money. For the management of the godless Public Schools there is a costly array of "Commissioners," and "Inspectors," and "Trustees," and "Superintendents," and "Secretaries of Boards," and "Central Officers," all in league with "Contractors," to make "a good thing"—so-called—out of the plan. We have, now, contractors for buildings and repairs, contractors for furniture, contractors for books, contractors for furnaces, contractors for fuel, contractors even for pianos, and all making money out of it. The "Boards" that give the contracts do not make any money by way of commissions, do they? Ah! you know full well that hundreds of thousands of dollars are annually spent or squandered in running these Public Schools, and which are recommended, in a particular manner, for their economy!

But aside, for a moment, from these Public Schools, so numerous, so costly, so grand and imposing in their exterior, managed by a little army of high-paid professors, teachers, superintendents and assistants, costing the people of every city and State hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, there is another army, yea, a volunteer army, not commissioned or paid by the State, but by a greater power—God—who, for His love, and that uncomparable reward which only God bestows, devote themselves to teaching, instructing, training and educating the poor, the needy, the orphan, the houseless, the homeless, the forlorn, the despised, as well as the more favored of the earth. These make no grandiloquent printed reports in costly binding; they have no official stenographers or reporters to noise their proceedings in "morning papers"; they have no "Polytechnic Halls," fitted up with pretentious libraries, and all the surroundings of upholstery, and heating and cooling apparatus; but winter and summer, early and late, they keep the even tenor of their way with an "eye single" to their humble and laborious duties.

In nearly all the cities of America, in those busy and worldly centres of traffic and trade, of luxury and wealth, with their average of good and evil, virtue and crime, this "volunteer army" distributes itself noiselessly, quietly, and as it were obscurely, not heralded nor preceded by the emblems of pomp or worldly power, but nevertheless making its conquests and asserting its quiet influence in lanes and alleys, gathering up the little children, taking them to its camps, and instructing and educating them in the service of God and society.

You may have seen, in some of those cities, that long line of little boys or girls, two by two, extending to the length of a block or more; you may have observed how regularly they are assorted, the tallest in first, and ranging down to the little ones, whose busy feet are trying to keep up with the column. You may also have noted the order and silence (so unusual among children), and your attention was arrested, and perhaps you know not how all this order in this beautiful panorama was brought about. Well, with these boys you may have observed two men, one at the head, the other at the foot of this long line. If you saw this for the first time you may have wondered, and I suppose been even amused, at the figure and costume of those men;—the broad-brimmed hat, the long, strange-fashioned robe, the white collar, the collected air and mien, all bespeak the Christian Brother. These men, nevertheless, are "profoundly learned in all the sciences of the schools." They have abandoned home, family, friends, and have devoted themselves, merely for a scant support, to the education of the young.

If, on the other hand, the long line are girls, you may have observed two ladies; one at the head, the other at the foot. You will at a glance conclude they are not of the world. Their costume is of the homeliest cut and quality, but scrupulously clean; there is a something about their very presence that impresses you with reverence and respect, and you must be a very hardened sinner indeed if you did not feel the better of having even their shadow fall upon you. These silent, collected, but impressive women are "Nuns" of one order or another. They, too, have left all to serve God in the persons of these little children. They have made sacrifices greater than the world can appreciate or understand, and which only the Divine Master can reward. Their whole life is a silent but an eloquent sermon, their whole conduct the gospel in action. You will remember they are women like others of their sex, and mayhap have been flattered and petted, and once filled with the natural vanity and expectations of their sex; but all these they have put behind them, and henceforth and forever their walk, and life, and conversation is with God, and in the service of His little ones. Now it will be easily seen that the personal influence of such men and women over the life and manners of children, must be immensely beneficial. It is granted that the influence of father and mother is potential for good or evil. So it is with teachers. Children are shrewd observers, and are apt to take some one as a prototype and exemplar. This one they copy as near as may be. These "Christian Brothers," and "Nuns, or Sisters," are good models; they teach the children to pray in the best of all ways—by praying themselves first; they try to impress on these tender souls sentiments of love, obedience, and respect to their fathers and mothers, and, above all, their duties to our dear Lord. They accompany them to His altar on Sundays and holy days, beginning and ending all their daily lessons with a little prayer or devotion. For the rest, they give them, in their schools, a plain, practical education.

Every day (we are told) there are instances of men slipping from the high rounds to the lowest one in the ladder of wealth. Business men find themselves engulphed in the sea of financial embarrassment, from which they emerge with nothing but their personal resources to depend upon for a living. Clerks, salesmen, and others find themselves thrown out of employment, with no prospect of speedily obtaining places which they are competent to fill, and with no other means of gaining a livelihood. How many men are there in every city to-day, some of whom have families dependent on them for support, who bewail the mistake they made in not learning useful trades in their younger days? There are hundreds of them. There are men in every city who have seen better days, men of education and business ability, who envy the mechanic, who has a sure support for himself and family in his handicraft. Parents make a great mistake when they impose upon the brain of their boy the task of supporting him, without preparing his hands for emergencies.

No matter how favorable a boy's circumstances may be, he should enter the battle of life as every prudent general enters the battle of armies: with a reliable reserve to fall back upon in case of disaster. Every man is liable to be reduced to the lowest pecuniary point at some stage of his life, and it is hardly necessary to refer to the large proportion of men who reach that point. No man is poor who is the master of a trade. It is a kind of capital that defies the storm of financial reverse, and that clings to a man when all else has been swept away. It consoles him, in the hour of adversity, with the assurance that, let whatever may befall him, he need have no fear for the support of himself and his family.

Unfortunately a silly notion—the offspring of a sham aristocracy—has, of late years, led many parents to regard a trade as something disreputable, with which their children should not be tainted. Labor disreputable! What would the world be without it? It is the very power that moves the world. A Power higher than the throne of the aristocracy has ennobled labor, and he who would disparage it must set himself above the Divine principle, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread!" A trade is a "friend in need"; it is independence and wealth—a rich legacy which the poorest father may give to his son, and which the richest should regard as more valuable than gold.

Now what kind of education is necessary for a tradesman to carry on business successfully? Only a plain, practical education; that is to say, that kind and amount of knowledge of daily ordinary use and appreciation. It is reading, writing, arithmetic, English grammar, and geography, and possibly a knowledge of the German language, sufficient to speak it.

If we look around we will see that all the important and every-day duties of life are carried on by the use of industry, common sense, reading, writing, and arithmetic.

And it might almost be said that the failures are to be ascribed, in part, if not to over-education, at least to the common misdirection of acquirements, accompanied with the vague ambition and desires which they invariably excite, but rarely serve to satisfy. Why, I could find, for instance, in the history, management, and success of every newspaper editor, a living proof of my proposition. Not that I leave it to be inferred that there is not, in these newspapers, the evidences of every kind of acquirements and ability; but that the founders within my knowledge, and those who have made it the power and success that it is, have worked with these ordinary instruments. But why give one instance when there are so many on every side—so much so that the success of what is called the learned class is so rare, that it must be put among the exceptions.

As to those who are able, and desire further information, they can have it to any extent at the colleges, convents, academies and higher schools.

Many of our "dissenting brethren," of the various denominations, are equally diligent, according to the measure of grace and light given them, to bring their children up in Christian morals and education. They have their own schools, and support them, or they send their children to Catholic institutions, and will not have them tempted or corrupted by the evil influences, moral, social, and intellectual, that emanate and surround those "whited sepulchres"—the godless schools—as the miasm emanates and surrounds the pestilent marsh. In all these schools the children are carefully trained in Christian practices, prayers, and religious duties, as well as taught a good, plain, practical course of studies. In fact, they are truly educated; while in the Public Schools they are simply instructed, as you might irrational animals, according to their instinct. The Jews also teach and bring up their children in the religion of their fathers, at their own expense; so that more than one-half are, fortunately for themselves, and fortunately for society, the good order and well-being of the State, educated outside of immoral and dangerous pest-houses. It is on this element of our population that the future of the State depends; for if we are to have a sound public conscience and a controlling conservative influence in public or private affairs, we must, under God and His Church, obtain it from a true Christian education.

At these parish schools, supported by voluntary aid, the expenses of pupils per year is under seven dollars; at the Public Schools, it is, I am informed, about thirty-two dollars; so that it costs about four times as much to give the poor, miserable, shallow, infidel instruction in the Public Schools, as it does to give a good Christian education in the denominational ones; or, in plainer language, to educate 20,000 children in denominational schools saves to tax-payers not less than the small sum! of $500,000.

"If thy right hand scandalize thee, cut it off and cast it from thee; for it is expedient for thee that one of thy members should perish, rather than thy whole body be cast into hell."—(Matt. v. 30.) By the present Public School system, the State scandalizes the family, because it usurps the rights and duties that belong alone to parents; it scandalizes the tax-payer, because it takes money from him which it has no right to take; it scandalizes society, because, instead of teaching virtue, it teaches vice; it scandalizes the young men and the young women, because, instead of inspiring them with love for Christianity and their religious duties, it inspires them rather with contempt for religion, and turns them into actual unbelievers, and thus destroys the very life of society and the basis of every government; it scandalizes all nations, because there is not, and there has never been, any nation inculcating education without religion.

By its present system of education, the State has weakened, and will finally break up and destroy, the Christian family. The social unit is the family, not the individual; and the greatest danger to American society is, that we are rapidly becoming a nation of isolated individuals, without family ties or affections. The family has already been much weakened, and is fast disappearing. We have broken away from the old homestead, have lost the restraining and purifying associations that gathered round it, and live away from home in hotels and boarding-houses. A large and influential class of women not only neglect, but disdain, the retired and simple domestic virtues, and scorn to be tied down to the modest but essential duties—the drudgery, they call it—of wives and mothers. We are daily losing the faith, the virtues, the habits, and the manners, without which the family cannot be sustained. This, coupled with the separate pecuniary interests of husband and wife secured, make the family, to a fearful extent, the mere shadow of what it was and of what it should be. What remains of the family is only held together by the graces and virtue of women. But even this last hope is fast breaking down, by the great facility of obtaining a divorce a vinculo matrimonii—a facility by which the laws of most of the States of the Union grant to lust the widest margin of license, and legalize concubinage and adultery. Now when the family goes, the nation goes too, or ceases to be worth preserving. God made the family the type and basis of society; "male and female made he them."

By its present system of education, the State makes war on God and His Christ, and says, with Lucifer, "Non servio"; and this is the daring rebel against God and His law, that would claim the innocent children of the Christian family as its own; teach them its false maxims, promising them, as Satan, its master, did the Saviour, riches, and honors, and power, if they will but fall down and worship it. How incomprehensibly strange it is, that good men and women who profess Christianity, and acknowledge the obligations of its commandments, should give ear to this tempter, instead of saying, "Get behind me, Satan," and, "Thou art a liar and a cheat from the beginning." The State, in this subject of education, represents the world; and religion, as well as experience, teaches us its folly, its wickedness, its treachery and its ambition. "The State promises bread and gives a stone." It promises wealth, and honor, and gives taxes, slavery, and degradation. It is blind, and it attempts to lead; it is ignorant, and it offers to teach and direct the young. It will not receive the law, and it claims the right to give it. It arrogates the "higher law," and "would be as God." There is the danger; and it is against this the fight must be made, if we would not surrender our civil and religious freedom, our temporal and eternal happiness.

Surely it is time for all good Christians of America to cry out to our rulers, "And now, O ye rulers, understand; receive instruction, you that judge the earth."—(Ps. ii. x.) Do not force any longer upon a Christian nation an educational system which produces such results; do not train any longer our children without religion—to infidelity, and consequently to revolution. Do not teach the youth of America any longer to reject God and His religion; they will not be long faithful to you if you make them unfaithful to the faith of their fathers. You, and all the classes in society who delight in seeing the influence of religion weakened or destroyed, never seem to realize, until it is too late, that you are sure to be the especial victims of your own success. The man who scorns to love God and His law, how shall he continue to love his neighbor? The man who has said "there is no God," is he not on the point of also saying "lust is lawful," "property is robbery"? If you raise instruments to deny God and to do away with all religious principles, God will use these very instruments to do away with you also.

Your Pagan system of education will ultimately overturn all order in the land. Among ancient Pagan nations, where the poor were comparatively ignorant—where they did not know their rights—it was easy to hold them in bondage; but now things have changed. Discontent in the lower order of society can no longer be smothered. Education has become general; and, unfortunately, the very element, without which education is often a curse, is omitted. Religious education has been separated from secular instruction. Without religion, the poor are unable to control their passions, or to bear their hard lot. They see wealth around them, and, unless taught by religion, they see no reason why that wealth should not be divided amongst them. Why should they starve, while their neighbors roll in splendor and luxury? If the poor were ignorant, they would not, perhaps, notice all the sad privations of their state; they would not, perhaps, feel them so keenly. But they are partially educated, and "a little learning is a dangerous thing."

They know their power, and, not having the soothing influence of religion to restrain them, they use their power. They have done so in France and elsewhere, and if they do not always succeed in producing revolution, and anarchy, it is only the bayonet that prevents them. Such is the abyss that yawns beneath the feet of our country, and into which the advocates of education without religion—perhaps some of them unconsciously—seek to precipitate us, by continuing to force upon this Christian nation an anti-Christian, an anti-American system of education.

Surely the grievance is not simply an affair of taxes, or so much money unjustly levied and collected. This we might bear, as we have to do in other cases of injustice, for righteousness' sake. But we have a duty to God, ourselves, and our children. We recognize the office and obligations of the State as temporal ruler, but we do not acknowledge in it an absolute and unconditional authority. We do not admit the doctrine of passive obedience. We will not and cannot surrender the education of our children to its dictation and control, for that is a trust placed in our hands by a higher power, and for which we will have to answer, at the last day, on our salvation. I ask—am I right in all that I have said upon the State and its godless system of education? If I am, then I think I have a right to ask for a verdict of "Guilty." If there are still some who cannot see that I am right, then let them, without delay, be operated upon for amaurosis. But then, in God's name, is it not high time to inquire what should be done to correct the system, and stop the torrent of its evil influences? This is a great question; it demands a speedy and satisfactory solution. The interests it involves are commensurate with time and eternity.



CHAPTER XI.

REMEDY FOR THE DIABOLICAL SPIRIT AND THE CRIMES IN OUR COUNTRY.

Men look around, and ask, Where is the remedy for the so wide-spread corruption of all classes of society? This is a most important question. It is not difficult for a Christian to answer it. A skilful physician, who wishes to cure his patient, endeavors first to remove the cause of the disease. So, in like manner, if we wish to stem the torrent of the evils that flood the land, we must stop the source from which they flow.

Now the leading men and the most prominent journals of New York and New England, confess that the greater part of the wide-spread immorality in our day and country is to be traced to the separation of religion from the instruction in our Public Schools.

Governor Brown, addressing the Seventh National Teachers' Convention in St. Louis, in August last, said: "It is a very customary declaration to pronounce that education is the great safeguard of republics against the decay of virtue and the reign of immorality. Yet the facts can scarcely bear out the proposition. The highest civilizations, both ancient and modern, have sometimes been the most flagitious. Nowadays, certainly, your prime rascals have been educated rascals."

And indeed if we go to Auburn, Sing Sing, and other prisons, and examine some of the criminals confined there, we will find that there is truth in the Governor's words.

Do the managers of the Erie Railway lack any kind of intelligence that could be communicated in a common school? Are not those pests, the Washington and Albany lobbies, rather too knowing? Had not those blood-suckers, the shoddy-ites and army contractors, an average common school education? Do not the "gold rings" and the "whiskey rings" know how to read and write? Were not Catiline of old, and Aaron Burr and Benedict Arnold of more recent times, men of intelligence? Were not the parties to the recent tragedy, two of whom Mr. Beecher united in unholy wedlock, passable enough in point of merely intellectual cultivation? Mephistopheles was a person of surprising accomplishments, and the ablest debates in literature are those which Milton puts in the mouths of the grand synod of devils in Pandemonium. Byron was a prodigy of intelligence; but, whether Mrs. Stowe's revolting accusation be true or not, he was certainly a profligate.

No one, certainly, gifted with ordinary power of observation, will ascribe crime solely to ignorance, nor will such a one fail to see that a large class of the most audacious and dangerous offenders of both sexes are educated, nay, over-educated, according to the Public School standard.

The Boston Daily Herald, of October 20th, published the following as an editorial article:

"Year after year the Chief of Police publishes his statistics of prostitution in this city, but how few of the citizens bestow more than a passing thought upon the misery that they represent! Although these figures are large enough to make every lover of humanity hang his head with feelings of sorrow and shame at the picture, we are assured that they represent but a little, as it were, of the actual licentiousness that prevails among all classes of society. Within a few months, a gentleman[F] whose scientific attainments have made his name a household word in all lands, has personally investigated the subject, and the result has filled him with dismay; when he sees the depths of degradation to which men and women have fallen, he has almost lost faith in the boasted civilization of the nineteenth century. In the course of his inquiries he has visited both the well-known 'houses of pleasure' and the 'private establishments' scattered all over the city. He states that he has a list of both, with the street and number, the number of inmates, and many other facts that would perfectly astonish the people if made public. He freely conversed with the inmates, and the life-histories that were revealed were sad indeed. To his utter surprise, a large proportion of the 'soiled doves' traced their fall to influences that met them in the Public Schools; and although Boston is justly proud of its schools, it would seem, from his story, that they need a thorough purification. In too many of them the most obscene and soul-polluting books and pictures circulate among both sexes. The very secrecy with which it is done throws an almost irresistible charm about it; and to such an extent has the evil gone, that we fear a large proportion of both boys and girls possess some of the articles, which they kindly (?) lend to each other. The natural result follows, and frequently the most debasing and revolting practises are indulged in. And the evil is not confined alone to Boston. Other cities suffer in the same way. It is but a few years since the second city in the Commonwealth was stirred almost to its foundations by the discovery of an association of boys and girls who were wont to indulge their passions in one of the school-houses of the city; and not long ago another somewhat similar affair was discovered by the authorities, but hushed up for fear of depopulating the schools."

"That the devil is in the Public Schools, raging and rampant there among the pupils as well as among the teachers, no one can well doubt who has sent a little child into them, as guiltless of evil or unclean thoughts as a newly fallen snowflake, and had him come home, in a short time, contaminated almost beyond belief by the vileness and filth which he has seen, and heard, and learned there."—(Hathe Tyng Griswold, in Old and New, for March; or Boston Pilot, April 6, 1872.)

A celebrated physician of this country says in his book, "Satan in Society," as follows:

"The evils and dangers of the present system of educating and bringing up the boys and girls of our country, are too obvious to require minute description. Irreligion and infidelity are progressing pari passu with the advance guards of immorality and crime, and all are fostered, if not engendered, by the materialistic system of school instruction, and the consequent wretched training at home and on the play-ground. The entire absence of all religious instruction from the school-room is fast bearing fruit in a generation of infidels, and we are becoming worse even than the Pagans of old, who had at least their positive sciences of philosophy, and their religion, such as it was, to oppose which was a criminal offence. To those who would dispute this somewhat horrible assertion, the author would point to the published statistics of church attendance, from which it appears that of the entire population but a very small proportion are habitual church-goers. Deducting from these, again, those who attend church simply as a matter of fashion, or from other than religious motives, and there remains a minimum almost too small to be considered, abundantly sustaining our charge. The disintegration of the prevalent forms of religious belief, the rapid multiplication of sects, the increase in the ranks of intellectual sceptics, the fashionable detractions from, and perversions of, the Holy Scriptures, acting with the influences already mentioned, may well cause alarm.

"But we have not only the removal of the salutary restraints of religious influence from our popular system of education; we have the promiscuous intermingling of the sexes in our Public Schools, which, however much we may theorize to the contrary, is, to say the least, subversive of that modest reserve and shyness which in all ages have proved the true aegis of virtue. We are bound to accept human nature as it is, and not as we would wish it to be, and both Christian and Pagan philosophy agree in detecting therein certain very dangerous elements. Among the most dangerous and inevitable is the sexual instinct, which, implanted by the Creator for the wisest purposes, is, perhaps, the most potent of all evils when not properly restrained, retarded, and directed. This mysterious instinct develops earlier in proportion as the eye and the imagination are soonest furnished the materials upon which it thrives; and, long before the age of puberty, it is strong, and well-nigh ungovernable, in those who have been allowed these unfortunate occasions. The boy of the present generation has more practical knowledge of this instinct at the age of fifteen, than, under proper training, he should be entitled to at the time of his marriage; and the boy of eleven or twelve boastfully announces to his companions the evidences of his approaching virility. Nourished by languishing glances during the hours passed in the school-room, fanned by more intimate association on the journey to and from school, fed by stolen interviews and openly-arranged festivities—picnics, excursions, parties and the like—stimulated by the prurient gossip of the newspaper, the flash novels, sentimental weeklies, and magazines, the gallant of twelve years is the libertine of fourteen. That this picture is not overdrawn, every experienced physician will bear witness.

"And as for the Public School-girls, they return from their 'polishing schools'—these demoiselles—cursed with a superficial smattering of everything but what they ought to have learned—physical and moral wrecks, whom we physicians are expected to wind up in the morning for the husband-hunting excitements of the evening. And these creatures are intended for wives! But wives only, for it is fast going out of fashion to intend them for mothers—an 'accident' of the kind being regarded as'foolish'!

"We assert, then, that the present system of education, by its faults of omission and commission, is directly responsible, not, it is true, for the bare existence, but for the enormous prevalence of vices and crimes which we deplore; and we call upon the civil authorities to so modify the obnoxious arrangements of our schools, and upon parents and guardians to so instruct and govern their charges, that the evils may be suppressed, if not extinguished."

The attempt to prepare man for his duties in social life with morals and religion left out, is not only a failure, but a crime. Yes, it is not only a failure, but a crime of such magnitude, that society has already begun to suffer its consequences in a demoralization and general libertinage of the most shameful kind. This education without religion and morals is the poisoned fountain from which flows, and will flow, if not purified by adding the essential elements now omitted, the impure streams of all kinds of vice. If God is despised, governments will be trampled on; if God's law is hated, the laws of men will be violated; man will see only his own interest, his neighbor's property will only whet his appetite; his neighbor's life will be only a secondary consideration; he would, according to his creed, be a fool not to shed blood when his interest requires it; his fellow-men become imbued with his principles—anarchy succeeds subordination—vice takes the place of virtue—what was sacred is profaned—what was honorable becomes disgraceful—might becomes right—treatises are waste paper—honor is an empty name—the most sacred obligations dwindle down into mere optional practices—youth despises age—wisdom is folly—subjection to authority is laughed at as a foolish dream—the moral code itself soon becomes little more than the bugbear of the weak-minded—crowns are trampled under foot—thrones are overturned—nations steeped in blood, and republics swept from the face of the earth.

Yes, continue a little longer to educate the greater part of the community according to the present system of the Public Schools, and rest assured we shall soon have a hell upon earth—society will be stabbed to the heart by the ruffian assassin called godless Public School education—it will reel, stagger, and sink a bleeding victim to the ground, expiring, like the suicide, by the wound itself has inflicted. I truly believe that if Satan was presented with a blank sheet of paper, and bade to write on it the most fatal gift to man, he would simply write one word—"godless schools." He might then turn his attention from this planet; "godless Public Schools" would do the rest.

Now what is to be done to stop the poisoned source from which the diabolical spirit and the crimes of our country flow? A certain class come forward and say, "Let the Bible be read in our Public Schools. The Bible is the grand source of religion and morality. The Bible alone, without note or comment, is the grand source of life and civilization."

Very well, let the Bible be admitted, but with the Bible you must send the key—the interpreter. And then, which of all the Bibles, and whom among the numerous sects, shall be sent?

To read the Bible, without note or comment, to young children, is to abandon them to dangerous speculation, or to leave them dry and barren of all Christian knowledge. In mixed schools there is no other resource, because it is impossible to make any comment upon any doctrinal teaching of Christ and His Apostles, without trenching upon the conscientious opinions of some one or other of the listeners. "The Father and I are One." "The Father is greater than I." Here at once we have the Unitarian and the Trinitarian at a dead-lock! "This is My Body." "It is the spirit which quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing." Here we have the primitive Lutheran, who believed in the real presence (consubstantially), and his Calvinistic coadjutor in reform, squarely at issue! "Unless you be born again of water and the Holy Ghost," etc. Here we have the Baptist and the Quaker very seriously divided in opinion. Nevertheless, widely as they differ the one from the other, there is a fundamental assimilation between all the Protestant sects which may render it possible for them to unite in one educational organization; and yet we find many of the most enlightened and earnest among the Protestant clergy of America now zealously advocating the denominational system, such as we find it in the European countries. They believe that education should be distinctly based upon doctrinal religion, and they are liberal enough to insist that, by natural right as well as by the constitutional guarantees of our free country, no doctrine adverse to the faith of a parent may lawfully be forced or surreptitiously imposed upon his child. It is well known, however, that between the Catholic faith and all Protestant creeds, there is a gulf which cannot be bridged over. It would, therefore, be simply impossible to adopt any religious teaching whatever in mixed schools, without at once interfering with Catholic conscience. No such teaching is attempted, as a general rule, we believe, in the Public Schools of the United States, and hence we have only a vague announcement of moral precepts, the utter futility and barrenness of which must be evident to every one. Catholics, agreeing with very many enlightened and zealous Protestants, believe that secular education, administered without religion, is not only vain, but exceedingly pernicious; that it is fast undermining the Christian faith of this nation; that it is rapidly filling the land with rationalism; that it is destroying the authority of the Holy Scriptures; that it is educating men who prefix "Reverend" and affix "D.D." to their names, the more effectually to preach covert infidelity and immorality to Christian congregations; that, instead of the saving morality of the Gospel of Christ, which rests upon revealed mysteries and supernatural gifts, it is offering us that same old array of the natural virtues or qualities which helped, for a while, like rotten pillars, to prop up the heathen nations of old. It must, then, be evident to every man of common sense that the reading of the Bible alone, though it be the Word of God, will not counterbalance the results of Pagan education. Indeed the reading of the Bible alone is by no means an adequate remedy to stem the torrent of the evils in our country. What impurities have not been committed under the sanction of those words of the Lord, "Increase and multiply"! A host of sectarians, following in the wake of the Anabaptists of Munster, in Germany, have, on the authority of those words, dared to legitimate polygamy. On such misapplication of a text from the Gospel, Luther, Bucerus, and Melanchthon have permitted Philip, the Landgrave of Hesse, to have two wives.

In the name of the Bible, of the Word of God, Luther at first incited the German peasantry to revolt against their rulers, and then, frightened at his own work, he persuaded the princes to massacre the peasants. John of Leyden found, in his studies of the Bible, that he should marry eleven women at once. Herman felt himself clearly designated, in the Bible, as the Envoy of the Lord. Nicholas learned from it that there was no necessity of anything connected with faith, and that we must live in sin in order that grace may abound. Sympson pretends to find in the Scriptures an ordination that men should walk in the streets stark naked, to teach the rich a lesson that they must divest themselves of everything. Richard Hill justified, with the Bible in hand, adultery and manslaughter as deeds never failing to work out some good purpose, especially when joined to incest, in which case more saints are added to the earth and more blessed to the heavens. Even on the avowal of honest Protestants, no crime or abomination has ever failed to find its pretended justification in some scriptural text.

What, then, must we think of the reading of the Bible, when its reading, without note or comment, leads to such consequences? Indeed what has been said on the evil consequences of the Public School system on society proves sufficiently that the reading of the Bible is no adequate means at all to stem the torrent of crimes in our country. Nowhere has the Bible been read more frequently, during school-hours, than in the Public Schools of the New England States, and yet nowhere have the results of these schools proved more fatal than in these very States. The reading of the Bible alone, therefore, though it be the Word of God, will not counterbalance the results of Pagan education.

There are others who maintain "that religious instruction should be left to parents."

Now it is not only idle, but cruel, to say that the place and provision for such Christian instruction and formation is under the roof of the parents' home; that the best school is the family. This is indeed true of the early formation by affection, influence, example, by which fathers and mothers fashion the first outlines of character, and mature them while the education of their children is advancing. None have reminded parents of this more faithfully than the Pastors of the Church. But to say that fathers and mothers are to educate their children, and that their home is to be the school of Christian instruction, catechetical teaching, formation of conscience, preparation for sacraments, and the like, is either the shallow talk of men who know nothing of Christian education, or care nothing for it, or a heartless mockery of our poor. The rich, the refined, the educated, whose time is their own, do not educate their own children. They systematically send them to schools and colleges, or pay for tutors or governesses under their own roof. They wisely shrink from a work for which, if they have the time, they seldom have the acquirements or the gift, or the method of the perseverance or the patience. And if this be, as it is, universally true of those who are the most competent, and the most provided with all the means and opportunities for the work, now is it not hardness of heart, or want of common sense, to say that the children of the poor are to learn reading, and writing, and summing, indeed, at school, but that their Christian teaching and formation must be provided at home? The workingmen of these countries are at labor from twilight to twilight. Their wives have the burden of the whole family; the poor mother is alone both the head and the servant of the whole house. When is she to teach, and train, and shape, and fashion the characters, hearts, consciences, intellects of the children? Is it to be done in the midst of a day's work, or in the weariness after the day's work is done? And are they competent to do what the mother of the rich cannot do? Broken with cares, wearied by work, suffering from poverty, often fainting from sickness because worn out with all these burdens, how shall the father or mother of a family, huddled into a single room, do what the rich and the educated, in their spacious houses, and with abundant leisure, never dream of attempting?

Moreover, as I have shown in a preceding chapter, it must be admitted that a mother not educated in religious and moral principles cannot inform the mind and heart of the young child; this fully disposes of the argument that domestic teaching alone will supply what is acknowledged to be wanting in the "Public Schools." It is to be hoped that we shall hear no more of this heartless talk.

"Well, then," some will say, "let our children receive, in Sunday-schools, that amount of religious culture and instruction which the State says shall not be given in the school, and which is believed to be so essential in the education of the young."

Now it is in vain to open our Sunday-schools and expect to cure, on one day of the week, or rather a few hours of that day (when this even depends, in a great part, on the weather), the work not only of the other six, but the fruits of years of an ill-directed and godless State education. The Sunday-schools are nothing but so many "Poor-man's soothing plasters" on Christian consciences. The want of religious training for six days in the week, added to the positive knowledge of error on all religious subjects which youths may acquire during that time, will more than counterbalance the best-directed efforts of parents and the clergy to give any definite knowledge on the truths of revelation. The question whether or not religious education is compatible with Public School education, has been tried in all English-speaking countries, and in parts of Germany, with this result: that, a class, the Public School children are without any adequate religious knowledge or training. The clergy may have Sunday-schools, as they have, in all their churches; but what can children learn, in a few hours, of a subject which took three years from the Saviour of man to teach even to the apostles? And then the apostles, after three years of instruction from the lips of Christ, did not understand the Christian religion; they were slow to understand, and, after His resurrection, Christ upbraided them with incredulity and hardness of heart. Even the children of the Public Schools, as far as experience goes, lose all taste for the study of religion, which is developed among the children of Christian schools without any effort. Sunday-schools, at best, may train children to be Christians one day in the week, and Pagans six days. School-days over, the usual result will be Pagans all the seven days of the week.

If it is in vain to say, "Let the Bible be read in our Public Schools," or "let our children receive religious instruction from their parents, or in Sunday-schools, in order to arrest the fast-spreading crimes of the land," it is still more in vain to say, "Let the Legislature be called upon."

It cannot be denied that the higher culture of America has, from the time of the introduction of the present Public School system, ceased to be Christian. What is the natural harvest of this sowing? It is that we have already a generation of men, thousands of whom are not fit to be the heads and fathers of families. But this is not all; we have also ever so many guides of public opinion, ever so many ministers of public affairs, and ever so many lawgivers of the United States, who are infidels and profligates; who see only themselves in all they do, who desire only to fret out their little hour on the political stage with a sharp eye to their own interests, without the smallest desire to secure the Republic against future disasters—who cannot, or will not, see the disastrous storms the ship of the Republic will soon have to encounter. What good, then, could be expected from calling upon the Legislature? It would only show its impotency, or, what is more, its own corruption. The executive is unable, suspected, or often found in the "ring," or, to use a common expression, "Justice stinks." The judiciary, by its very nature, always timid, and too often time-serving, can do nothing. Well, then, the press: what shall be said of it? Only this: that it would be unreasonable to expect it to possess the supernatural powers of healing such a multitude of foul lepers, or to be able at any time to lift itself far above the level of the general average of the age and country.

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? We must proceed on a true principle. When we proceed on a true principle, the more logically and completely we carry it out the better; but when we start with a false principle, the more logical we are, and the farther we push it, the worse. Our consistency increases, instead of diminishing, the evils we would cure. The reformers started wrong. They would reform the Church by placing her under human control. Their successors have in each generation found they did not go far enough, and have, each in its turn, struggled to push it farther and farther, till they find themselves without any church life, without faith, without religion, and beginning to doubt if there be even a God. So, in the question of education, the upholders of the Public School system have pushed the false principle "that all individual, domestic, social, and political evils are due to ignorance, and can only be prevented by high intellectual culture," till they have nearly taught away all religious belief and morality, have well-nigh abolished the family which is the social unit, and find that the evils they pretended to prevent, and the wrongs they sought to redress, are fast increasing.

We must, then, proceed on a true principle in trying to remedy the profligacy that disgraces so many of our crowded centres, and the demoralization that is fast gangrening even our rural districts.

One thousand eight hundred and forty-odd years ago, you might have observed a poor, meanly-clad wanderer, wending his steps on the Appian way to the Capitol of the world,—the wealthy, magnificent, and ungodly city of Rome. He has passed its gates, and threads his way unobserved through its populous streets. On every side he beholds gorgeous palaces raised at the expense of downtrodden nationalities; stately temples dedicated to as many false gods as nations were congregated in Rome; public baths and amphitheatres devoted to pleasure and to cruelty; statues, monuments, and triumphal arches raised to the memory of blood-thirsty tyrants. He passes warriors and senators, beggars and cripples, effeminate and dissolute women, gladiators and slaves, merchants and statesmen, orators and philosophers;—all classes, all ranks, all conditions of men of every language and color under the sun. Everywhere he sees a maddening race for pleasure; everywhere the impress of luxury, everywhere the full growth of crime, side by side with indescribable suffering, diabolical cruelty and barbarity. And this poor, meanly-clad wanderer was St. Peter. Oh! how the noble heart of the fisherman of Galilee must have bled, when he observed the empire of Satan so supreme—when he witnessed the shocking licentiousness of the temple and the homestead; when he saw the fearful degradation of woman groaning under the load of her own infamy; when he saw the heart-rending inhumanity which slew the innocent babes and threw them into the Tiber; when he saw how prisoners of war, slaves, and soldiers were trained for bloody fights, and entered the arena of the amphitheatre, and strove whole days to strangle one another, for the special entertainment of the Roman people. When Peter came to Rome, that city was the condensation of all the idolatry, all the oppression, all the injustice, all the immoralities of the world; for the world was centred in Rome.

Here, then, were evils to be remedied similar to those of our day and country. Pagan philosophers, poets and orators, had tried their best to cure these evils and to elevate mankind, but they had tried in vain. What they were unable to bring about, St. Peter accomplished by preaching to the Roman people Christianity—the religion of Jesus Christ—which imparts to the mind infallibly the light of truth, and lays down for the will authoritatively the unchangeable principles of supernatural morality, true prosperity, true happiness, and peace on earth and for eternity. Indeed, it is a well-known fact that the Capitoline temple, and with it the many shrines of idolatry, the golden house of Nero, and with it Roman excess and Roman cruelty, the throne of the Caesars, and with it Roman oppression and Roman injustice, gave way and disappeared in proportion as the light of Christianity was infused into that foul mass, into that rotten society, centred in Rome. It was this Christian religion that changed a sinful people into saints, and so many holy inhabitants of heaven. And what the blessings of the religion of Christ brought about in Rome, they bring about wherever they are diffused. Hence all true lovers of the country tell us that there is but one remedy for the cure of the diabolical spirit and the crimes of our country—it is to teach our children the truth and blessings of the Christian religion. It is the Christian religion that infallibly and authoritatively teaches the duties of civil authorities towards their subjects, of husbands towards their wives, of parents towards their children, of masters towards their servants, of pastors towards their flocks, of the faithful towards their pastors, of servants towards their masters, of wives towards their husbands, of children towards their parents, of subjects towards their lawfully constituted civil authorities, of all men towards God, their Supreme Master, and just Rewarder of good and evil. Moreover, it is the Christian religion alone that affords men the means to obtain God's grace, which enlightens the mind to see the beauty of virtue, inflames the heart with love for it, and inclines the will to practise it with perseverance. If we then wish to be sure of having a virtuous and virile people, we must Christianize our youth, especially during their school hours; we must bring up our children in a religious atmosphere. I have already remarked that religion may be compared to leaven. As leaven must be diffused throughout the entire mass in order to produce its effects, so the Christian religion must be thoroughly diffused throughout the child's entire education, in order to be solid and effective.

Not a moment of the hours of school should be left without religious influence. It is the constant breathing of the air that preserves our bodily life, and it is the constant dwelling in a religious atmosphere that preserves the life of the youthful soul. Religion is not a study, or an exercise that may be restricted to a certain place, or 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. It will never do to suffer the child to devote six days in the week to worldly science, and to depend on Sunday for a religious training. This would be like reserving the salt which should season our food during the week, and taking it all in a dose on Sunday. By such a system we may make expert shop-boys, first-rate accountants, shrewd and thriving "earth-worms"; but it would be presumption to think of thus making good citizens, still less virtuous Christians.

Let us be assured that our young men know their duties to God, to their neighbors, and to themselves, and they will then, but not till then, be true Christians. In being true Christians they will be dutiful sons, faithful husbands, affectionate fathers, gentle masters, honest servants, law-loving and law-abiding citizens, true statesmen, good soldiers, and valiant defenders of the country, chaste and sober companions, the joy of God and of society.

But, above all, let us be assured that our daughters are educated as women, not as men. Women are not needed as men; they are needed as women: to do, not what men can do as well as they, but what men cannot do. Woman was created to be a wife and a mother; that is her destiny. To that destiny all her instincts point, and for it nature has specially qualified her. Her proper sphere is home, and her proper function is the care of the household, to manage a family, to take care of children, and attend to their early training. For this she is endowed with patience, endurance, passive courage, quick sensibilities, a sympathetic nature, and great executive and administrative ability. She was born to be a queen in her own household, and make home cheerful, bright, and happy. There it is that she is really great, noble, almost divine.

Now the general complaint is that the greater part of our Public School-girls are not fit to be good wives, mothers and housekeepers. As wives, they forget what they owe to their husbands, are capricious and vain, often light and frivolous, extravagant and foolish, bent on having their own way, though ruinous to the family, and generally contriving, by coaxings, blandishments, or poutings, to get it. They hold obedience in horror, and seek only to govern their husbands and all around them.

As mothers, they not only neglect, but disdain, the retired and simple domestic virtues, and scorn to be tied down to the modest but essential duties—the drudgery, they call it—of mothers; they manage to be relieved of household cares, especially of child-bearing, and of the duty of bringing up children. They repress their maternal instincts, and the horrible crime of infanticide before birth now becomes so fearfully prevalent, that the American nation is actually threatened with extinction. If they condescend to have one or two children, they set them an ill example; for if children see that their mother, as a wife, forgets to honor and obey her husband, and always wants to have her own way with him, they soon lose all respect for her, and insist on having their own way with her, and usually succeed.

As housekeepers they devote their time to pleasure or amusement, wasting their life in luxurious ease, in reading sentimental or sensational novels, or in following the caprices of fashion; thus they let the household go to ruin, and the honest earnings of the husband becomes speedily insufficient for the family expenses, and he is sorely tempted to provide for them by rash speculation or by fraud, which, though it may be carried on for a while without detection, is sure to end in disgrace and ruin at last.

There is indeed nothing which more grieves the wise and good, or makes them tremble for the future of the country, than the way in which our daughters are educated in the Public Schools. When they become wives and mothers, they have none of the habits or character necessary to govern their household and to train their children properly. Hence arise that growing neglect or laxity of family discipline; that insubordination, that lawlessness, and precocious depravity of Young America; that almost total lack of filial reverence and obedience with the children of this generation. Exceptions there happily are; but the number of children that grow up without any proper training or discipline at home is fearfully large, and their evil example corrupts not a few of those who are well brought up. The country is no better than the town. As a rule, children are no longer subjected to a steady and firm, but mild and judicious, discipline, or trained to habits of filial love, respect and obedience. These habits are acquired only in a school of obedience, made pleasant and cheerful by a mother's playful smile and a mother's love. The care and management of children during their early years belong specially to the mother. The education of children may be said to commence from the moment they open their eyes and ears to the sights and sounds of the world about them; and of these sights and sounds the words and example of the mother are the most impressive and the most enduring. Of all lessons, those learned at the knees of a good mother sink the deepest into the mind and heart, and last the longest. Many of the noblest and best men that ever lived, and adorned and benefited the world, have declared that, under God, they owed everything that was good and useful in their lives to the love of virtue, and truthfulness, and piety, and the fear of God instilled into their hearts by the lips of a pious mother. It is her special function to plant and develop in their young and impressible minds the seeds of virtue, love, reverence, and obedience, and to train her daughters, by precept and example, not to catch husbands that will give them splendid establishments, but to be, in due time, modest and affectionate wives, tender and judicious mothers, and prudent and careful housekeepers. This the father cannot do; and his interference, except by wise counsel, and to honor and sustain the mother, will generally be worse than nothing. The task devolves specially on the mother; for it demands the sympathy with children which is peculiar to the female heart, the strong maternal instinct implanted by nature, and directed by a judicious education, that blending of love and authority, sentiment and reason, sweetness and power, so characteristic of the noble and true-hearted woman, and which so admirably fit her to be loved and honored, only less than adored, in her own household. But though the duties and responsibilities of mothers in this matter are the heaviest and most important for themselves, and for the society of all others, yet there are none which are more neglected.

Now wives and mothers, by neglecting their domestic duties and the proper family discipline, fail to offer the necessary resistance to growing lawlessness and crime, aggravated, if not generated, by the false notions of freedom and equality so widely entertained. It is only by home discipline, and the early habits of reverence and obedience to which our children are trained, that the license the government tolerates, and the courts hardly dare attempt to restrain, can be counteracted, and the community made a law-loving and a law-abiding community.

Why is it that the very bases of society have been sapped, and the conditions of good government despised, or denounced under the name of despotism? Why is it that social and political life is poisoned in its source, and the blood of the nation corrupted? It is because wives and mothers have failed in their domestic duties, and the discipline of their families. And they have failed in this, because the State did not, and could not, bring them up to it.

The evils we have to cure cannot be reached by the reading of the Bible, by Sunday-school training, nor by any possible political or legislative action. Men or women cannot be legislated into virtue. That the remedy, to a great extent, must be supplied by woman's action and influence, we not only concede, but claim. But it is only as woman, as wife, as mother, that she must do the work: as woman, to soften asperities, and to refine what else were coarse and brutal; as wife, to sustain with her affection the resolutions and just aspirations of her husband, and render home bright and cheerful—"the sweetest place on earth"; as mother, to direct and inspire the noble and righteous aspirations of her sons—to train and form her children to early habits of piety, filial love and reverence, of obedience to God's law, and respect for authority.

There are, in our day, comparatively few mothers who are qualified to do this. But what they can and should do is to see that they have a better and more thorough system of education for their sons, but especially for their daughters—a system of education that specially adapts them to the destiny of their sex, and prepares them to find their happiness in their homes, and the satisfaction of their highest ambition in discharging its manifold duties, so much higher, nobler, and more essential to the virtue and well-being of the community, the nation, the society, and to the life and progress of the human race, than any which devolve on king or emperor, magistrate or legislator. We would not have their generous instincts repressed, their quick sensibilities blunted, or their warm, sympathetic nature chilled, nor even the lighter graces and accomplishments neglected; but we would have them all directed and harmonized by solid intellectual instruction, and moral and religious culture. We would have them, whether rich or poor, trained to find the centre of their affections in their home; their chief ambition in making it cheerful, bright, radiant and happy. Whether destined to grace a magnificent palace, or to adorn the humble cottage of poverty, this should be the ideal aimed at in their education. They should be trained to love home, and to find their pleasure in sharing its cares and performing its duties, however arduous or painful.

There are, as I have said, comparatively few mothers qualified to give their daughters such an education, especially in our own country; for comparatively few have received such an education themselves, or are able fully to appreciate its importance. They can find little help in the fashionable boarding-schools for finishing young ladies; and, in general, these schools only aggravate the evils to be cured. The best and the only respectable schools for daughters that we have in the country are the conventual schools taught by women consecrated to God, and specially devoted to the work of education. These schools, indeed, are not always all that might be wished. The religious cannot, certainly, supply the place of the mother in giving their pupils that practical home-training so necessary, and which can be given only by mothers who have themselves been properly educated; but they go as far as is possible in remedying the defects of the present generation of mothers, and in counteracting their follies and vain ambitions. With all the faults that can be alleged against any of them, the conventual schools, even as they are, it must be conceded, are infinitely the best schools for daughters in the land, and, upon the whole, worthy of the high praise and liberal patronage their devotedness and disinterestedness secure them. We have seldom found their graduates weak and sickly sentimentalists. They develop in their pupils a cheerful and healthy tone, and a high sense of duty; give them solid moral, religious instruction; cultivate successfully their moral and religious affections; refine their manners, purify their tastes, and send them out feeling that life is serious, life is earnest, and resolved always to act under a deep sense of their personal responsibilities; meet whatever may be their lot with brave hearts, and without murmuring and repining.

The editor of the New York Herald prefaces an account of a Catholic academy with the following remarks:

"However divided public opinion may be as to secular and religious schools—no matter what differences in opinion may exist in the community as to the policy of aiding or discouraging purely sectarian systems of education—there can be but little opposition from any quarter to the verdict of experience given by many thousand families, that these devoted women—the Sisters of the Catholic Church—are the best teachers of young girls, the safest instructors in this age of loose, worldly, and rampant New Englandism. Those matters of education which make the lady, in their hands, subordinate to the great object of making every girl committed to their care a true woman, are imbued with those principles which have made our mothers our pride and boast. Those of us who cavil at Catholic pretensions, sneer at their assumption, and ridicule their observances, must acknowledge that the Sisters are far ahead and above any organization of the sort of which Protestantism can boast. The self-sacrifice, the devotion, the single-mindedness, the calm trust in a Power unseen, the humility of manner and rare unselfishness which characterize the Sisters, has no parallel in any organization of the reformed faith. The war placed the claims of the Sisters of Charity fairly before the country; but these Sisters of the different branches have, in peace, 'victories no less renowned than in war.' Educating the poor children, directing the untutored mind of the youthful alien savage in our midst, or holding the beacon of intellectual advancement bright and burning before the female youth of the country, and beckoning them to advance, they are ever doing a good and noble work."

We do not disguise the fact that our hopes for the future, in great measure, rest on these conventual schools; if they are multiplied, and the number of their graduates increase, and enter upon the serious duties of life, the ideal of female education will become higher and broader; a nobler class of wives and mothers will exert a healthy and purifying influence; religion will become a real power in the Republic; the moral tone of the community, and the standard of private and public morality, will be elevated; and thus may gradually be acquired the virtues that will enable us, as a people, to escape the dangers that now threaten us, and to save the Republic as well as our own souls.

Sectarians, indeed, declaim against these schools, and denounce them as a subtle device of Satan to make their daughters "Romanists"; but Satan probably dislikes "Romanism" even more than sectarians do, and is much more in earnest to suppress or ruin our conventual schools, in which he is not held in much honor, than he is to sustain and encourage them. At any rate, our countrymen who have such a horror of the religion it is our glory to profess, that they cannot call it by its true name, would do well, before denouncing these schools, to establish better schools for daughters of their own. These modest, retiring Sisters and Nuns, who have no new theories and schemes of social reform, and upon whom a certain class of women look down with haughty contempt, as weak, spiritless, and narrow-minded, have chosen the better part, and are doing infinitely more to raise woman to her true dignity, and for the political and social, as well as for the moral and religious, progress of the country, than the Woman's Rights party, with all their grand conventions, brilliant speeches, stirring lectures and spirited journals. By way of parenthesis, we dare tell these women who are wasting so much time, energy, philanthropy, and brilliant eloquence in agitating for female suffrage and eligibility, which, if conceded, would only make matters worse, that, if they have the real interest of their sex or of the community at heart, they should turn their attention to the education of daughters for their special functions, not as men, but as women, who are one day to be wives and mothers—woman's true destiny.

Undoubtedly the special destiny of women is to be wives and mothers; but we are told that there are thousands of women who are not and cannot be wives and mothers. In the older and more densely settled States of the Union, there is an excess of females over males, and all cannot get husbands if they would. Yet, we repeat, woman was created to be a wife and a mother, and the woman that is not fails of her special destiny. Under the Christian dispensation honorable provision has been made for that large class of women who, either from preference, or from any other cause, do not marry. Virginity, which was regarded as a reproach, became an honor under the Christian law. Those women who do not wish, or cannot be wives and mothers in the natural order, may be both, in the spiritual order, if they will, and are properly educated for it. They can be wedded to the Holy Spirit, and be the mothers of minds and hearts. The holy virgins and devout widows who consecrated themselves to God, in or out of religious orders, are both, and fulfil in the spiritual order their proper destiny. We hold them in high honor, because they become mothers to the motherless, to the poor, to the forsaken, to the homeless. They instruct the ignorant, nurse the sick, help the helpless, tend the aged, catch the last breath of the dying, pray for the unbelieving and the cold-hearted, and elevate the moral tone of society, and shed a cheering radiance along the pathway of life. They have no need to be idle or useless. In a world of so much sin and sorrow, sickness and suffering, there is always work enough for them to do; it is on the poor and motherless, the destitute and the downtrodden, the sinful and the sorrowful, the aged and infirm, the ignorant and the neglected, that, under proper direction, they can lavish the wealth of their affections, the tenderness of their hearts, and the ardor of their charity, and find true joy and happiness in so doing, ample scope for woman's noblest ambition, and chances enough to acquire merit in the sight of heaven, and true glory, that will shine brighter and brighter forever. They thus are dear to God, dear to the Church, and dear to Christian society. They are to be envied, not pitied. It is only because you have lost faith in Christ, faith in the holy Catholic Church, and have become gross in your minds, of "earth earthy," that you deplore the lot of the women who cannot, in the natural order, find husbands, and call them, contemptuously, "old maids"—a miserable relic of heathenism or Protestantism, neither of which have anything to hold out to old maids. But Jesus Christ has provided for them better than you are able to understand.

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. Let us, then, rest assured that the best way to check the torrent of infidelity and immorality, to avert impending evils, to prepare the golden age of our Republic, is to infuse good morals by the most powerful of all means—Christian Education.

FOOTNOTES:

[F] Prof. Aggassiz.



CHAPTER XII.

THE DENOMINATIONAL SYSTEM ALONE SATISFIES THE WANTS OF ALL, AND CAN SAVE THE REPUBLIC.

We live in a time of great activity and change, and intense worldliness. "Men run to and fro and knowledge is increased." Would that we could feel that there is an increase also in integrity and virtue, and respect for Religion. We all know that it is not so. So far as we can form accurate ideas of the social and religious condition of men at any particular period in the world's history, we may doubt whether the words of the Apostle St. Paul, describing what shall come to pass in what he calls "the last days," ever touched any people so closely as they do those of our times and country. "Men," he says, "shall be lovers of themselves, covetous, haughty, proud, blasphemous, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, wicked, without affection, without peace, slanderers, incontinent, unmerciful, without kindness, traitors, stubborn, puffed up, and lovers of pleasure, more than lovers of God." Well may the Apostle speak of such times as "dangerous times." When the moral atmosphere we breathe is so full of what the Scriptures call "the spirit of this world," we can only hope to escape its corrupting influences by doing all in our power to diffuse Christian principles among the rising generation, by means of truly Christian schools.

The arrangements can be made without disturbing the general system. It is this: "Let the State aid, but not direct, a system of plain English education, confined to all those whose circumstances are limited, or who are left destitute, or orphans. Let all religious denominations, when they desire it, have the privilege of conducting their own schools, subject only to general uniform inspection and examination on the part of the State, and have their proportion of the school-moneys." The wealthy classes will know how to take care of the education of their own children, as they do of their family affairs in other matters.

The advocates of this "Denominational System" yield to none in their endeavors to secure to all the children within the State a good, solid, and practical education, according to the religious convictions and circumstances of all. This, they claim, is not, and cannot be furnished on the present plan. They do not, as falsely charged, desire to distract or divide, or introduce sectarianism into the Public Schools; on the contrary, they wish to satisfy conscience by yielding to all others what they claim for themselves, and cannot help denouncing the present system as practically resulting in a form of sectarianism worse than any yet professed: to wit, "Indifferentism."

If the "Denominational System" was adopted, it would satisfy and do justice to all, and, at the same time, excite such rivalry and competition among teachers as to advance education, whilst it diminishes its cost in the same ratio. We have seen that it costs about four times as much to give the miserable infidel instruction in the Public Schools, as it does to give a good Christian education in the denominational schools. What possible objection, then, can there be to adopt the denominational, or separate system, when it costs four times less, and imparts, to say the least, as good an education to the greatest number of children? It is no argument to urge that schools would be sectarian. We have sectarian churches, and various shades and differences of belief, already. This would not alter one or the other a particle. The State cannot impose uniformity on churches; why force it on schools? Indeed it is worse, inasmuch as this scholastic conformity or uniformity is against all religions, and in favor of infidelity, or the no-religious sect, if there be such a one. It discriminates against the believers, and is in favor of the unbelievers.

But it is easy to see what the matter is. It is not religion these men fear so much as competition. One session's trial of the separate system would so clearly demonstrate to the public the economy and advantages of this plan, that the troop of paid teachers, officers, musicians, and others, who are fattening at the expense of a credulous people, would be exposed, and have to take their "carpet-bags" and tramp. However, I have no cause of quarrel with the employes, male or female, of the Public Schools. They do not elect themselves, nor make their salaries, and they are not to be blamed for taking them. If the clever gentleman who draws (in one State, at least) $2,750 for ten months, four hours' a day work, or the accomplished lady who gets $2,000 for the same time and labor, or the three musicians at $2,000 each, or the humble, but perhaps not less useful, corps of "school-sweepers" (janitors), who are rewarded with $16,886.50, or the officers (three), who pocket $14,457.90 salary, and $20,771.96 office-expenses!! are so handsomely rewarded, it is their good fortune, and not their fault. There is, doubtless, a great deal of human nature in their composition, as well as others.

There is no earthly way of giving satisfaction to all, except by granting the denominational system, thereby leaving to all sects and denominations, as well as to those who do not range themselves under any specific form at all, to apply a fair proportion of the school-money. All those who prefer the present plan would have no change to make, and all those who desire the separate plan would have the right to select their own class-books and teachers; in other words, would have the interior management of their own schools. This is the way church matters are managed to the satisfaction of all. Peoples' views and convictions on education are just as conscientious and distinct as on religion, and they have just as good a right to them. If any man denies this truth, I would like him to give his reasons.

There is one other thing to be taken into consideration here: if, as is claimed, all, from the highest to the lowest, have a right to an education at the hands of the State, and if, as is admitted, all should be instructed in their moral and religious duties, if not by the State, at least by their parents and pastors, who will instruct the poor little orphans, the very class for whose benefit the public provide an education—who, I say, will instruct them in the way they should go? who will answer for these little "waifs of society"? They ask for bread, and the State gives them a stone; it has, with the best intentions in the world, no better to give them. These considerations have compelled most of the European States, as well as our neighbors—the Canadians—to abandon the godless system, and establish separate schools, when asked to do so by the members of any denomination.[G]

There is no exception to this rule, except here! With all our boasted progress, we are behind all civilized nations in this important particular.

Now by adopting this fair method, the poor orphans and ragged children, who have the first and best claim of all, would be educated. As it is, it is a notorious fact, that as far as Public Schools are concerned, they are left out in the cold. This fact is capable of being demonstrated to any lady or gentleman who will visit the Catholic orphanages and poor schools of any city. If any one doubts this, and does me the honor of putting himself at my disposal, I will show him or her thousands of such poor ragged little ones in one evening. Now is it not drawing largely upon public credulity, as well as on the public purse, to ask for thousands for high schools, and normal schools, etc., to educate the children, in great part, of the rich, or, at best, comparatively well to do, and turn their backs on the poor fatherless orphans and the ragged children of the poor widow or laboring man? Will anybody who has his eyesight doubt or deny this? If so, he can be convinced, any day of the week, by looking at the class and style of boys and girls who go to the upper Public Schools, and observing the boys and girls (several hundreds in number) who go to the poor schools of the Sisters of Mercy, or, in fact, to any other charity convent school.

The Bible, or religious education in schools, will ever come up to vex and torment the public, especially the Catholic portion of the community, until the right of separate schools is granted. It is especially the Catholics that do and must insist upon having separate schools, for it is the Catholics that have always done all in their power to establish and maintain the republican form of government, and it is through the influence of Catholicity alone that our Republic can be maintained, and increased in power and glory.

A body which has lost the principle of its animation becomes dust. Hence it is an axiom that the change or perversion of the principles by which anything was produced, is the destruction of that very thing; if you can change or pervert the principles from which anything springs, you destroy it. For instance, one single foreign element introduced into the blood produces death; one false assumption admitted into science, destroys its certainty; one false principle admitted into morals, is fatal. Now our American nation is departing from the principles which created their civilization, and upon which their grand Republic is based. Their civilization is becoming every day more and more material, and this material civilization, while more and more material, is becoming less moral; society is becoming less solid, less safe, less stable; individuals are becoming more anarchical, the intellect more licentious, the wills of men more stubborn, and this self-will expresses itself in their actions, so that it is true to say that, by means of godless education, the principles of Christianity upon which the American Republic was founded, and by which it has hitherto been preserved, have been rejected, and are being violated on every side. Our Republic, therefore is no more progressing, but is going back.

About fifteen years ago a number of leading politicians and statesmen of America, of highest name and note, met together to consider the condition of the United States. It was before the war, when there were already many causes of anxiety. It was said that there was a universal and growing license of the individual will, and that law and government were powerless to restrain it; that if the will of the multitude became licentious, it would seriously threaten the public welfare and liberty of the country. The conclusion they came to was, that, unless there could be found some power which could restrain the individual will, this danger would at last seriously menace the United States.

Now it is easy to say what that power is. It is the power which created the Christian society—it is the power which drew the world out of the darkness of heathenism, abolished slavery, restored woman to her true dignity—it is the power which established and maintained republican governments, and that power is the power of Catholicity. Whensoever this power is weakened or lost, immediately all political society decays. There will be a bright future for America if this power will be maintained and preserved.

The Catholic Church is the grandest Republic that was ever established. But it is a Republic of a supernatural order. It has for its Founder Jesus Christ, the Son of God Himself. He chose St. Peter for its first President. This grand Republic is divided, as it were, into as many States as there are dioceses; each diocese has a Bishop—a true successor of the Apostles—for Governor, and each Bishop has priests to assist him in the spiritual government of the diocese. The Constitution of this Republic was made by Jesus Christ. It cannot be changed or altered at all, either by the President, or by the votes of its citizens. St. Peter and the other Apostles, and their lawful successors, were bound in conscience, by Jesus Christ, to keep His Constitution—His doctrine—and teach others to keep it, under pain of forfeiture of eternal life. The President and the Governors of this Republic—the Pope and the Catholic Bishops—are not at liberty to govern its citizens, the Catholics, as they please; they have to govern them according to the Constitution—the Doctrine of Jesus Christ. Now Almighty God governs men in accordance with the nature with which He has created them, as beings endowed with reason and free-will. God adapts His government to our rational and voluntary faculties, and governs us without violence to either, and by really satisfying both. The rulers of the Catholic Church have to do the same; they must govern men as freemen. Hence the Catholic Church leaves to every people its own nationality, and to every State its own independence; she ameliorates the political and social order, only by infusing into the hearts of the people and their rulers the principles of justice and love, and a sense of accountability to God. The action of the Church in political and social matters is indirect, not direct, and in strict accordance with the free-will of individuals and the autonomy of states. Servile fear does not rank very high among Catholic theologians. The Church, when she can, resorts to coercive measures only to repress disorders in the public body. Hence her rulers are called shepherds, not lords, and shepherds of their Master's flock, not of their own, and are to feed, tend, protect the flock, and take care of its increase for Him, with sole reference to His will, and His honor and glory. The Catholic Church proffers to all every assistance necessary for the attainment of the most heroic sanctity, but she forces no man to accept that assistance. Catholics believe the doctrines of the Church, because they believe the Catholic Church the Church of God—they believe that Jesus Christ commissioned St. Peter and the Apostles, and their lawful successors, to teach all men in His name—to teach them infallibly and authoritatively His divine doctrine—they believe that this Church is the medium through which God manifests His will and dispenses His grace to man, and through which alone we can hope for heaven; they believe that nothing can be more reasonable than to believe God at His word, and that, above all, they must seek the kingdom of God and secure their eternal salvation.