CHAPTER VI.

WHAT RELIGION HAS TO DO WITH EDUCATION.

THE word education comes from the Latin verb educare, meaning to nourish or bring up. By common agreement it is not applied to vegetables or animals, but only to persons. Nor is it to be confounded with mere training. We have a perfect right to talk about a well-trained horse or dog or pigeon, but no one of them is or can be educated in the proper sense of that term. Equally unfitting is it to speak of an educated savage, although by dint of physical prowess and intellectual cunning he may easily gain the mastery over all the other savages with whom he comes in contact.

Education is possible only when a being has developed far enough to possess a more or less conscious ideal of what the improvement of his life requires, only when his imagination can picture more or less vaguely a higher plane of existence than the one he now occupies. As Prof. S. S. Laurie rightly says in his excellent Historical Survey of Pre-Christian Education (p. 3), "It is only when the ideas of bodily vigor, of bravery, of strength, of bodily beauty, or personal morality become desirable for themselves, or as the necessary conditions of political life and national conservation, that education begins."

Some sort of an ordered civilization must therefore precede education; and since different degrees of civilization exist in different communities, a great variety

of conceptions of education have arisen in the course of history and still prevail over the earth. We can hardly do better for our purpose than to take it for granted that no person can be considered as well educated who has not consciously developed the capacity to put himself in harmony with his environment and to modify or change that environment. The former places him in line with the course of history, and the latter opens up the way to future progress. The environment of any man is made up of two things, his physical surroundings and the sum-total of knowledge and custom that we call the civilization of his age. It is chiefly with the latter that education has to do.

Now it is admitted by all authorities that the beginnings of civilization were originated by religion. “Religion," says Professor Jastrow in his Study of Religion (p. 310), ". . . is the stimulus which produces the earliest definite manifestations of culture. It gives birth to the arts and sciences, and not only encourages all manner of intellectual pursuits, but presides over them.'

Medicine, although the most materialistic of all the professions, had its origin with the priests. To them the people came for relief from their ills, because they were supposed to know far better than others of their number how to control the evil spirits, who were universally regarded in early times as the cause of all bodily troubles.

It is also true that the sanctuary was the oldest tribunal of law. When a dispute arose, it was the priest who undertook to determine what was the will of the local deity in regard to it, and his decision was taken as the ultimate authority in the case.

Astronomy came into being because of the belief

current in that age that the planets and stars were associated with the actions of certain deities. It was therefore considered of great importance carefully to watch their movements, in order to ascertain what of good or ill the gods had in store for mortals.

Long before the thought arose of making one's dwelling anything more than a shelter from the inclemencies of the weather, architecture had reached a high degree of development. For temples had to be erected for the abodes of the gods. Then came painting and sculpture to adorn and beautify these abodes. Music was developed in order to entertain the deities, and odes and hymns were composed to sound forth their praises. Philosophy arose out of theology, and at the outset included all the natural sciences known in that day. In short, everything that pertained to the civilization of the time had religion for its source.

It is no accident, therefore, that in the earliest ages the entire matter of education and culture was in the charge of priests. In Egypt, they constituted the highest order in the state, and along with the monarch governed the country. All the learning of the Egyptians was in their hands. They instructed the members of the royal family, and, it is to be presumed, the children of court dignitaries. Great colleges for the education of priests were situated in the principal cities, such as Memphis, Thebes, and Heliopolis, and in them the highest learning of the land was to be found.

Among the Chaldæo-Babylonians, the priests not only conserved and developed the religious system which they had inherited from the Accadians, but they also handed down the traditions of the race and embodied in an oral and written literature its highest poetical conceptions and its philosophy of life.

The Assyrians rivalled the Babylonians in the magnificence of their temples and palaces and the art with which they were adorned. Technical and military skill was undoubtedly developed among them to a high degree of excellence and was widely diffused. But education of the highest kind, as with the Babylonians, was in the keeping of the priests. Whatever education the youth of the land received was due to them.

By far the most famous of the Semitic races were the Hebrews. Moses was the central figure in their history and he was one of the greatest schoolmasters of all time. He claimed to be the mouthpiece of Jahveh and his one aim was to make him the centre of the spiritual and political life of the people. Civil law and social practice were derived from the law of God. As another remarks: "The banal distinction between sacred and secular, from which modern Europe suffers, did not exist." It was this close connection between religion, morality, and civil polity that gave the Jewish priesthood an influence unequalled in any other land.

With the Israelites, all education was religious both in its highest and lowest forms. The fear of the Lord was not only the beginning, but the end of all wisdom. All the literature of the country centred around Jahveh. Priests and prophets and scribes devoted their energies to the preservation and application of his commands and the psalmists gave their strength to sounding forth his praises.

The Jewish conception of the relation of religion to education is well summed up in the injunction: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine

heart and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up" (Deut. vi. 5-7). This requirement made some degree of education imperative and has enormously affected not only the history of the Jewish people, but of the world.

Learning among the Hindus was almost exclusively in the hands of the Brahmans. Under certain conditions they explained portions of it to the two next lower castes. For they alone were considered capable in any degree of comprehending its meaning. Manu's Book of Laws thus expresses the end of all education: "To learn and to understand the Vedas, to practise pious mortifications, to acquire divine knowledge of the law and of philosophy, to treat with veneration his natural and spiritual father, these are the chief duties by means of which endless felicity is attained." In the same Book of Laws, we also read: "A female child, a young girl, a wife, shall never do anything according to their own will, not even in their own house. While a child she shall depend upon her father; during her youth on her husband; and, when a widow, on her sons" (v., 147). The religion of the country made it almost the sole mission of women to bear children and serve their husbands. Hence women, among the Hindus, were excluded from all education, except in the case of dancing girls who were taught to read and write and sing in order to serve in the temples as "maidens of the god."

The Magi among the Persians possessed all the science and philosophy of the nation; but as the religion they represented was a religion of light and truth,

as