of the confidence of the whole Christian community, and thus effect their ruin? We shall see. 6. But it is said, we shall thus offend and wrong the atheistic, infidel, and sceptical part of the people who are unwilling that any religious, if not even moral dogmas, shall be taught in our public schools, and that they will thus be led to join the crusade of Papists against the common schools. The answer is: 1. We must take a stand somewhere, unless we turn these schools into herds of human animals, without heart or soul, conscience or morality. Are we to have, to recognize, to presume upon no moral standards in our dealings with, in the mutual relations of, the hundreds of children often gathered in our public schools, that are contrary to the creed of Confucius, of Brigham Young, of polygamists, adulterers, idolaters, libertines, and blasphemers? The thing is simply as impossible as monstrous. We cannot live together, or permit our children to live and be educated together, on such a basis. We cannot de-humanize; therefore we cannot demoralize; therefore we cannot de-religionize; therefore we cannot de-christianize them. Not to give us any religion, or morality radicated in religious sanctions, is to give us immorality and irreligion. Here neutrality is impossible. So, these schools must observe the Christian, and not the Jewish Sabbath. We must have some standards. The attempt to please Mormons, Chinese, Jews, idolaters, atheists, and infidels, is out of the question. It would, and ought to destroy the schools. Christians could have nothing to do with them. And this in effect settles the question of the expediency of abstracting all religious exercises, or reading of the Scriptures, from the public schools for the purpose of conciliating the sceptical part of people, and detaching them from the Romanists to re-enforce us in this contest. Our impression is, that the irreligious element is small who will join the Romanists in destroying our common schools, when once the object of the latter is understood to be their destruction. However this may be, it is unquestionable, that the project to de-religionize and de-christianize our common schools would alienate ten of our Christian people from their support, where it would gain to it one of the contrary sort. Not only so, but it would arm. the Papists with weapons of tenfold power, to compass their destruction, and deprive them of the support of multitudes of Christian people. The following, quoted in the Christian World from the Western Watchman of St. Louis, a Romish paper, shows sufficiently to what purpose the Romanists will turn any exclusion of the Bible from public schools in accommodation to their consciences : * "The much vexed question of Bible-reading in the public schools of Cincinnati is at length settled. * The resolution of the Board is sweeping; and not only is the Bible excluded, but all hymns, prayers, and whatever else savors of religion. Books, too, in which Christianity is taught, must be replaced, or expurgated, and no vestige of religious truth can be allowed to disgrace the hallowed precincts of the school-room. Protestants are found for the first time in the history of our State school system, who teach that no religion, not even that weak dilution of it, which we call Puritanism, is compatible with the well being of their much extolled institution. Our school instruction must be purely materialistic. If the name of the Author of Christianity is mentioned at all, he must be spoken of as one of the men who figured prominently in history, as we would speak of Mohammed, Julius Cæsar, or Napoleon. Under no circumstances may we hint to the child that the great preacher and teacher was God. We may not even tell him that he has a soul, or that there is any code of morality outside the statutes of the city, and the records of the police courts. There must be nothing in the character or surroundings of our schools which might offend a Jew, a Mohammedan, a disciple of Confucius, or a common infidel. Our State has no religion, and our schools can have none." The writer in the Christian World justly adds: "This logical and practical issue of the proposed withdrawal of the Bible we commend to consenting Protestants, as coming from the very men on account of whose consciences it is proposed. Coming from such a source, and in such a connection, surely the mere ideal conception of so fearful a result in the establishment of a godless State, must have a weighty argumentative force to every honest, thoughtful Christian mind." 7. The plea that the reading of the Bible in public schools is a perfunctory exercise, and that all moral and religious teaching in them must be feeble, does not answer its purpose. Prayers in colleges, high schools, the army and the navy, in Congress and in legislatures,-nay, we might even add, sometimes in our Sabbath assemblies, are not always attended with becoming reverence. They are quite too much attended in a perfunctory manner. This is to be deplored. But then, do they not constantly and publicly recognize the right, the true, the good, the divine, the infinite and eternal, and in most cases, the Incarnation, Redemption, Salvation, Eternal Judgment? However heedlessly attended, do they not exercise a constant educating, moral, and religious power, which would be lost in their absence? So, in regard to the reading of the Bible and offering the Lord's Prayer in public schools. These exercises may be attended in a more perfunctory manner than is for edification. And yet the child that knows the first verse of the Bible, knows more than all heathen philosophers. And what is impressed upon the most careless mind by the story of the birth, life, miracles, parables, humiliation, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord, is a "truth-power" in the soul infinitely greater than the highest classic or scientific culture without it. Moreover, the continuance or exclusion of the Bible and all religion in the public schools, not merely involves the more or less actual religious teaching; it has a symbolic significance. It is a proclamation to the world of the place which the Bible and Christianity have in the public mind. To withdraw them is to lower the flag of Christianity in the face of our children, and of all mankind. It declares, so far forth, the decline of its ascendency over the public mind. This is just what its foes, infidel and Papal, want, and strive for. It is what the Protestant religious mind of our country will resist. We do not insist on any particular method of recognizing and asserting morality and Christianity in our public schools. It may vary according to circumstances. It may, where communities are sufficiently united, be more minute; in others where greater divisions exist, less so. In no case is the state to compel the attendance of any child upon religious exercises against the conscientious preference of the parent properly expressed. If parents express the wish, their children may read the Bible in the Douay version, or they may be allowed to keep their children away from the opening religious exercises; or some hour in the week may be specially set apart for the purpose, when parents may or may not send their children, or may commit them to their own chosen religious teachers if convenient, as they may judge right. But what we insist on first and last is, that the Bible, the Lord's Prayer, the recognition and assertion of fundamental moral and religious truth shall not be prohibited in our public schools on any pretext whatsoever. It is unnecessary to become sponsors for the following extract from a recent defence of Christian education and the Bible in common schools, by the Rev. Dr. Bellows. But when Unitarian preachers write in this way, we think that all concerned may see evidence of the deep earnestness of the Protestant mind of the country, which is sure to be roused, but cannot be trifled with, in this great agitation. We quote it as a sign of the times, not because we adopt all its expressions: "We cannot concede the equal rights of Catholics with Protestants to regulate our educational system any more than we could allow monarchists to become senators and representatives. They must swear allegiance to the unmonarchal principle of the Constitution to be eligible to office. But the Catholics are denying and seeking to overthrow the political supremacy of the Protestant ideas originally imbedded in our public law. They are contending against the original recognition of the Bible-on which every President and every high officer swears his official oath of allegiance to the Constitution-to be a national book, and at the bottom of our system. And it is a weak and illogical hesitation to refuse to hold the true historic ground and to maintain the original supremacy of the Protestant idea, which is now weakening and imperilling the national fidelity to its public school system, and the national claim that the Bible is the fundamental stone in the temple of American liberty. "If the Roman Catholics are not content with perfect toleration; if they look for the countenance and support of the American people as having an equal claim with the Protestant founders of our institutions to regulate its fundamental methods of public education, they are reckoning without their host, and will surely come to grief. They are arousing an opposition, such as American slavery in another form, aroused only after thirty years of smouldering indignation and wrath, but which finally broke out into overwhelming ruin for its insidious and fatal system. We warn our Roman Catholic fellow-citizens of what is in store for them if they continue to press their claim to break up our national system of public schools. They will sooner or later bring on a civil war, in which they and their churches will be swept, as by a whirlwind, from the land. All the liberty they can rightfully ask, they enjoy. But they ask, in another form, the liberty which Utah claims-she wishes to enjoy polygamy, and to have the right to teach it under the American flag. We deny the right; and shall extinguish it in her ruins, if she raises a finger to maintain it.” ART. IX.-NOTICES OF RECENT PUBLICATIONS. Manual of Historico-Critical Introduction to the Canonical Scriptures of the Old Testament. By Karl Friedrich Keil. Translated from the Second Edition, with supplementary notes from Bleek and others, by George C. M. Douglass, B. A., D.D., Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis in the Free Church College, Glasgow. 1869. Vol. I., 8vo, pp. 529. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. New York: Scribner & Co. An Introduction to the Old Testament of the proper character has been greatly needed both for private use and as a manual for theological instruction. And it is surprising that the lack has been so long left unsupplied. Horne, which for a generation maintained its place as the standard, and in fact the only book in English of any value upon this subject, does not represent the present advanced state of biblical learning. The reader will turn in vain to its pages for a solution of critical inquiries with which the theological world has been ringing, or for a statement and refutation of those arguments by which the veracity and authenticity of certain parts of Scripture have been so ingeniously and pertinaciously assailed, or for an exhibition of those impregnable defences which learning and piety have constructed from the materials furnished by the most recent researches. The writings of Davidson, with his importations of foreign neology, enlarged in each successive publication, are still less satisfactory. In this dearth of native works of the right sort, Messrs. T. & T. Clark have laid the theological public under great obligations by the translation and publication of Keil's Introduction to the Old Testament, which of all those that have appeared in Germany is best suited to the wants of English readers. With no affectation of novelty and little pretension to originality, it presents, for the most part clearly and in brief compass, the principal facts and opinions which bear upon the criticism and literary history of the Old Testament as a whole, or any of its parts. Keil is a sturdy defender of old and well-established views, though candid in stating and honest in refuting opposing arguments. This treatise moreover has the advantage of being done into English by an orthodox Scotch professor, who takes occasion to correct any unguarded expressions which might be to the prejudice of sound opinions (as on p. 435), or to enter his caveat in any case of departure from received views, as where Keil, following the lead of Hengstenberg, gives up the Solomonic authorship of Ecclesiastes, and assigns it to the period following the exile. The second volume, which completes the work, is promised shortly, and is perhaps already through the press. An Introduction to the New Testament. By Friedrich Bleek. Edited by 1869. New York: |
