Religion and the Public Schools.
Because of its great importance both as a State and National question, I beg permission of the committee to be allowed to present as a part of my argument, a portion of the argument of the Hon. Stanley Matthews, now Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, upon this very question, in the case of Minor et al. vs. Cincinnati School Board et al. I ask further to present this because it would be impossible for me to make an argument as good, and I seriously doubt whether anybody can ever make a better. After referring to the resolution of the Cincinnati School Board which forbade the reading of the Bible at the opening exercises of the city schools, Mr. Matthews said:— “I do say that the reading of the Holy Bible in the manner repeated by this resolution is the teaching of a dogma in religion, held by only a portion of the religious community, objected to by a large part of the others, and that it is in a just, true and sober sense,—as to all who either reject it, in whole or in part, as a divinely inspired and infallible book, and as to all others, who admitting that to be its character, nevertheless deny that it can properly be understood without the interpreting aid of external authority, as to unbelievers, Jews, and Roman Catholics,—a merely sectarian book. Now, if your honors please, the community is divided, you may say, in a general way, as a matter of fact, of which your honors can take judicial notice, and to which your honors’ notice is addressed specially by the answer in this case, into at least three main divisions of religious belief, throwing out of view all those who have merely a negative position, sometimes called nullifidians—believers in nothing, if you choose, except what they see, and hear, and feel. But I propose to confine myself now only to that division of the community as to their positive religious belief; and I will include under one name all Protestant Christians, including every variety of faith, every sect and denomination, from those who take a merely humanitarian view of the person and the work of our divine Saviour up to those who believe that he was the incarnate God, and embracing every possible shade and variation of religious belief. “Here are all these varieties of belief. The gentlemen say, What is conscience? It may be a very small matter in their estimation, applied to other people a very small matter, not to be taken notice of; and one gentleman quotes the legal maxim ‘De minimis non curat lex,’ in reference to the supposed conscience of an infidel. “But this will not do. We may call the eccentricities of conscience vagaries, if we please; but in matters of religious concern we have no right to disregard or despise them, no matter how trivial and absurd we may conceive them to be. In the days of the early Christian martyrs, the Roman lictors and soldiers despised and ridiculed the fanaticism that refused the trifling conformity of a pinch of incense upon the altar erected to the Cæsar that arrogated to himself the title and honor of ‘Divine,’ or of a heathen statue. History is filled with the record of bloody sacrifices which holy men who feared God rather than men have not withheld, on account of what seemed to cruel persecutors but trifling observances and concessions. “Conscience, if your honors please, is a tender thing, and tenderly to be regarded; and in the same proportion in which a man treasures his own moral integrity, sets up the light of conscience within him as the glory of God shining in him to discover to him the truth, so ought he to regard the conscience of every other man, and apply the cardinal maxim of Christian life and practice, ‘Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.’ “Now, here is the Christian community. Then there are a large number of the citizens of this community who are not Christians at all, and yet are devout religionists. They are the descendants of the men who crucified Christ; and yet, as old Sir Thomas Browne says, we ought not to bear malice against them for that, for how often since have we, who profess his name, crucified him, too! “Quousque patiere, bone Jesu!
Judæi te semel, ego sæpius crucifixi;
Illi in Asia, ego in Britannica,
Gallia, Germania;
Bone Jesu, miserere mei, et Judæorum. “But here they are in this community, devout worshipers of the only living and true God, according to their conscientious convictions; and I will say, if your honors please, in all respects capable of performing every duty of the civil State, and equally entitled to, not toleration—I hate that word, there is no such thing known in this country as toleration—but civil and religious equality, equality because it is right, and a right. Then there is another sect of religionists. . . . They are the Roman Catholics. I know the Protestant prejudices against the Roman Catholic hierarchy and the Roman Catholic system of faith, and the Roman Catholic Church. I know, too, from a reading of that history, a part of which has been reproduced in argument upon this occasion, that the Roman Catholic Church has too well deserved that bitter memory at the hands of those whom it persecuted. But it is not to be denied that the victims of persecution, with singular inconsistency, have not always omitted the opportunity, when power was in their hands, to inflict upon their oppressors the same measure of persecution, as if the wrong consisted not in the principle, but only in the person. “Now, if your honors please, I try to stand impartial and neutral in this argument between these three sets of men. I am bound to look upon them all as citizens, all as entitled to every right, to every privilege that I claim for myself; and further, if your honors please, I do in my heart entertain the charity of believing that they are just as honest and just as sincere in their religious convictions as I am. I will say further, that from the study which I have made, as time and opportunity have been given me, of the doctrinal basis of the Roman Catholic faith, I am bound to say that it is not an ignorant superstition, but a scheme of well-constructed logic, which he is a bold man who says he can easily answer. Give them one proposition, concede to them one single premise, and the whole of their faith follows most legitimately and logically, and that is the276fundamental doctrine, the doctrine of what the church is, what it was intended to be, by whom it was founded, by whom it has been perpetuated, being the casket which contains to-day, shining as brightly as before the ages, the ever-living, actually present body of God, teaching and training men for life here and life hereafter. “Now, if your honors please, that is the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church; that is the doctrine that is believed in by the Roman Catholic people; believed in sincerely, conscientiously, under their responsibilities, as they understand them, to answer to the bar of Almighty God, in the day of Judgment, according to the light which they have received, in their own reason and their own conscience; for you must bear in mind that the process by which a Roman Catholic attains his faith is the same by which your honors do. We seem to make a difference, in that respect, as if the Roman Catholic believed in his church in some other way, by some other organs than those which a Protestant uses when he comes to his convictions. Why, if your honors please, there is no compulsion about it; it is a voluntary matter; they believe it or not, as they choose; there is no external power which forces them to believe. They believe because they are taught; they believe because they are so educated; they believe because they have been trained up to it; just as we believe in the Protestant form of religion, because our fathers and our grandfathers and our grandfather’s fathers were Protestants. They think they have sufficient reason for their belief; it may be an insufficient reason, but that don’t make any difference to you and me; it is their reason, and that is enough. Now, they have—at any rate so far as the impersonal spirit of jurisprudence is concerned; so far as the presiding genius of the civil law is affected with jurisdiction; so far as, your honors, the embodiment of that artificial reason which consists in the collective wisdom of the State can take any notice—civil rights and religious rights, equal to yours and mine. Here are these three great divisions of men and of opinions and of religious faith and worship, all standing before you to-day upon a platform of absolute and perfect equality. “But it is asked by some, who by asking it betray their want of comprehension of the real question: Have Protestants no rights? Cannot the majority of the community insist upon their consciences? Must the rights of minorities alone be consulted? Are we to be ruled by Catholics, or Jews, or infidels? “The answer is obvious and easy. Protestants have no rights, as such, which do not at the same time and to the same extent belong to Catholics, as such, to Jews and infidels too. Protestants have a civil right to enjoy their own belief, to worship in their own way, to read the Bible and to teach it as a part of their religion, but they have no right in this respect to any preference from the State, or any of its institutions. They have no right to insist upon Protestant practices at the public expense, or in public buildings, or to turn public schools into seminaries for the dissemination of Protestant ideas. They can claim nothing on the score of conscience, which they cannot concede equally to all others. It is not a question of majorities or minorities, for if the conscience of the majority is to be the standard, then there is no such thing as right of conscience at all. It is against the predominance and power of majorities, that the rights of conscience are protected and have need to be. “If it be said that the Protestant conscience requires that the Bible be read by and to Protestant children, and it is a denial of a right of conscience to forbid it, waiving at present the obvious and conclusive answer that no such right of conscience can require that the State shall provide out of the common taxes for its gratification, it is enough to say, that Catholics then, too, have the same right to have their children taught religion according to their views; not out of the Douay Bible,—if they do not consider that sufficient, but by catechism and in the celebration of the mass, if they choose to insist; that Jews have the same right to have their religion taught in the common schools, not from the English version of the Old Testament, but according to the practice of their synagogues; and infidels have the same right to have their children taught deism, or pantheism, or positivism.