Untitled article | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · January 15, 1891

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 6, No. 3

Must End in Failure.

ARCHBISHOP IRELAND, of St Paul, in his address before the National Educational Association, favored the theory of compulsory education, and also insisted that the public money should be used for the support of the parish schools of religious denominations. His solution of the school problem is to “permeate the regular State school with the religion of a majority of the children of the land,” and also to “pay for the secular instruction given in denominational schools according to results” attained. This we regard as a very defective and wholly impracticable theory. The truth is, that there is no religion of the majority, in distinction from that of the minority, in this country, with which the State has any thing to do. The State, as such, has nothing to do with the religious beliefs of the people one way or the other, beyond affording them a just

and equal protection in the exercise of their religious rights, no matter what may be their religion, and no matter whether it be true or false. What the State should do in regard to popular education is to provide; at the public expense, adequate facilities for the secular instruction of the children of the land, and leave all persons who wish to make provision for their religious education to do so in their own way and to pay the bills thereof. Our political system admits of no other solution of the school question so far as the State is concerned; and when Catholics and Protestants come to this reasonable conclusion, and content themselves with it, they will see things as they are, and have no school question to settle as between themselves. All efforts to make the State a party to their religious preferences are simply efforts to get the State out of its proper sphere, and must at last, and should, end in failure.—Independent.