Christian Education in America
By R.
BISHOP JAMES A. McFAUL (Catholic) of Trenton says that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are “undermining faith and teaching immorality.” He further has this to say: “I would forbid young Catholics to go to institutions such as I believe these to be, where they will get no moral training; where they will associate with skeptics and agnostics and where, in the faculties, there is a strong inclination to find faults in and attack Christianity.” And Cardinal Gibbons has something to say along the same line. He says: “There is no doubt that there is a growing tendency to omit Christian training, both moral and theological, from American institutions of learning of all grades. This is to be deplored. I believe that a religious training is necessary to the proper development of the country’s youth. A well-rounded education is the greatest thing to be sought after, and an education which omits religion and religious training is not well rounded or complete.” This is all perfectly true. There is in modern education a strong current setting away from not only religious principles and living, but also from morality itself. But when these two prominent Catholics as here speak of “moral training,” “Christian training,” and “religious training,” it is well known that they mean that which is moral, religious, or Christian from the Catholic standpoint. Religious training that is of the purest type from the Protestant view would be as deeply antagonistic to these men’s view as is the agnostic, or nearly so. Religious training is as much more necessary to the equipment of life as the soul is finer and more valuable than the body or mind alone. An all-around education will fit body, mind, and spirit; and all three will be brought into conformity, not with the traditions of men, even tho hoary with age, but with the word of God. The moral impulse is the strongest impulse in the universe and he who lacks it has lost what is of greater value than worlds. And the religious impulse can be the highest only when begotten by the Spirit of God, which always acts in strict conformity to the behests of that blessed Book we call the Bible.