NOT EDUCATION SO MUCH AS RELIGION.
President Eliot, of Harvard University, frankly proclaims that popular education is a failure. (We quote from the Literary Digest.) He mentions in a recent address before the Connecticut State Teachers' Association various evidences of this as follows:— 1. Drunkenness, which no method as yet has been able to deal with successfully; and where prohibitory legislation has been enacted, the people have not been intelligent enough to make it effective. 2. Increase of gambling, “an extraordinary unintelligent form of pleasurable excitement,” “a prevalent vice among all savage people.” 3. Negative or worse results from universal suffrage. 4. “Gravest crimes of violence,” “committed in great numbers all over the United States, in the older States as well as in the new, by individuals and by mobs, and with large measure of impunity. The population produces a considerable number of burglars, robbers, rioters, lynchers, and murderers, and is not intelligent enough either to suppress or to exterminate these criminals.” 5. “The nature of the daily reading supplied to the American public affords much ground for discouragement.” “Since one invaluable result of education is a taste for good reading, the purchase by the people of thousands of tons of ephemeral reading matter which is not good in either form or substance, shows that one great end of popular education has not been attained.” 6. The popular theaters of to-day. “The popular taste is for trivial spectacles, burlesque, vulgar vaudeville, extravaganza, and melodrama, and the stage often presents to unmoved audiences scenes and situations of an unwholesome sort.” 7. Medical delusions. “Americans . . . are the greatest consumers of patent medicines in the known world, and the most credulous patrons of all sorts of ‘medicine men’ and women, and of novel healing arts.” 8. “That labor strikes should occur more and more frequently and be more and more widespread has been another serious disappointment in regard to the outcome of popular education. As we have all seen lately, the strike is often resorted to for reasons not made public, or, at least, not made public until after the strike has taken place.” The Columbia State says: “It will at least be difficult to point to any fatal exaggeration in this arraignment.” And with this every candid, moral observer will agree. The Chicago Chronicle remarks: “The defects of our people lie in morals rather than in intelligence.” So also thinks the Columbia State. President Eliot would perhaps agree with this. There is no religion in mere intellectual education. There is, however, intellectual education in the Christian religion, which, sad to say, has been relegated to an hour or so a week to Sunday-schools; and these in the majority of cases are conducted in a half-hearted and indifferent manner. The only thing which could help matters can not come through mere intellectuality, but by a revival in religion which would bring back the sense of responsibility to parents and churches, which would bring religion, devotion, example, into the home and church life, a going back to the Word of God. But will the church do this? Will Christians, as individuals, do it? Will the things which bring defeat be forsaken, and will the church build on the Word of the living God—not through State-paid teachers; but through parents in the home, and through the church at all times? Only in this is there hope. The church has gone too far in apostasy to hope for much from her; but will you do your part, parent and Christian friend, in your own circle? The only true education has its basis in the Bible.