The Issue of the Near Future.
By J. O. Colliss
The Rev. L. L. Rogers, Vice President of the Methodist Educational Society, said in a recent speech:— “It is my candid opinion that our common schools must eventually be Bibleless and prayerless. So long as all do not believe in Christ and the Scriptures, I do not see how we can stand by our principles as Americans, and yet force people to hear the Bible read as the word of God. In the interests of Christianity, I advise that Bible reading and prayer be discontinued in the public schools where persistent objection is made to them by lawful patrons.” The above language called forth the following remarks from a writer in the San Francisco Weekly Post, in which he speaks the sentiment of many leading minds of to-day, and shows the position they may be expected to maintain in the coming conflict:— “To analyze the opinion of the reverend gentleman, and weigh it by the old, the heroic, standard of American faith, we become more convinced than ever that Gladstone was correct when he lately announced that ‘the marked want of the church to-day is the want of great men as leaders’—men, we will add, who have a supreme faith in God, in his word, and in his providences—men who have the nerve to ‘stand by principle,’ though ‘all do not believe in Christ and the Scriptures’—men who, discerning the indissoluble relations between the Bible and free government, are ready to labor at any cost to interweave its ethics and its republican sentiments into the early education of the citizen. “Our institutions to-day are mainly resting upon the moral credit of our republican ancestry—the credit of a period when the Bible was the text book of ethics in the public school, the sole volume of inspiration at the hearth-stone; when an American Congress did not deem it beneath its dignity to have the Scriptures printed and circulated as a moral and political necessity among the people. Ordained expositors of the divinity, the sublime philosophy, and the prepotent influence of the Bible, may practically ignore their professed faith in their recommendations to exclude the Sacred Writings from our schools as a reading book; but they may as well arouse themselves first as last to the overshadowing fact that a crisis is approaching on this very question, in which they must either advance and take a more consistent stand, or retreat and make a more consistent profession. “The prophecy of a ‘coming revolution,’ uttered by the eloquent Rabbi at the Mason street synagogue on Saturday last, is no less inspired than were the words of the old Hebrew seers. He who cannot hear the tread of ‘coming revolution’ is deaf to the footsteps of the future. The foundations of free government with us are not yet securely laid, and will not be until out of the fires of another revolution—moral at least—there springs up a purer national faith—a faith that draws its inspiration from the Bible. The re-establishing of the early custom of reading and chanting portions of the Scriptures in the public schools, and the complete rescue of our system of municipal instruction from anti-republican influences, is the dominant question of the near future, destined to force to the front, unmasked, every element of our national life, and lead to a decisive and permanent solution of the American idea of government and of its auxiliaries. The Bible in the schools is a question we cannot evade if we would. It embodies a principle too vital for us to entirely ignore, and as a result it is gradually but irresistibly crowding upon us as if by divine necessity.” “We, however, rest in the faith that every great emergency, involving sacred public interests calls up at the right hour its hero to inspire and to lead. So, in the coming conflict of Bible or no Bible in the public schools, of national loyalty to the revealed law of God, or national apostasy, we are sure that in the fullness of time, regardless of ecclesiastical opinion or decree, the hero will come who shall be instrumental in leading the Republic to a higher and a grander plane.” Thus we hear the distant muttering of the elements, presaging the storm which is destined soon to break upon the inhabitants of this country with overwhelming force; at least to those who do not watch the gathering cloud. But the careful student of prophecy looks steadily forward with an eye of faith, calmly awaiting the issue which he knows is but one more of the numerous waymarks given as precursors of the coming reign.