RELIGION IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
By G.
WITH reference to this much-discussed subject, Bishop Satterlee, of the Episcopal Church, Washington, D. C., declares that it can not be kept down. "If we look at the history of England, France, Germany, and other European nations, and also America, we find it constantly coming up." He insists that "the Ten Commandments ought to be taught in the public schools," and says that "only the small minority of the American people will object to this teaching; for Hebrews, Gentiles, Protestants, and Romans all receive the Ten Commandments as the revealed law of God, without a shade of difference in belief among them." Now we submit that any teacher, who should undertake to teach the Ten Commandments as construed by all these varying classes, would find several shades of difference, and that some of the differences amount to positive contradictions. Another incongruous statement is, that "if the Ten Commandments are not taught in the schools, every child will grow up with the inevitable impression that on this account they must be less important than reading, writing, and arithmetic." This is incongruous because it implies that all these classes of religiousists are ignoring the teaching of these commandments in their churches and in their families. When the family and the church entail their especial function of religious teaching upon the state, the state must have a recognized state religion, or undertake to teach all the conflicting religions that recognize the Ten Commandments in any form. In either event, it will be the state doing the work of the family and the church. Now, we would not detract an iota from the importance of the teaching of the Ten Commandments—it is all-important; and the pity is that leading churchmen are so willing to have the families and the churches shift the responsibility of it on the political state, of whose corruption there is such general complaint. It is also clear that any people who are so careless of the Ten Commandments as to throw off onto the state their family and church duty to inculcate them, never will set the children a very marked example of commandment-keeping. And without this example, a perfunctory teaching of them by public school professors would have very little effect. Furthermore, when the churches and professed Christian families get this all-important duty5transferred to the state, it will be easy and logical to transfer other religious responsibilities to the care of the same authority. And, as the state becomes laden with the religious function, it will be just as logical for the church to demand a controlling interest in state affairs, a demand that is already being made through the National Reform Association and the Bureau of Reforms at Washington, besides the demands by the Roman Catholics for support for their denominational schools among the Indians. Yet Bishop Satterlee, and many others, maintain that "separation between church and state in this country is, and must be, irrevocable." He also declares that "the sense of justice is too strong in the American people ever to allow sectarian teaching to follow this concession, whereby the Jew would be made to feel he was being tyrannized over by the Christian." It is already a fact, however, that in the states where the Fourth Commandment, according to the bishop’s construction, is upheld by the law, the Jew is made to feel that he is "being tyrannized over by the [professed] Christian." The appeal that "we should trust each other in a matter of this kind, regarding beliefs we all hold in common," has already been tested and found wanting. Men who want to have the government committed to their kind of religion, are not to be trusted very far by those who hold different views. More tyranny has grown out of the teaching of popular constructions of the Ten Commandments than out of any other source. The Author of the Ten Commandments has laid more emphasis on the importance of teaching them than any man can do, yet He never has delegated that duty to the state, even under the theocracy of which He Himself was the head. Here is His direction in the matter: "Thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates." Deut. 6: 7-9; also, 11: 18-20. Thus the Lord’s rule for teaching His law is for His recognized religious teachers to teach it to the people from His Word—not from men’s constructions; for parents to teach it to their children diligently; and for all His people to teach it, by precept and example, to the heathen. The Ten Commandments will not harm any public school; they will not harm anybody’s children, if taught as they are in the Word of God. But no state ever has done this, and no state ever will do it, in this world; for the reason that the people always have perverted the fourth commandment, and more or less of the others, before they began to ask the state to assume the duty of the family and of the church in the matter of teaching and enforcing religion. Then the state was asked to teach the perversions of a backslidden church, and not the pure Word of God. But no state, whose people have gone over to the traditions of men, can teach the Word of God in its purity; and no state, whose people have not so departed from God’s Word, ever will be asked to assume the teaching of religion at all. G.