the imparting of knowledge, in the moulding of character, in the management of this children's world so that it shall open up to the world of a lofty American citizenship, the teacher must have this help. And all the questions involved in

the management of this difficult subject center in the character of the teacher. If he is base and vulgar, undeveloped in the nobler regions of manhood and womanhood, he is the most dangerous of public enemies, poisoning citizenship at the head-springs of the State. If he is a cold-blooded, skeptical pedant, he is a spiritual electrical eel, shocking every child into stupidity, or nursing a set of heartless citizens. If he is violent and brutal, sensual, crafty, or untrue, he is sowing the seeds of civil disorder, undermining womanly virtue, or sprouting "rings" to swindle the State. An incapable teacher makes the noblest system of instruction ridiculous. A competent teacher guards every good system from exaggeration and abuse. Give us a body of trained, reasonable, religious men and women in the school-houses, and there is no danger that the opportunities of moral and religious instruction will be abused; and any other kind of teacher is a public nuisance that should be abated without benefit of clergy.

The people of the United States understand what they mean when they require these, their public servants, to use the Bible as the text book of moral and religious instruction. They do not mean any one of a hundred absurd and unconstitutional things imagined by "secular" critics, born and educated abroad, and ignorant of the first principles of American life. They mean that the child in school shall receive religious and moral instruction, in the practical way that shall make him a good citizen of this republic. His theology, his ecclesiasticism, his future life in heaven they leave to the family and church, under the providence of God. The Bible should be placed in every public school-room as the text book of American morality. Every American teacher, of ordinary common sense, understands how to use it for that purpose. You can use any text book, or teach any science, in a way to outrage the rights of the child and the parent. If the Bible is used to ply the work of sectarian indoctrination, put out the teacher and let the Bible stay: guard the use of it, if necessary; tie up your teachers to the simplest duty of drawing from it the great lessons of universal religion and morality, set forth in the simplest and most sublime language heard on earth; but to teach morals in America without reference to the Bible, is like teaching the English language without the dictionary.

There are three classes of people that want to put the Bible out of the school. First, that class of the Christian priesthood and their followers which desires to teach sectarian religion to youth at public expense. Second, that class of people which does not believe in religion, and claims the right to bring up American children in practical heathenism. Third, a considerable class of religious and patriotic people who think the State is bound to respect the motives of these two classes. As either of these two ideas would destroy republican institutions, we are not bound to respect them. We are bound to educate the child into a true American citizenship, which involves a character founded on intelligence, morality and religion.

But why not divide this work, and leave the moral and religious part of the education of the citizen to the parent and priest? Because you can not hold the parent or the priest to any public responsibilty to educate the child into that practical form of religion and morality essential to good citizenship in a republican State. A lofty sense of public morality and religion is of far more importance than intelligence to the public good. This republic, this State, this city are threatened to-day, not so much from the ignorance of multitudes of people,

as from the brutal, sensual, selfish character of great masses, led by the most accomplished demagogues, swayed by men whose best gifts and acquirements are dedicated to Satan. Unless we can grow among the masses in this republic a type of public character intelligent, moral, religious-our years are numbered. All the experience of history shows that the family alone is incompetent to do this. An ignorant and selfish parent will sacrifice his children to the immediate benefit of his family, or give them to a priest to be enslaved in their souls.

The State, in its collective wisdom, must offer to its youth this training in public character, or the family itself will run down into barbarism. The priest and the church stand for a spiritual culture in man that fits him for the citizenship of eternity. Even if the church did its work in the highest way, it would fail to emphasize sufficiently this particular phase of public religion and morality. But in America the church is not a unit; it is outwardly a score of contending ecclesiastical corporations, each with its own theory of life, its peculiar priesthood, and its own polity. It can not be safely left to educate our youth for citizenship. Its priests can unite, as priests, to teach or do scarcely anything great or good. But its ministers and members can unite, as citizens, to elaborate a style of simple, practical, religious and moral training in school that shall secure the State against imperialism and anarchy. It is the glorious office of Christianity more and more to overflow our sectarian churches, and penetrate society with its blessed principles of justice, liberty and love. Until the church can harmonize her bitter feuds and become one in purpose and policy, let the sovereign American people, in the popular university, teach and apply those eternal facts of religious and moral life without which no nation can endure.

It is not strange that the infallible priesthood of America want to destroy the public school and seize the educational citadel of the republic, for thus alone can they hold the people in their sects, and pave the way for a future union of Church and State. It is not strange that the party of communism and secularism desires to sweep religion altogether from the school. It does not believe in God, or the spiritual nature of man, or the eternal obligation of the moral law, and it desires a State where individual rights shall run riot, and every man be a little king and an incipient deity. But it is passing strange that so many good citizens, religious, and patriotic men of American birth and education, should be misled by the shallow sophistry, that under the plea of " conscience," would plant the machinery for a return to medieval despotism, or a collapse into a social pandemonium. The people of the United States have the right to do all things necessary to secure to themselves and their posterity a republican form of government, founded on the morality of Christ's golden rule of perfect justice and universal good will; and all sophisms-political, social, religious-that stand in the way of that mighty purpose will be rent asunder and drifted down stream. As the Mississippi bursts its icy fetters in the spring and sweeps onward to the gulf, dissolving or spurning as it flows every hindrance that would stay the march of its lordly torrent to the sea, so will the people deal with every foe that bars its progress to that ideal American republic, where all men shall be free because all men shall be wise, and just, and good.

The Committee on Business reported a series of resolutions which were laid on the table for the present. (See the resolutions, as subsequently amended, on page 50).

Prof. J. R. W. Sloane, D. D., was then introduced, and delivered the following address:

THE MORAL CHARACTER AND ACCOUNTABILITY OF THE NATION. The principle involved in the very statement of the theme which has been assigned me is one of vital importance to the existence and prosperity of the State. That a nation is possessed of moral character, that it is therefore a subject of moral law, and consequently accountable to God, is not theory, but fact; not hypothesis, but science. When I say not theory, but fact; not hypothesis, but science, I do not mean that the truth is so demonstrated as to be beyond the reach of ingenious objection and cavil. It is conceded, I presume, that the Copernican system of astronomy is demonstrated, and yet it is not many months since I heard a man in the cars declare that the question as to whether the earth revolved around the sun was one upon which a great deal could be said on both sides, and for his part he did not believe that it did. Harvey testified that there was not a physician in Europe, over forty years of age, who accepted his doctrine of the circulation of the blood, and yet it is generally conceded, we believe, that it is a demonstrated fact. That all men do not admit that a nation is a moral being, and accountable to God, does not prove that it is not an established principle of moral and political science.

The denial of the moral character and accountability of the State is of the nature of Atheism; it is practically a denial of God's providential government -leads to the subversion of morals, the annihilation of all rights, the overthrow of rational freedom, and the destruction of the State itself.

A nation is a creature of God. In the language of Franklin, "If a sparrow can not fall to the ground without His notice, much less can an empire rise without His aid." It is not of man, nor of the will of man, but of God; created not by physical, but by moral forces; not in the sphere of His material, but of His moral government. We have the highest authority for comparing a nation to a mountain; but other forces than those which have upheaved the "Everlasting Hills," Alps, Andes, or Himalayas, are employed in the creation and perpetuation of great nations.

Since the times of the old Hebrew prophets a tree has been the standing emblem of a political power, yet it requires influences other than those which nourish the pine and the palm, the cypress and the cedar, to produce an enlightened and free Commonwealth. There is no greater fallacy than that which imposes upon the mind with ingenious analogies between that ethical organism called a nation and the perishable physical organisms of the animal or vegetable kingdom. These are aggregations of material particles united by physical laws. They must perish eventually by the very law of their existence, but a nation is composed of moral entities, united by moral laws, has all the elements of a perpetual life, and may continue as long as the sun and the moon shall endure. is possible, not in the individual, but in the nation, to realize the dream of perpetual youth. "The State has no soul" is the dictum of an atheistic political theory. On the contrary, we say, with the famous French priest, Pere Hyacinthe, "What I admire most in the State is its soul." Moral principles are the soul of a nation; these are the informing spirit that mould its various elements into a compact unity, and that bind them together with bands stronger than steel. Eradicate or weaken these, and the elements of decay at once seize upon it, and the vultures of ruin hasten to batten upon the carcass.

It

Truth, justice, honesty, virtue, patriotism, love of man and fear of God,

are the forces that constitute and preserve a great nation; these are the pillars of the republic. These are the towers and the bulwarks of the State. While these remain no weapon formed against her shall prosper, and she will condemn any tongue that rises in judgment against her. In these is the hiding of her power; by the possession or lack of these is a nation characterized and its work determined.

That physical causes operate to a greater or less degree in moulding national character few would care to dispute. All the great epochs of history, however, testify that while they may affect they cannot determine either the character or the course of nations. How often have nations, by the operation of some moral or spiritual power, been born as in a day; the whole current of their national life been changed; breathed upon, as in the vision of Ezekiel, by the Spirit of the Almighty and started with the speed of the racer on a new career toward a new goal. Notably is this illustrated in that great birth-epoch, the Reformation of the 16th century. Europe was in darkness. "God said, Let Luther be, and there was light." The changes were so stupendous, and yet so sudden, that the historian can find no simile so appropriate as that by which Christ describes his second advent: "As the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even to the west, so shall the coming of the Son of Man be." The physical conditions remained the same, but new moral and spiritual influences were working with a wider sweep, with a more intense activity, and with a grander power.

Wherever the new life came there was the same sudden awakening, the same marvelous transformations, the same display of resistless energies and unconquerable heroism. Holland witnessed on her fertile dyke-defended plains as splendid examples of self-sacrifice, as stern a struggle for civil and religious liberty, as Switzerland, in her Alpine fastnesses, or Scotland, on her wild moorland wastes, or amid the deep recesses of her heath-clad hills. Infidel communism and communism is the logical consequent of all theories of government which do not hold the State to be of divine origin-can create a mob frantic as the victim of delirium in its struggles against lawful authority; but Christian morality alone can create and preserve a great, free, and enlightened nation. Could any madness be greater than that of the men who shriek like howling Dervishes against any national acknowledgment of God, ere yet the glow of burning Paris has passed from yonder heavens? Americans, look across the sea and behold in France the results of theories that exclude God from the government of nations and refuse obedience to His law. We quote the words of a great master of language: "We must needs have the brush that painted the Apocalypse to portray those scenes which recall the destruction of Nineveh and Babylon. Reason is staggered before them. They are in history what those primeval convulsions of the earth were in nature. We now know what socialism may give birth to. In its train may be seen the giants of modern chaos heaping one upon another burning ruins. At one moment Paris, under the burning canopy which covered it, threatened with new crimes and new terrors, the screeching shells tearing through its roofs, seemed like a city under a curse. After these fearful nights came days still more terrible, when, in our streets, strewn with the dead, and traversed by thousands of prisoners, another fire was lighted in the hearts of men-that of fear, kindled with fury; when the dregs of the human heart were stirred up; when cowardice, united to cruelty, and not satisfied with implacable justice, called for summary vengeance. This was an hour when all the birds of evil omen cursed the very name of liberty; but it was also that solemn, decisive hour when a nation, face to face

with the evils that are devouring it, should question itself, examine its own conscience, and fix the responsibility of a catastrophe which involves not alone its direct abettors. The ancient sibyl, to whom Rome shut her ears, comes to us in the form of this great calamity. She gives us warning; it is, perhaps, the last page in the volume of wisdom, but it is the page that I would read to my country in order that modern Democracy may learn therefrom the lesson which the events of these days should cultivate."

So writes Edmund de Pressense, a true friend of enlightened liberty, of scenes of horror which passed before his own eyes, who could say of them, if not quorum pars magna fui, at least quæ ipse misserrima vidi. Let us remember that a brilliant devotee of the Commune in our own country has said of Henry Delacluze, one of the high priests who prepared this terrible holocaust, that he was a man after his own heart, and that that branch of the Internationals that followed Woodhull through the streets of New York a few Sabbaths ago, recalling the ancient myth of Circe and her swine, was organized by one of the chief actors in these scenes of blood, who, not satisfied with banishing God from the earth, said if he were to go to heaven and find Him there, he would immediately throw up barricades.

The oriental nations are often pointed to as examples of stable government. The facts do not accord to the theory; but their repose, such as it is, is the repose of death, the calm of the Dead Sea, the quietness of the extinct volcano. There are no States, in the true sense of the term, in oriental countries. They have no progress, and consequently no real national life. They do not advance, and play no part in the world's history. India, China, Japan-what are they? Hordes, multitudes, masses, but not nations: nor can they be in their present moral degradation. Persia is a country peopled by a few millions, more or less, of human beings; all the physical conditions favorable for a great nation are there, but the moral are all wanting. There are Persian people, but no Persian nation-none possible, because, as one who knows them well recently said: "There is not a single man in Persia that is not an arrant liar, nor a single woman that has any correct idea of true virtue." A few European adventurers conquered India, two hundred British soldiers quelled a rising war of ten millions, and in the great rebellion of a few years since thirtysix thousand Europeans, all told, soldiers and civilians, men and women, crushed in an incredibly short period the rising revolt of more than one hundred and fifty millions!

Why is France to-day like a ship driven of the wind and tossed? Or, to come nearer home, what is the character of the masses on whose shoulders the Tammany robbers were borne to power? Who does not see that our country would go down at once in a sea of fire, mingled with blood, if the moral character of the New York voters was spread all over the land? But what is the State? Not a mass of men, nor an organization of men, but an organization composed of moral beings, subsisting in moral relations, a tree, but a tree whose particles are moral entities, and which must partake of the life and character of the substance of which it is composed; a tree like the fabled Igdrasil of the North, "every leaf a biography, every fibre an act or a word. The rustle of it the noise of human existence onward from of old. It grows there, the breath of human passion rustling through it. Its true figure is that of a colossal man, his consciousness the resultant of the consciousness of the millions that compose this gigantic entity, this body corporate, his power their power, his will their will, his purpose their purpose, his goal the end to which they are moving; a