about?

Where did parents come from, and where did my little sister go when she died? Why should I obey the laws? Why has Judge Hagans a right to sentence a thief to jail? What does all this mean, that we children must do all these things; and what does it mean to become men and women? and so on through the myriad-sided questioning of the eager little ones. Must the souls of these children be struck with a hammer every time they rise up out of the realm of natural things and look toward the infinite side of life? Must the teacher put the finger on the lip when God, or Christ, or duty, or immortality comes in? Must every book and every exercise that gratifies the highest curiosity be swept like litter from the school-room floor? Must 25,000 children in Cincinnati be forbidden to hear of their Father in heaven; to sing, "Be Thou, O God, exalted high;" to read the Ten Commandments, and the Lord's Prayer, through the most precious hours of their most sensitive years, because Archbishop Purcell wants to teach them the infallibility of the Pope, or some Archbishop of "secularism" regards it an open question whether the primeval monkey has yet clambered through his "positive" being up to an immortal soul? Let the Archbishop teach in his churches all that his flock desire to hear. Let the patriarch of materialism keep at his inspiring work of growing a new kind of soul, and inventing a new God. But we, the people of the State of Ohio, regard some things as settled; and one of them is, that "religion and morality" as well as "education," are "necessary to good government." And as the common school is the training school of American citizenship, we propose still to develop our children therein by appeal to the higher faculties they share with the angels, and not by appeal to the lower nature they share with the brutes.

The teacher who does not make all his instruction of the more advanced pupil center on these fundamentals of life-the everlasting ideas and motives that hold society together, and alone make a nation possible-has thrown away his labor. The secular " party in education perpetually calls upon us to be "practical" in our public schools. What is practical education? To pin upon the mental surfaces of the child a multitude of facts about a hundred subjects of human interest? To shoot a car load of useful knowledge, pell mell, into the empty mind? Who does not know that such knowledge, is only a dead burden upon the soul, and dances through the memory like the grain through the hopper? The only practical thing you can do in a public school is to arouse the minds of the multitude before you; teach them how to observe, to think, to work; awaken a desire for knowledge, and inspire a sense of duty in gaining and using it; and then lead the little band a few steps along each of the several paths of science far enough to show them that the things seen by the soul are eternal, and that the glory of life consists in living for spiritual, and not for sensual ends.

Send out a child thus trained and you have the material for a good citizen, and a noble man. Send out a child stuffed with disconnected facts, or stimulated into universal skepticism, and you have a mischief-maker in society, and a revolutionist in government. There is nothing so practical done in this country as to educate children into intelligent, thoughtful, moral and religious citizens of the republic; and when the common school leaves this solid ground, to drift through the educational dreams of secular pedants and politicians, it will be time to call it back to the homely ways of practical wisdom.

Turn which way you will, you can not escape the necssity for unsectarian religious and moral training in the common school. In the work of discipline, in

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 prac tical 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 cnlightened 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. It 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.

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 condemu 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