THE WESTERN

JOURNAL OF EDUCATION.

ESTABLISHED 1852.

OLD SERIES:

GOLDEN ERA, VOL. XLVI. SAN FRANCISCO: NOVEMBER, 1901.

NEW SERIES: VOL. V
NUMBER 18.

The Religious Element in Education.

BY EMMA YOUNGLOVE.

Not far from Edinburgh rises a mountain at whose foot was reared a Scotch lad. He grew to manhood and passed on to middle life without ever leaving the hamlet where he was born. At length a friend persuaded him to climb the mountain which rose behind his cottage. When he reached the summit and turning beheld the view stretched out before him, he exclaimed, "Auch, mon, what a big warld it is!"

Many times as I have been studying our theme, the thought has occurred to me, "What a big world it is! "

RELIGION AS A FACTOR IN CIVILIZATION.

For the last two thousand years the central fact of the history of the Western world is Christianity.

Charles Martel struck the blow that drove back Mohammedanism, which impinged against Christianity. And the battle of Tours is one of the great battles of the world. Christianity, not Islamism, is the religion of Europe and America. Thruout the "dark ages" the little learning which was preserved, was nursed in the retirement of the cloister. Here were kept the precious manuscripts which have handed down. to us the literature of Greece and Rome. Had the church, with its priests and monks, its abbeys and convents, been blotted out fifteen hundred years ago, we should have little left to tell us of the civilization and culture of the ancients. Without this foundation our own civilization would have been of slow growth and would lack many of its richest elements.

The crusades are brilliant and fantastic expressions of the religious enthusiasm which inspired them, and they gathered about them all the romance of the age of chivalry. Moreover they left a permanent impression upon Europe in the acquaintance they gave with the best elements of the life and education of the East. They had their share, too, in increasing the wealth and importance of the burgher class.

Gradually the temporal power of the church was augmented until at length the Pope dominated all nations in relation of state, both internal and foreign.

Then came the Reformation, with its discussions, its stimulus to free thought and free speech, its profound influence upon the life and character of one-half of the Christian world.

It was followed by religious wars which shook Europe for a century.

So greatly and so variously has the Christian religion affected the history of Europe in the past.

How great a part in the settlement of our own loved land was taken by profoundly religious men, is a thought familiar to every school boy. How deeply and permanently the motives and circumstances of that early settlement have affected the character and history of the country, are problems which can be but partially solved by the greatest scholar.

Among the leading facts of the past century are missionary efforts and their results. It is everywhere acknowledged that in the recent strange political complications with China the labors of the missionaries made an important factor as cause, and also an element which must not be ignored in the arrangement of terms. These things are matters of current history freely discussed by newspapers and magazines.

When we turn from history to institutional life, we find Christianity a factor no less potent.

Nature is cruel; by her law the weak is ever sacrificed to the strong, and many must perish that one may live. So it has been in human society-the rich has crushed the poor, the powerful has enslaved the helpless. In the world of human life it still often seems true that if one man succeeds it implies the failure of someone else. For example, it is difficult to see in such a relation of demand and supply as exists in the anthracite coal regions in our own country, how it can be otherwise than that the success of the mine owner implies the crushing of the mine worker.

But the law of Christ's kingdom is, "We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves."

Slowly this idea has permeated thought and borne fruit in life.

It has brought about the elevation of woman to a position of honor and influence and has opened to her avenues of self-improvement and usefulness.

Even within the last twenty years it has caused the devastating African slave trade to disappear.

It has done much to educate and elevate the black race after the shackles have fallen from his limbs. Booker T. Washington, the greatest living representative of that race, in his unique and fascinating autobiography, "Up From Slavery," says: "If no other consideration had convinced me of the value of Christian life, the Christlike work which the church of all denominations in America has done during the last thirty-five years for the elevation of the black man would have made me a Christian."

It is the Christ spirit in our civilization which has taught the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the dumb to speak; which has cared for the insane in homes where they have social joys; which has trained the feeble-minded and epileptic to such ideas of order and obedience as render life in normal conditions tolerable. It furnishes homes to orphan and worse than orphan children, to the aged and infirm. It treats the inebriate in hospitals and soothes those hopelessly suffering from incurable diseases. It leagues men to prevent cruelty to animals; it protects women and children by factory legis ation.

It is doing much for the criminal and degraded classes. There is a growing conception of prison reform, an effort to make punishment helpful to the criminal, to render him of value to himself and to the community. In pursuance of the social settlement plan men and women have left pleasant and often wealthy homes to live among the poor, the ignorant, the degraded, that they may set before them an example of a cleaner, more wholesome. higher life than they have known, and that by the warm human touch they may lead them upward.

Christianity has lessened the frequency of wars, has brought about arbitration, originated the Hague Conference, with its permanent court of arbitration. It has lessened the cruelty of wars; its spirit breathes in the Red Cross Society, with its equal care of friend and foe.

It is struggling with the problems of industrial competition, and men are asking not chiefly, “How may the wretched be relieved?" but "How can the con

ditions of business and trade be so modified that there may be no poor and wretched?" Meanwhile great fortunes are being freely given that universities and libraries may be open to all.

The joys of social life are fed from religious springs. Easter, filled with the gladness of springtime, is the great festival of the church. Our own national Thanksgiving day commemorates the bounty of the autumn and calls together families and friends in gratitude to God for personal and for national blessings. And Christmas, while it yearly renews thoughts of the Christ Child, everywhere brings fresh joy to all childlike hearts.

The literature of Christendom is filled with Christian problems and ideals, and is replete with Scripture allusions and paraphrases. To his religious conceptions Dante owes the gloomy sublimity of his pictures.

The life of the times which Chaucer so cheerfully depicts would be strangely incomplete without prioress and nun, monk and friar. Milton and Goethe and Heine and Wordsworth and Browning all have drawn copiously from the same great Book, and prose is scarcely less a debtor than verse.

One of the most magnificent forms of architecture owes its existence to the Christian religion. The spires and pinnacles of Gothic chapels, abbeys, cathedrals give expression to the Christian's aspiration. How the traveler welcomes the sight of the parish churches, in which England is so rich; the ruins of Melrose Abbey under the light of the full moon as Sir Walter Scott has pictured it; Westminster Abbey, to whose architectural attractions is added such wealth of historical and literary associations. The Rhine would lose much of its picturesqueness if it did not look up to these Gothic structures of which the spires of Strasburg and Cologne are the most magnificent. Paris, with her many attractions, would lament the loss of her remarkable church of Notre Dame, and Milan would be shorn of her greatest glory if her cathedral were no longer even a memory.

Modern sculpture had its origin in the purpose to adorn the churches. The cathedrals of Florence and St. Peter's, Cologne and Strasburg, show panel and altar, choir and baptistery with the noblest work in relief and statue which the modern world has produced.

Italy is the cradle of modern painting. This art took its rise in religious sentiment. It chose religious subjects for its themes and had for its object the the adornment of Christian churches. All the common people, ignorant of reading, were educated in art. Then when the Renaissance came with its intellectual awakening, there blossomed the greatest age of the pictorial art. Much of the religious spirit fled; art was loved for her own sake. But religious subjects still remained the favorites, and the light of Correggio is shed about the sweetness of cherub faces; the beauty and grace of Raphael has depicted the Madonna again and again; the sublime strength of Michael Angelo was devoted to the representation of Biblical scenes.

Music, the most sensuous of the arts, is great also in extent and range and power on its devotional side. How much would be lost if organ and voice were never again attuned to praise! What tenderness in hymn! What beauty and dignity in sacred song! What solemn exaltation in anthem! What stateliness is added to worship by Te Deum and Mass and Recessional! To what height does music rise in the sacred oratorios, the melodious "Creation" of Haydn, the dramatic "Elijah" of Mendelssohn, the sublime "Messiah" of Handel!

It is sometimes said that science is materialistic. When Kepler discovered the laws of the movement of the planets he reverently bowed his head and said: "I thank thee, O God, that I am permitted to think thy thoughts after thee." And to many another scientist it has seemed that "the eye of man looked forth

upon the boundless mystery [of the universe] and saw the shadow of the presence of the infinite God."

Speaking of the conversions which occurred during the year 1900 in the colleges and universities of the United States, John R. Mott, General Secretary of the World's Student Christian Federation, says: "It is significant that a larger number of the converts have come from the students of science than from any other class of students." I quote from Spalding: "Science is not material. It is the product of intellect and will; and the great founders of modern science, Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Newton, Leibnitz, Ampere, Liebig, Fresnel, Faraday, and Mayer were Christians. 'However paradoxical it may sound,' says Du Bois-Reymond, 'modern science owes its origin to Christianity.'"

ITS PLACE IN EDUCATION.

Into a world whose civilization is a Christian civilization, then, comes the baby born among us. How shall we educate him?

Nicholas Murray Butler "separates civilization into man's science, his literature, his art, his institutional life, and his religious beliefs," and continues, "Education must include knowledge of each of the five elements named, as well as insight into them all and sympathy with them all." And again: "The child is entitled to his scientific inheritance, to his literary inheritance, to his æsthetic inheritance, to his institutional inheritance, and to his religious inheritance. Without them he cannot become a truly educated or cultured man."

Spalding says: The ideal of culture embraces the whole man, physical, moral, religious, and intellectual, and the loss of health or morality or faith cannot but impede the harmonious development of the mind itself."

Nay, more. The religious faculty is not only one of the powers of the soul; it is the highest of them all. Because there is an affinity in man's spirit with the Spirit of the Infinite Maker and Ruler of the universe, the human soul can become a sharer in the Divine life. The child needs religious training, then, that he may be symmetrically developed, and especially that his highest powers may not become atrophied.

In the mind of the child religiously trained, religious images begin to form early. The idea of God is probably at first always grossly anthropomorphic.

Those who have ever read John Fiske's portrayal of his childhood conception of God will not easily forget it:

"I remember distinctly the conception I had formed when five years of age. I imagined a narrow office just over the zenith, with a tall standing desk running lengthwise, upon which lay several open ledgers bound in coarse leather. There was no roof over this office, and the walls rose scarcely five feet from the floor, so that a person standing at the desk could look out upon the whole world. There were two persons at the desk, and one of them—a tall, slender man, of aquiline features, wearing spectacles, with a pen in his hand and another behind his earwas God. The other, whose appearance I do not distinctly recall, was an attendant angel. Both were diligently watching the deeds of men and recording them in the ledgers. To my infant mind this picture was not grotesque, but ineffably solemn, and the fact that all my words and acts were thus written down, to confront me at the day of judgment, seemed naturally a matter of grave concern."

Less gifted minds than John Fiske may retain these crude conceptions a few years longer, and tho they may more readily forget them in later years, they are not likely to form more spiritual conceptions in early childhood.

So painful to mature minds are these pictures, so much like caricatures do they seem, that some have said, "It is better not to try to teach religion until the child is old enough to understand it. Let us teach morals with care by precept,

and especially by example. Let us defer the instruction in religion until the child will not form grotesque images which need to be corrected."

But these partial and inaccurate pictures are characteristic of the manner in which the child mind works. Tiny Mildred amused her mother thruout the fivemile street-car ride from Oakland to Berkeley in the early dusk of a winter afternoon, by trying to blow out the moon as she was accustomed to have the privilege of doing by the match with which the gas was lighted. Little Grace White, the daughter of a college professor, exclaimed when she first saw cat-tails, "O, papa, see the Bologna sausages growing on bushes!" To the child these conceptions of the physical world or of its Creator are natural and proper. As Mr. Fiske says: "To my infant mind this picture was not grotesque, but ineffably solemn."

It was with a profound knowledge of child nature that the founder of the kindergarten said, "The school should first of all teach the religion of Christ; it should first of all, and above all, give instruction in the Christian religion; everywhere, and in all zones, the school should instruct for and in this religion."

THE EFFECTS OF THE LAICIZATION OF THE SCHOOL. When we consider the immense importance of education, both for this life and for its continuation hereafter, it does not seem strange that the early Christians entrusted the education of children and youth wholly to the Church. In the hands of the clergy and monks its dominant idea was what George Eliot called "otherworldliness," the preparation for the life to come. Religious exercises were prominent, and all else was valued in its relation to the church service. The purpose was chiefly to make of the boy a priest. The course of study embraced only formal studies-Latin, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, with arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. So mass could be said, the service chanted, religious discussions carried on, the church calendar computed. Such importance was attached to the authority of the scriptures that free thought was strangled. Discipline was very harsh, inflicted by men of ascetic habits, who had separated themselves from household joys and the love of little children.

In all this no attempt was made to prepare for the life that now is. The development of the individual was disregarded. Words, not things, were studied. Women had no share in education. The manners of even the best educated men were rude and coarse.

From the narrowness and exaggeration, the exclusive and technical character of this education, the awakening spirit of the modern world recoiled. A little experiment made it evident that the Parent could not be trusted to provide suitably for the education of his child. Responsibility for the training of the future citizen was shifted from the Church to the State. And now the principle is widely accepted in Europe and America that it is the duty of the State to provide all the education which is needed by the man and the woman for the ordinary life of a citizen. In this country we go much further, and say that the government shall furnish high schools and universities for the youth who are more favorably situated or are inspired with loftier purposes.

The result is a system of instruction much broader than that of the cloister. The idea of training the individual has become prominent. Child-study has begun, that the teacher may be able to guide the young mind intelligently. Discipline has become mild and love is the motive. Educational opportunities are offered to the child of the cottage as well as the child of the mansion. Girls are taught beside their brothers. Education is even made compulsory, on the ground that this is needful for the welfare of the state. School work is made attractive, interest in study is cultivated.

The curriculum of the school has been broadened and adapted to the life of the present. There has been a revival of classical learning. Greek, which in the