"The Papacy has been the eternal, implacable foe of Italian independence and Italian unity. It never would permit a powerful national kingdom to unite Italy." "Whether the United States will be involved in an immedi ate conflict with Rome lies in her future. While there are noble but still few exceptions, her unity and education and freedom will meet, in Roman Catholicism, it may be a guarded and often concealed, but an unceasing antagonist. Those who see in the course of the Christian centuries only the development of a dogma, and regard Protestantism as an intellectual conflict, can find no cause for apprehension. M. Guizot turns from speculations on the essence of Christianity to advocate a confederacy in Italy, and the maintenance of the temporal power of the Pope; but, to those for whom the conflict of so many centuries has a deeper reality, the ecclesiasticism of Rome bears another character. Milton was the statesman of a greater age, and was a wider scholar, and of fairer sympathies; but for him it was 'the old red dragon.' It was to be met by the nation in a struggle of life and death; and the nation will not maintain its unity or its being if she meet it only as a material force. The Church will not give place to an atheistic State, nor to a materialized civilization. The end of history is not attained, and the destination of humanity is not realized, in that. The nation can meet the forces with which it has to contend, only as it realizes its own moral being, and recognizes its origin and end in God." NO MAN OUGHT TO HAVE OFFICE OR CITIZENSHIP IN AMERICA WHO DOES NOT RECOGNIZE the State as, under God, SUPREME IN HER SPHERE, TO WHICH ALONE HIS CIVIL LOYALTY IS DUE, TO WHICH HE IS WILLING TO SWEAR AND MAINTAIN ALLEGIANCE. THE RECOGNITION OF GOD IN PUBLIC EDUCATION BY READING THE BIBLE. A NORTH-EAST wind has been blowing steadily over the land, with intermittent gusts more or less furious, during the last score or more of years, on the Bible in the Public Schools. Hope is that this storm will, on fair discussion, pass its fury, and the air grow calm and sunny again. A YEAR ago the writer attempted to reach bottom on one of the vexed questions of the day in a paper on “Taxing God's House." Dissatisfied with any of the ways of meeting the kindred question of the Bible in the Public Schools, as not coming to the root of the matter, he ventures this essay on the topic of the heading. These thoughts were first presented a week or two after Bishop McQuaid's address, in Horticultural Hall, on "The Public School Question as viewed by a Romanist." His main principle bearing on this topic is specious, but unsound, that the parental responsibility for the child's salvation limits his public education by the State to what the father chooses he shall learn. Carried out, this principle would ignore the right of government to punish such a child for crime, or control him in any way. The State, in its sphere, is as responsible that he should be a good citizen, as the father, in his sphere, that he should be a wise son." 66 Three procedures in regard to the matter may be thought of, which are, we think, sound in the respective circumstances: I. There seems to be no reason why a body of men, like the Pilgrims or the Hernhutters, might not acquire title to a territory within natural limits, and then, by compact (as in "The Mayflower's" cabin) or by constitution, decree that the country founded should exist to carry out God's purposes. It is a question, whether that will not be the millennial experience. In the schools of such a nation, the Bible would not only be read, it would be studied. Now, it is susceptible of a powerful argument, that the founders, although they may not by law have made these States Christian, nevertheless showed their intention that they should be built up on the religion and morality of the Scriptures, an intention shown in the early history of schools, and the motto of Harvard College, "Christo et Ecclesiae." Though this action of the fathers was not positive law, it showed no less what is worthy of perpetual respect, a respect shown by sons of the fathers, whatever may be the spirit of foreign-born, — a clear intention to shape the institutions of this land by the Bible. ---- And yet, though the intention of the fathers is worthy of full respect, it cannot be considered regnant and binding in the legal or complete moral sense; since, on this side the Atlantic, law and constitution are not merely the collected opinions of great names in the past, or even the national policy of the past, but only that which is the present will of the people, declared in the present constitutions, in the laws, and in popular vote. II. Another legitimate procedure would be the appointment of some score of our best statesmen as a high commission to consider this question in a broad, statesmanlike way: Is it true that this book, the Bible, is intimately connected with the welfare of nations? Is it true that New England and Scotland owe much of their intellectual discipline to the Bible? Is it true that you can note the difference between the Protestant and Catholic cantons of Switzerland; that, in sailing up the Danube, you can tell when you pass from the dominion of the Koran to the dominion of the Bible by the neatness and thrift of the villages? Was Victor Cousin right when he said of Luther's Bible, "It has greatly aided in the moral and religious education of the people"? 'Every wise man will rejoice in this; for, with three-fourths of the population, morality can be 66 |