274 GENERAL RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 



education upon another, or to graft anything foreign into the 

 original stock; it is not a proposal to remove education a single step 

 from the concrete, practical realities of life. Religion is the recogni- 

 tion of realities as against mere shows, and religious education is 

 simply that which moves within realities and not within the system 

 of abstractions that the world tends to become whenever its one, 

 ever-present ground is ignored. 



To say that education as such is properly religious does not, 

 however, deny the propriety of division of labor in teaching. Each 

 of our three great educational institutions, the family, the church, 

 and the state, has functions that cannot be transferred to either 

 of the others. Religion conies tt) the home and the state, not to 

 destroy, or to supplant, but to bring to full realization and fruitage. 

 But religion does demand that there be real unity within this diver- 

 sity, that we have, not two or three educations, but one education 

 to which all three institutions contribute, each its special part, while 

 all are inspired by the same ideals. 



From the standpoint of religion, then, the reason for religious 

 education is the real presence of the Divine Being in the child and in 

 his whole environment, and this idea excludes purely secular educa- 

 tion altogether. 



From the point of view of educational philosophy the conclusion 

 will be the same unless the idea of the secular be pushed on from 

 the sense of " non-religious " to that of " anti-religious." Secularism 

 that consents to be a merely partial point of view, that merely ignores 

 religion without weighing its claims, is for that reason incompetent 

 to meet the universally recognized requirement of unity in education. 

 The ultimate aim of the school cannot be other than the ultimate aim 

 of life. It is vain for a school system to ignore the question of what 

 life means and what are the highest use and destiny of a child's 

 developing powers. The effort to evade this deepest aspect of life, 

 while professing to prepare children for living, is really to confess that 

 one does not know what education is or what it is for. 



The problem of the ultimate aim confronts us from whatever 

 theory of education we start out. Suppose that we take our depar- 

 ture from biology. We then define education in terms of adjustment 

 to environment. We are now required to make clear what we mean 

 by the environment to which we propose to adjust the plastic child. 

 The moment that we pass on from the physical conditions of life to 

 the cultural environment, to the products of human thought and 

 feeling and aspiration, religion meets us as an ever-present, insistent 

 fact. If education is adjustment to environment, it must surely 

 seek to influence the attitude of the child toward his religious heritage. 

 To be neutral with regard to it is no more reasonable than to be 

 neutral toward good literature, or toward civil liberty. The attempt 



