SHORT PAPER 



DR. IRA LANDRITH, then of Chicago, Illinois, and General Secretary of the Re- 

 ligious Education Association, now Regent of Belmont College, Nashville, Ten- 

 nessee, presented the following paper on "Religious Educational Agencies: " 



" Our trinity of educational institutions, the home, the church, and the 

 school," will be complete when these three shall work together intelligently, 

 cordially, continuously, and always devoutly. It was with the hope of helping 

 to bring about the intelligent, cordial, continuous, and devout cooperation of the 

 home, the church, and the school in the training of the young that the Religious 

 Education Association was organized. If these all-comprehending institutions 

 are duly active, wholly harmonious, and mutually helpful, all of the other 

 agencies of religious education can be trusted to work together without friction 

 and without hindering competition. 



The Religious Education Association is not, therefore, properly a religious 

 educational agency as the church is, or the home, or the school; it would be rather 

 that organization which stands to promote and to proclaim the close cooperation 

 of the church, the home, and the school, together with all those subordinate 

 educational agencies intimately related to these, the chief, even the parent ones. 

 The Religious Education Association is not another church, nor is it a school, 

 neither has it any other than a benediction to pronounce upon the home. It 

 would speak none other than words of praise and love for the church, none but 

 words of commendation and kindly counsel to the school, and none but in- 

 spirational and welcome advice to the true home. It seeks no authority in any 

 of these institutions, desires none, needs none. 



But it does seek, desire, and need opportunity to help the church to be more 

 effective, the school more complete, and the home more righteous, an opportunity 

 which will be given in embarrassing abundance when leaders in the church, and 

 managers of the schools, and lovers of the home, all alike realize what most of 

 them have already seen, that in a peculiar sense, with reference to these three 

 agencies, no one liveth to itself, and that nothing is too good for either, and that 

 for the good of each there must be a striving after the best for all. 



There are national associations and conventions, secular and educational, 

 political and financial. The various churches have each for itself such general 

 organizations, as have such important interdenominational departments of 

 religious education as the Sunday-school, the Young People's Society of Christian 

 Endeavor, and the Christian Associations of young men and young women ; but, 

 singular as it is, and it must seem very singular to all who know that the central 

 purpose of all religious work is the building of character for temporal and eternal 

 uses, there has been no one association in whose activities and conventions the 

 workers in all churches and in all schools and in all institutions and societies of 

 religious education might profitably and appropriately participate, both con- 

 tributing and receiving the benefits of successfully tried plans, and uniting their 

 testimony and their influence for the weal of their common cause, the religious 

 education of this generation. 



The Religious Education Association would serve the cause of individual, 

 national, and international righteousness in the capacity of that safe and sane 

 confederation in which all churches, schools, and persons, willing to get and to 

 give better things, can meet, without compromise of principle, neither demand- 

 ing, nor offering the surrender of, any sacred conviction, and study together how 

 each may best do that part of the work of world-betterment which each has found 



