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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



CORRESPONDENCE. 



VITIATED MOEAL TEACHING. 



Editor Popular Science Monthly : 

 QIR: The letter of E. P. Meredith, in the 

 IO April Monthly, reviewing the article by 

 Benjamin Reece on "Public Schools as affect- 

 ing Crime and Vice " in your January number, 

 does not seem to go to the root of the evils 

 deprecated. It is true that high mental cult- 

 ure is not always accompanied by a corre- 

 spondingly high ethical standard, but often 

 the reverse, and that, as a general rule, our 

 public-school teachers " bear an exceptionally 

 good moral character, and a majority of them 

 are members of good standing in the various 

 churches," and that " the Sunday school, 

 where moral training is especially attended 

 to, is now considered an indispensable ad- 

 junct of every church ; yet, with all this, 

 vice and crime are on the ascending scale, 

 and in a most astonishing degree." But 

 when he says that " with this guarantee 

 for the moral training of the pupils by pre- 

 cept and example on the part of the teach- 

 ers, it seems to me that all is being done in 

 that line that can be done," is he equally 

 right ? Is there not some moral taint, some 

 poison-bearing germ from which such evils 

 grow, lurking within these ethical influences ? 

 When we read of some great bank defalca- 

 tion, of some much-trusted man absconding 

 with fiduciary funds, and the like, in nine 

 cases in ten the paragraph will end by stat- 

 ing that the perpetrator was a leader in a 

 Sunday school, or a leading man in a church 

 or a mission. Naturally we often ask why it 

 is so. The usual and the easy answer is, 

 that he put on the cloak of religion to screen 

 and facilitate his dishonest methods— " the 

 livery of heaven to serve the devil in." But 

 that facile answer prompts another still more 

 pertinent question, " Why did this professed 

 religious man add hypocrisy to his other in- 

 iquities ? " Must we not search the founda- 

 tions of his ethical culture for the fruitful 

 germ from which these evil actions sprang ? 

 It is more than probable that had any one 

 of those leaders of a church or Sunday school, 

 or of that majority of public-school teachers 

 "of good standing in the various churches," 

 confessed that he did not believe, or even 

 that he doubted, that the world was made in 

 six days some six thousand years ago ; the 

 first man molded from its clay, and the first 

 woman from his newly made rib ; that Moses 

 conversed face to face with God ; that Lot's 

 wife was turned into a pillar of salt ; that in- 

 fants dying unbaptized are eternally damned ; 

 that the laws of nature were set aside when 

 Christ was begot — he would have lost the 

 position he held, and his social standing, as 



Dr. Robertson Smith, Dr. Woodrow, and 

 many others have, for telling the truth. He 

 was therefore reticent, and soothed his stul- 

 tified conscience by saying to himself that, 

 if those things were not literally true, they 

 were in a figurative sense, and went on act- 

 ing if not uttering a lie, as a very large class 

 of people are doing every day for the same 

 reasons. The teacher, preacher, or layman 

 who does this is committing an immoral act, 

 and preparing his conscience for tolerating 

 others of a darker hue. We all know that 

 it is the first willful lie or profane oath ut- 

 tered that shocks the youthful conscience 

 and sears it for repetitions that cease to 

 shock. The late Henry Ward Beecher told 

 us somewhere that his was so shocked at the 

 first lie, that he sought the attic and behaved 

 in such a peculiar, repentant manner that 

 his mother questioned him, thinking that 

 he was about to experience religion. Now 

 the number of men and women who believe 

 in the supernatural part of our religion is 

 constantly growing less, yet for the reasons 

 that I have alluded to they do not avow it. 

 May it not be this constant acting of a lie 

 that corrodes the conscience and causes, in 

 a measure, the rapidly ascending degree of 

 vice and crime, and the "venality and cor- 

 ruption pervading every branch of the Gov- 

 ernment " ? Have we not reached that stage 

 of enlightenment and that sound policy at 

 which we can safely drop the supernatural 

 from our religion, and relegate it to the cults 

 of less advanced peoples, who still find it 

 necessary to keep that element ingrafted into 

 their theogonies, in order to awe their simple 

 and unintelligent followers ? We have out- 

 grown the age of witchcraft which our Puri- 

 tan ancestors believed in so fully, and we have 

 denied the divine rights of kings, which had 

 the same ethnic origin and for the same ends. 

 Why not eliminate the same element in our 

 religion, retaining all its sound ethical tenets, 

 and administer it upon the human teachings 

 of Christ and the natural laws that science 

 has revealed in the progress of civilization ? 

 The time is rapidly approaching when the 

 Bible will be expurgated, and all that science 

 proves false expunged ; the stirpiculture of 

 its patristic writers and the foul genesis of 

 Ammonite, Moabite, and Ishmaelite banished 

 to the pages of a dead language, leaving a 

 work that men can read without repulse, and 

 the children in our public schools without 

 pollution. As Mr. Meredith says, "Purify 

 the fountain, and the stream will become 

 likewise limpid and pure." 



Addison Child. 



Childwold, N. T., April 8, 1890. 



