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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



assistants. A suitable hymn may also be sung." 

 In the schools of New Haven, the regulations 

 used to require that the morning session of the 

 schools should be opened with " appropriate de- 

 votional exercises. 1 ' At the beginning of the 

 present year the schools were made purely secu- 

 lar. The Chicago schools are also secular ; the 

 Bible is not read, nor are there religious exercises 

 of any kind. The superintendent reports (July, 

 1S76): "An attempt to reinstate the Bible in our 

 schools was defeated by a vote of three in the 

 affirmative to ten in the negative, two members 

 being absent and not voting. I cannot but re- 

 peat now what I said on the occasion of that 

 vote : ' If I were a clergyman of a Christian 

 church, and believed in all its doctrines and ten- 

 ets, I should still vote upon this question as I 

 now vote — No.' " 



The principal " religious difficulty" in Ameri- 

 ca arises from the strength of the Roman Catho- 

 lic population, and the steady refusal of the priests 

 to sanction the attendance of Roman Catholic 

 children at the common schools. 1 Two or three 

 years ago some of the conspicuous Protestant 

 clergy made an attempt to promote reconciliation. 

 They argued that as long as the Protestant Bible 

 was read in any of the common schools it was 

 equally hopeless and unreasonable to expect that 

 the priests would change their policy. For a few 

 months the columns of several religious news- 

 papers were filled with those arguments on both 

 sides of the question with which we have become 

 familiar in this country. No one contended, as 

 far as I know, that the schoolmaster should ex- 

 plain or enforce the Scripture lessons ; but many 

 excellent people had the impression that if the 

 " ten" or more verses which are read at the com- 

 mencement of the school were omitted the schools 

 would become atheistic. To what extent the dis- 

 cussion, which has now ceased, affected public 

 opinion, I do not know. 



Whether the hostility of the Roman Catholic 

 hierarchy to the common schools would be ap- 

 peased if the Protestant flag were taken down is 

 more than doubtful. But that an honest at- 

 tempt should be made to remove every reesonable 

 ground of hostility seems to me to be the plain 

 duty of the American people. The children of 

 Roman Catholic parents are receiving an educa- 

 tion in " parochial " schools which is almost ne- 

 cessarily inferior to that which is given in the 

 free common schools sustained by the general 



1 A very large number of Roman Catholic children 

 attend the common schools, notwithstanding the die- 

 approval of the priests. 



community ; and Roman Catholic tax-payers have 

 a right to complain that the public schools, which 

 they are compelled to support, are formally iden- 

 tified with a faith which they reject. 



The Governor of New York in his last annual 

 message raised the " religious difficulty " in con- 

 nection with colleges and high-schools. New 

 York City has a college with a faculty of fourteen 

 professors and eighteen tutors; it educates more 

 than a thousand students. From the report of 

 the board for 1876 it appears that the college 

 costs the city $144,250, or £28,850 per annum. 

 There is a Professor of Philosophy and a Pro- 

 fessor of History. I do not know the philosophi- 

 cal creed of Prof. Huntsman ; but if he happens 

 to be a positivist or a pessimist — a disciple of 

 Comte or a disciple of Schopenhauer — it may be 

 urged that all citizens who hold firmly any form 

 of the Christian faith are suffering a serious griev- 

 ance, for his lectures must be a polemic against 

 the religious truths which seem to them of su- 

 preme importance. If his philosophy sustains 

 and justifies the Christian theory of the universe, 

 positivists and agnostics of every school have a 

 similar grievance ; the city — so they may say — 

 might as well give a salary to a professor to de- 

 fend the authenticity and genuineness of the four 

 Gospels, or the theology of the Westminster Con- 

 fession. Dr. Anthon is Professor of History ; is 

 he a Protestant or a Roman Catholic ? This is a 

 vital question. Does he denounce or palliate the 

 massacre of the Huguenots ? Does he give the 

 papacy the credit of nearly all the civilization 

 and intellectual activity of Europe, like Mr. 

 Balmez ? Or does he try to show, like Dr. Dra- 

 per, that the Church has been the steady and re- 

 lentless foe of free thought and scientific discov- 

 ery ? If he glorifies the papacy, how is it possi- 

 ble for Protestants to be satisfied ? If he con- 

 demns it, have not the Romanists a just ground 

 of complaint ? Similar questions may of course 

 be pressed in relation to the high-schools. If the 

 validity of these plausible but untenable objec- 

 tions could be maintained, philosophy, ethics, 

 and history, would have to be excluded from all 

 educational institutions sustained out of public 

 funds. 



There are some men who are prepared to ac- 

 cept this conclusion. They contend that the high- 

 er education' should be withdrawn from the hands 

 of the state, and intrusted to schools and colleges 

 sustained by private endowments. On the other 

 hand, the friends of the public system maintain 

 that a college like that of New York, which charges 

 no fees, but gives free admission to all students 



