FOERSTER, AND NKdLECTED FACTORS IN EDUCATION. 24I 



nent of that reverence. The true teacher must ask, not, What 

 shall I do? but. What must I be? Character-former on the 

 on the part of the teacher ; character-reflecting on the part of the 

 taught. I could quote passage after passage to emphasize this. 



Character is unity. How can a young man unite love and power, 

 humility and strength, love of truth and pity, independence and sacrifice, 

 without the help of Him who alone has combined the apparently unihable 

 contradictions in a powerful will? Merely ethical pedagogics without 

 religion tears hinnanity asunder instead of centralizing and leading man 

 to unity. 



Holmes, an authority one cannot easily disregard, looks at 

 the matter from the same point of view. He maintains that a 

 child may be "mighty in the Scriptures " and yet possess no 

 knowledge of God, because his religious sense has not yet been 

 awakened; just as a child may have a knowledge of all the rules 

 of arithmetic and yet be unable to solve a single problem, because 

 his arithmetical sense is dormant and his knowledge of the subject 

 non-existent. What is needed is an awakening, not of the sense 

 of duty to God, but devotion to God and love to (^od, without 

 which religion is vain. 



These are points of view which must be taken into account 

 when the question of religion is discussed. 



I am aware that Rousseau, in the fourth book of his " Emile," 

 has strongly vetoed religious training in schools. To examine his 

 views here and now would be out of place. Surtice it to say that 

 neutrality on this vital question is a principle which, if rigidly 

 applied in the home and school, would make all teaching abso- 

 lutely impossible. No teacher is neutral regarding the rules of 

 grammar and arithmetic, in the teaching of history and geography, 

 in the great ethical principles of right and wrong, duty and 

 obedience. 



In this connection I may be i)ermitted to draw attention to 

 a notable utterance in a bulletin recently issued by the Association 

 of American Colleges. The assertion is made that — 



there is no more intrinsic reason for excluding the Bible and the literatum 

 of the Old and New Testaments from tlie subjects of study in Colleges 

 and Universities than there is for throwino out the works of Tennyson.^ 

 Browning, and Shakespeare, 



and that — • 



the Christian Church has more profoundly inlluenced American civiliza- 

 tion, and the Christian ideals have had more to do with the evolution of 

 American life, than any of the secular civilizations of the old world. 



The exclusion, therefore, of religious sttbjects from the curricu- 

 lum means — 



an irreparable loss to culture, a calamity to human progress, and the degra- 

 dation of htmian life. 



Our educational ])roblem becomes complicated when we con- 

 sider how alarmingly cities have grown of late years. As Riehl 

 has said — no mean authority forsooth — 



■' Europa wird krank an der Monstrositat seiner Grossstadte.'" 



With the growth of cities schools keep pace. But the growth 

 in size is not growth in efficiency, in formative power. Cities 



