42 EDUCATION 



and the divinest efforts of the race, as by it the evolution of civiliza- 

 tion has been inspired and controlled. The predominant influences 

 in history have been and are religious and economic, and whenever 

 conflict has risen between economic welfare and that of loyalty to 

 God and the soul, the highest, the noblest, and the mightiest have 

 preferred truth and right to temporal success, and in doing so have 

 become pioneers in the cause of freedom and progress. As it is a 

 chief purpose of the school to acquaint the individual with the 

 profoundest experience and the purest wisdom of the race, religion 

 and the conduct it inspires must continue to be its central theme. 

 The great human interests are maintained, protected, and furthered 

 by institutions, by the family, the state, the church, and the school, 

 and subordinate to these and in cooperation with them, by innu- 

 merable forms of association which the ever-increasing specializa- 

 tion of civilized life calls into existence. The home of the modern 

 world is the outgrowth of Christian ideals and principles. It has 

 been fashioned and safeguarded by the church, whose teachings 

 establish its rights, its sacredness, and its mission to form citizens 

 capable of freedom and self-devotion, who, while striving to build 

 here a kingdom of heaven, live for a higher world which shall not 

 pass away. 



It is only in such homes that the true children of God are bred and 

 reared; and they need to be reinforced by the school not less than 

 by the state and the church. If the school ignore the principles 

 which inform the home, the state, and the church, these institutions 

 are undermined. As the modern state is conscious that without the 

 school it cannot have intelligent, capable, and patriotic citizens, so 

 the church in the modern age understands that it requires the co- 

 operation of the school, if the spirit of religion, which is faith, rever- 

 ence, obedience, self-sacrifice, purity, righteousness, and love, is to 

 remain vital. As it is the tendency of the free school to weaken the 

 sense of responsibility in parents, it is the tendency of the religiously 

 neutral school to suffer faith, reverence, self-devotion, purity, and 

 love to perish of atrophy; and a church which is severed from the 

 school loses its influence on the home and ends by becoming a club for 

 ethical culture or social advantage, as a state which is content to exist 

 without and apart from the school condemns itself to weakness and 

 inferiority. It would be as reasonable to maintain that the state 

 has no need of the school as to hold that the church does not need the 

 school. Without the assistance of the home and the school neither 

 the state nor the church can prosper. 



To a life of virtue, freedom, and progress the church is as indis- 

 pensable as the state. 



" The church," says Dr. Harris, " announces the divine plan of 

 the universe, the fundamental ideal by which all things are to be 



