272 GENERAL RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 



our thinking and our practice before we perceive that the relation 

 between religion and education is so close that the problem of the 

 nature and place of one includes the problem of the nature and place 

 of the other also. Solve one problem and you solve the other with 

 it. That " education " and " religious education " are treated on 

 this programme and in our every-day thinking as different concep- 

 tions is due simply to historical incidents that have temporarily 

 divided what is properly one and inseparable. 



The secularization of education that has been in progress for the 

 last century is not to be regarded as a wanton or deliberate violation 

 of principle, either religious or educational. It is rather an un- 

 avoidable incident of the coming of the people to self-consciousness 

 and self-government. From of old, civil authority, religion, and 

 learning, all alike descended upon the people from sources above 

 them. Then came modern democracy, according to the inner 

 principle of which the whole of culture should be found springing up 

 from within the free mind and heart of man. What had been de- 

 termined for the people by external imposition was now to be 

 determined by them through self-imposition. Yet this principle 

 could not be practically applied at once to the whole circle of life, 

 nor could its true limitations be clearly defined. The principle 

 could be put into practice only by limiting its application. Then 

 was repeated the old story of conquering by dividing. There was 

 ready at hand in religious thought a conception of a divided world, 

 the world of the sacred and the world of the secular. This con- 

 ception was now to receive its widest application and its severest test. 

 Undertaking to govern themselves in the sphere of the secular, the 

 people continued to think of things sacred as something separate 

 therefrom and as coming to them from a realm beyond rather than 

 as arising, like secular interests, from the nature and circumstances 

 of human life. 



Both Catholicism and Protestantism took this view. However 

 much they differed as to the nature and extent of spiritual authority, 

 they agreed in placing the affairs of religion apart from the affairs of 

 nature and the secular life. This distinction, though the thought of 

 to-day declares it to be artificial rather than real, made possible the 

 modern free state and the modern state school. The secularization 

 of education, therefore, is so far from involving any radical depar- 

 ture from religion that it is, in fact, an application of what religion 

 herself has taught. 



Nor is the secularization of education so much a retrograde step 

 as an, as yet, only partially accomplished forward movement. It is 

 difficult to see how free schools for the whole people, supported by 

 self-imposed taxation of the whole people, could ever have become 

 a fact in our divided Christendom without belief in the existence of a 



