20 KANSAS CITY RE VIE W OF SCI EN CE. 
It is alike impossible for the upholders of religious liberty to consistently 
require the children of our States to attend, and the tax-payers to support, schools 
where the Protestant Bible, which is regarded by Roman Catholics, Jews, and 
others as a sectarian book, is read, or where the tenets of the CathoHc, Jewish, 
or any other faith are taught. Therefore, if we have any public school fund, and 
it is not distributed in part among the religious bodies to be used by them for the 
support of their own denominational schools, the State should rigidly confine its 
system of popular education to the secular sphere of knowledge. 
But a secularist public school system does injustice to all who have any 
Christian convictions, and tends to sap the foundations of public morality. The 
consciences of all citizens have an equal, natural, and constitutional right to be 
respected, and a secularist public school system which is thus an outrage to mill- 
ions of American consciences, not merely because it excludes religious teaching 
altogether, but because it produces a vicious, immoral, thriftless, and superficially 
educated class of citizens, with an education sufficient to do them harm, but not 
complete enough to do them any good, is a violation of right and a disgrace to 
the country. It is a violation of right that any person having any Christian con- 
victions should be compelled to pay taxes for the support of such schools. 
A very large number of the children who now attend our public schools are 
so situated that all the improvement and instruction they get must come only from 
their attendance at school, and, as Washington said, ' ' Reason and experience 
forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of rehgious 
principle." This class of children cannot be expected to become men and women 
of good moral character. As to the rest of those who attend these schools, it is 
useless to say that their religious education can be secured by exertions in the 
Sunday-school and at home. The evil influence of the secularist public schools 
will thwart and nullify the efforts of good parents toward this end. Even those 
who inveigh against the opponents of a public school system are seldom willing, 
when they can afford to pay the charges of a private school, or can avail them- 
selves of the privileges of a parochial school, to risk the danger of having the 
breeding and morals of their children contaminated by their mingling with children 
from the most rude and immoral quarters of society in schools where not even 
the first principles of Christianity and morality are taught. Such Godless schools 
ought to be abolished on account of their pernicious influence. 
The term Godless, applied to the secularist public schools, here means the 
same as anti-religious, immoral, and hostile to true religion; and such the public 
school must be, unless it makes religious teaching one of its functions ; not be- 
cause true religion will not stand the test of popular enlightenment (if that were 
the case the sooner the world got rid of it the better) ; but because, as I have 
already urged, morality cannot prevail in exclusion of religious principle, and 
the indifference to and ignorance of religion among those who are trained in these 
schools, and* especially the bad examples and influences there met with, lead to 
immorality and every sort of corruption. 
A system which excludes altogether religious ideas from its instruction gives 
