74 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
it loves — to array itself in a glory more gaudy than Solomon. The tree does the 
same thing in donning its verdant garb. The law of its nature teaches it to select 
just such substances as are best for its growth and development. It is fulfilling 
the law of its physical life. Why can we not do for moral nature, what they do 
for their physical nature, squaring our lives by this law of love. 
We have by consent resigned to the church the sole duty of instructing in 
morality, but how poorly and miserably the large proportion of the professedly 
Christian ministers teach this law of love, needs no comments from us. One 
faction is well pictured by the poet Longfellow in Kinnellworth Tales. 
" The parson too, was there, a man austere, 
The instinct of whose nature was to kill ; 
The wrath of God he preached from year to year, 
And read for pastime ' Edwards on the Will.' " 
Another faction seeks by emotional excitement to gather adherents — to make 
proselytes — from the world. And when they have so made him "he is ten-fold 
more the child of Hell than he was before." Another faction teaches abnegation 
to the functionaries of a sect as meritorious and taking the place of this grand law of 
existence, love as a basis of morality. But there is still a few, bound by no 
creed, owning no sect or name, who believing in the power of this law, not only 
square their own lives by it, but from day to day, teach it from the sacred desk. 
Having no text-book they fall back on the Bible — the book that alone pretends to 
teach this law, — and yet our school legislators have excluded it from our schools. 
We are forgetting in our boasted enlightenment how much we owe to the promul- 
gation of this law. Is there not fear that we may wander back into barbaric 
night and heathen ignorance, in thus despising the only text-book on morality 
in existence ? In thus putting under a bushel the only lamp of morality ? The 
lamp of life ? Love ? 
What then in the Ught of these truths is the duty of every right thinking 
member of society ? Is it not to demand as a first principle, that this organic 
law of morality, be systematically taught in all our public schools, and colleges ? 
It is what pertains to society. It is part of the communal right, of the individual. 
Not his individual right alone. Education without this is a failure. It is as if a 
man were given a giant's strength and only the knowledge of a child to direct it, 
or a ship with powerful engines to propel but no rudder to guide it. The pos- 
sibilities are all present in every man, the right directing agency only is wanting, 
love — not a sickly sentimentalism, not pity, but love as a power, a power to 
control, enlighten, guide, restrain, and elevate. It has this power. For all we 
possess to-day of civil liberty, under an enhghtened government, has been brought 
about by this means — is the result of the teaching of this law, imperfectly as it has 
been done. Shall we not then, as a people give it a wider scope, a more thor- 
ough and systematic trial ? When the imperfect work has done so much, given 
us so much, shall we stop, content with what we have, or shall we not rather 
yield fully to this all powerful influence which 
