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conditions of humanity? Has it any reference to a hereafter, or shall its imperative norms be based on the present life only, and on the dictates of the philosophers of the day? Roman Catholics, of course, believe firmly that there is no viable morality without religion, i. e., without doctrinal convictions and apart from the sanction and co-operation of the Church. They could not accept as final and authoritative hand-books of morality constructed in the sense and temper of Theism or of an artificial and colorless Christianity, without a foundation in facts, and therefore without influence over the hearts of man. I may add that the large proportion of Hebrews in the public schools of our great cities is making it daily more difficult to provide any manual of religion and morality that shall satisfy the general Christian conscience and not offend a people which does not accept, as such, any principles of Christian belief or life.

The impossibility of an immediate co-operation seems still greater when we come to consider the Teacher. The teacher is the necessary interpreter of all things taught, the very pivot of the school. Whatever formulæ of religion or morality we might, hypothetically, agree on, would have to be explained and illustrated by the living voice of the teacher. The differences of belief would surely manifest themselves here, and all the more plainly in proportion to the measure in which the teacher lived out in his person the doctrines he had accepted. The religion of the Catholic teacher is a highly authoritative religion, whereas the Protestant teacher would be free to assert an absolute right of individual assent to or dissent from any and all doctrinal elements in the religious or moral teaching that was before him. The Catholic teachers would practically interpret in a like sense the doctrines of religion and morality, for they accept them from the visible and authoritative Church, but there can be imagined no way by which Protestant teachers would surely teach at all times an identical system of religion and morality.

There is one other reason, perhaps not quite so insuperable, why an immediate co-operation in religious education is impossible between Catholics and Protestants. I refer to what may be called the schoolatmosphere. In our modern life, for many reasons, the school has come to stand in loco parentis. For this and other reasons, we believe that the entire school, in all its elements and workings, should exercise a continuous influence of a religious and moral character. In the school the child should imbibe, at all the pores of its spiritual being, the essentials of religious conviction and moral strength. It should live in a kind of aura that would subtly and unconsciously permeate all its faculties

and impress upon them a certain bent and coloring that would predispose the child habitually toward the influences of religion and the moral law. In a word, everything about the school should be calculated to evoke and confirm those natural but weak germs of religiosity and ethical sentiments that are in the heart of every child, but only too easily get crushed or crippled amid ruder contending forces. We find in the public schools too marked and exclusive an attention to the material and the temporal interests of life, the purely transitory and inferior elements of education. We are still very un-Rousseau-like in our views of early mental formation, and believe yet that the child cannot be trained like the lower animals, that it has predispositions of many kinds, and that inherited traditions, ancestral religious fidelity, the venerable Zucht und Sitte of centuries, are valuable helps in the positive and negative manipulation of the child-mind. I might add that as the religious sense and the moral temperament grow gradually in the child, and as we hold both intimately connected with the positive teachings and the historical experience of Catholicism, we deem it of utmost importance to familiarize the child from infancy with the institutions and life of the Church, with her models of conduct and faith and with her wise views and appreciations of many things that have a bearing on religion and morality.

II. But if an immediate co-operation be impossible in the matter of religious education between Catholics and Protestants, is there no form of mediate or less close co-operation that would be acceptable? As a matter of fact, such a co-operation does exist in Germany and Austria, in Ireland, and elsewhere. The schools are national and common, the pupils, Catholic and Protestant, attend the same scholastic courses, and are taught by the same teachers, who are legally appointed without regard to religious preference, and after fulfilment of all civil requirements. But the religious instruction is furnished according to the expressed wishes of the parents, by ministers of their faith, at fixed hours, and all children are required to attend the instructions of their own religious denomination. In some places, as at Frankfort, there are occasionally two professors of history, so that in this important matter the delicacy of the child's conscience need not be violated. I mention these facts to show that in places where the political and social contact of Catholics and Protestants has been and is very close, ways have been found of co-operation for the common welfare in the matter of religious and moral education. I know that our political conditions differ profoundly from those of the Old World, and that compromises can be offered and accepted and worked out there in good faith which

would here meet with great difficulties. In all those delicate questions that belong to the borderland between the Roman Catholic Church and civil society, her supreme authority will always be found quite moderate and conciliatory, bent on saving the essentials of Catholic interests, but willing to go a long way in order to encourage and confirm national and municipal concord and amity in all temporal matters.

III. I take it for granted, however, that in the present temper of the great majority of our American people, we shall all have to go on as we are going, thankful that there is nothing in our written constitutions nor in the habits of our people to interfere with the natural and rightful liberty of the parent-citizen to educate his children as he sees fit, without any interference from a doctrinaire bureaucracy. But even amid these conditions I believe that much can be done in the sense of co-operation in religious education, though it must necessarily be of a remote and preparatory character.

We can all help, within our own lines, to bring about the universal recognition that religion and morality are necessary elements of a proper education; that they must be taught from early childhood, and that both represent something positive and permanent, indispensable to the welfare of individuals and states.

We can emphasize our many points of agreement among the broad and fundamental considerations that confirm this general thesis of the great need of scholastic reform in the sense of religious and moral education.

We can habituate ourselves to recognize a common peril in a deChristianized American soul equipped, as man never was before, with all the powers and opportunities that our mighty state has called forth and developed, or rather has only begun to call forth and develop. The eyes of humanity are fixed with a certain awe upon the American citizen as upon one who in a certain sense holds the secret of the world's future. Will he accept and teach the philosophy of Christ, or will he follow after the refurbished secularism of the past, and prove unequal to the splendid call that is ringing in his ears?

We can teach with more earnestness the common and traditional Christian doctrines concerning God, the soul, the moral law, sin, moral responsibility, prayer, divine providence, the divinity of Jesus Christ, and the traditional character of the Scriptures. We can insist upon the worth of a Christian discipline of character, even for the affairs of this world, on the sacredness and seriousness of human life, on the Christian constitution of the family, on the duties of parents, in general and in detail, on the obligation of a public worship and the Sunday rest.

We can instruct ourselves first, and then instruct others, on the true and solid reasons why abortion, suicide, divorce, corrupt conduct in business and politics, inordinate greed of wealth and distinction, personal arrogance, and contempt of the poor and lowly, are wrong, and conducive to the detriment of the state and society.

Finally, we can beseech the Holy Spirit to enlighten us all more and more, to bring home to the multitude the evils of an education that tends to forget or exclude God from His world, and to confirm human pride in the false persuasion that man is himself the sole measure and end of all things, that good and evil are really indifferent, and that the only law of religion and morality is an opportunism that borrows its criteria and its motives from the actual phenomena of society, without any concern for a future, a judgment, or a retribution.

THE BIBLE AND GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS IN THE

PHILIPPINES

REV. SIMEON GILBERT, D.D.

FORMER EDITOR THE ADVANCE, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

Is the Bible, in some form, either as a whole, or in some appropriately chosen body of Bible Selections, taken from both Old Testament and New, needed in the new system of public schools in the Philippines, in order to the creation of a duly intelligent, moral, freedom-loving, lawabiding, trustworthy native citizenship? In considering this question, it is necessary to note carefully and put together a number of facts, among which are the following:

There is, of course, no one who does not feel that in our vast new possessions in the Philippines we face a tremendous proposition, and no easy task; the definite aim being nothing less than to make over and to make, among the millions of native peoples there, under the one American flag, a new nation.

The meaning of the "white man's burden we are certain to realize more and more. Clearly enough, there will be necessity for bringing into use the most elemental and potential means and agencies that can make for personal character and civic manhood. The political experimentation and exploitation, the past four hundred years, ought to prove convincingly instructive, showing not more what to do, than what not to do.

To begin with, there is, of course, no question about the principle of the entire separation of church and state. That, happily, is fundamental to the American government. And we shall stand by it wherever the flag goes. This means freedom, protection, no special privilege, and equal chance for all. But this distinctive American principle is not a bugbear to frighten us out of our common sense, or a bugaboo to make us silly.

The German state policy, that whatever we would have appear in the state must first be put into the school, is exactly as pertinent in the Philippines as it has been in Germany itself, or in America.

But as to the school, of what sort must it be? To build the hope of any real regeneration of such a people on a basis of mere intellectual sharpening, ignoring the higher relationships of the human soul, and the moral imperative of spiritual ideals, would be equally short-sighted and futile.