pelled labor after imperfect work, the results of failure, school punishments, and public opinion stimulate a proper exercise of personal effort. Social obligations, the yielding of the selfish interest, class and school organizations and interests open wide the door to altruism. Honors, influence, personal pride, and leadership may, under wise suggestion, hold out alluring arms of invitation.

In the curriculum, the study of literature, expressing the struggles, hopes, ambitions, and developing sentiments of the race. furnishes a never empty spring of moral inspiration. The moral tales of fable and Biblical lore, with their definite pictures exercising and cultivating the imagination, drawn from the childhood of the race, and expressing the fundamental virtues of kindness, obedience, filial and parental love, supply both mental and moral sustenance for the younger children. The natural appreciation of the good and great men and women of political history, of commerce and science, of literature and music, their manners, habits, their successes and failures, with their mixture of theoretical and practical standards, related to actual personal needs, may well be used with inspiring and vitalizing force in the later grades; while to the budding soul of adolescence, living again the hopes, ambitions, and sentiments of the race, when the conflicting obligations of self-development and altruism are presented with alluring attractiveness, when emotions are struggling for interpretation and utterance, the varying fields of the world's literature interpret anew the inner life, presenting to the intellect and the imagination complete pictures of the world's idealism and sober facts.

History, with its examples of heroism, patriotism, and devotion, with its pictures of base, selfish, and traitorous lives, constantly demands a weighing of moral values, and shows the permanence of truth, goodness, and moral worth in aiding the progress of the individual and the

race.

Science, with its unending search after truth, with its conformity to known law, its emphasis of necessary cause and effect, its accuracy of thought and statement, induces not only a search for truth, but a conscious belief in its necessity in all the relations of life.

Manual training, emphasizing the dignity of labor, the value of personal effort, the consciousness of creative powers and constructive capacity; gymnastics, bringing the physical system into conscious sympathy and alliance with the mental nature; school gardens, bringing the children back to the heart of Mother Nature; music, touching the deepest springs of emotion and offering most delicate forms of expression; school games, inducing self-control and the necessity both

of proper initiative and subordination,- all have a large value in moral development.

There is still a large field for the direct and formal presentation of moral standards, based upon the age and development of the pupils. The opening exercises of the school may well seize upon some present interest and illuminate it for the day and days to come. At proper crucial periods of school life, the round of common duties and fundamental virtues may be set forth. Under the influence of days devoted to great men and historical events, the possibilities of manhood, and of lives devoted to humanity, country, and God, may well be exalted.

France has developed a complete system of formal instruction in morals and practical ethics, winning a grand prize at the Exposition of 1900. Her effort has been to shift her entire national education from a Catholic to an ethical basis. She has divided her scholars into an infant section from 5 to 7 years; a primary section from 7 to 9 years; an intermediate section from 9 to 11 years; and a junior section from 11 to 13 years, with definite instruction in ethics adapted to the child in the family, the school, the country, and his relation to himself and to his God.

Plato was right when he taught that the problem of education centered in ethics. The greatest teachers have been men of profound moral natures. Their personality has been their greatest possession; by it they have been able not only to quicken mental power, but to give a mighty spiritual uplift. Emerson's saying, "It makes very little difference what you study, but it is in the highest degree important with whom you study," means that, after all, education is a spiritual process; that the mysterious influence of one nature on another is its major factor; and that the atmosphere surrounding the work is in the highest degree important. Text-books may supply the matter of knowledge and of ethics, but the teacher supplies the electric spark, without which all is a lifeless mass.

VII. ELEMENTARY PUBLIC SCHOOLS

THE FOUNDATIONS OF RELIGION AND MORALITY HOW FAR, AND HOW, CAN THE FOUNDATIONS OF RELIGION BE LAID IN THE COMMON SCHOOLS?

PROFESSOR EDWIN D. STARBUCK, PH.D.

EARLHAM COLLEGE, RICHMOND, INDIANA

The controversy has grown acute, in a few of the states and in many communities, over the teaching of religion in the common schools. There is no little anxiety among the friends of religious education, because the law seems to be stepping between religion and the children. I do not believe the anxiety is wellfounded. While I should be the last to advocate the enactment of any measure that would limit the utmost freedom of teachers, it seems to me that the reaction against so-called religious instruction is a fortunate thing if only it disturbs us into an appreciation of some of the more fundamental considerations involved in the situation.

Whether the statement is true or false, I am going to assume, for the sake of having the point at issue clearly before our minds, that such a law exists, and is general in its application, by which the Bible and "religious" teaching of any kind are entirely excluded from the schools; and then ask to what extent the freedom of any devout teacher need be hampered in promoting the spiritual development of her pupils. How far could she, without hedging, or working in any surreptitious way, awaken in her pupils the spirit of religion? My own conviction is that she could keep the spirit and the letter of the law, if she is wise in mind and heart, and still not find her deepest purposes materially curtailed. Without formal religious instruction, what could be done in the schools to arouse the religious impulses and develop the religious life? I would suggest a revision along at least four lines, one of which has reference to the teacher, the second to her methods and to the curriculum, the third to our ideals about religion, and the fourth to the child. The end in view is to hint, however imperfectly, the possibility of a school, the whole of which shall in detail and in its entirety contribute, either directly or indirectly, to the religious life. In these suggestions there is no originality; neither is there in them an impossible dream; for they are only the simple statement of what I have found suggested in the actual experience of good teachers.

I. The ordinary secular school will be primarily a religious institution if the teacher is profoundly religious, cheerful, natural, livable, and busy, to be sure, but having in the midst of it all an emancipated spirit that lives behind the words, speaks through the actions, lends color and quality to the thoughts, and breathes life and health into the atmosphere of the entire school. We are coming to know, as never before, that there is nothing-motive, impulse, thought, inspiration- that is not finding expression in the tone and quality of the whole personality. Physiologists and psychologists are showing constantly that every idea or state of feeling registers itself definitely and in an allpervasive way, though very minutely, in pulse-beat, nerve-tension, and muscular reaction. It is coming to be demonstrably true that out of the heart are the issues of life. There is nothing more pervasive than character. Religion is as catching as wildfire. It is as contagious as disease, or as sin. We knew all this, after a fashion, but shall not have appreciated it at its full worth until the best, maturest, and largestspirited men and women are secured and retained in the teaching profession. There was a time when only the sages were teachers; we stand now at the opposite extreme, when our teachers of children range in age from sixteen years to the unspeakable age of thirty or thirty-five. It is impossible for a teacher to teach what she hasn't got deep down within her heart. This is the consideration of first importance. With the right teacher, alive in mind and pure in heart, the question of keeping the flame of religion burning while the necessary tasks of the school day are performed will solve itself. To secure the proper teachers is in part a matter of selection, and in part it is to be solved along the line suggested above: aspiration toward the higher life is a step in its own realization. If teachers felt their responsibility and their need, and would pray earnestly and often the prayer of Socrates, "Ye gods, make me beautiful within," the end would be much nearer.

2. The second point of revision has reference to the things to be taught, and the method of teaching them. How can a teacher keep from getting lost in the thousand petty details of school life and the countless things she is expected to teach? She can't. Nor should she try. Part of the routine of the school or her own best life will have to be sacrificed, and in the dilemma she had better save her soul and the souls of her pupils. It is a long and sad story how we have mistaken means for ends in education, and are making a great point of mastering the tools of knowledge, instead of concerning ourselves about wisdom. We teach how to read, instead of reading; how to draw, instead of · drawing; how to cipher, instead of doing the actual thing that ciphering

will help us accomplish; and so on. It is as great folly as if a carpenter should busy himself all his life making tools, and then get an inkling at the end of his life that he might have made something worth while with them. A safe rule might be, Teach only that which has some real life-significance, both at the time it is being learned and for later life. Learning merely for the sake of learning is rarely, if ever, excusable; but of learning for the sake of appreciating and enjoying and growing, we can never get too much. Here, I am inclined to believe, the fault is as much with the teacher as with the curriculum. In following the rule suggested above, there is not so much in the school that must of necessity be excluded. The most formal, meaningless subject, under one teacher's presentation, will, in the hands of a real teacher, be suffused with life-significance. I have seen a class in geometry, after some weeks of interpretation of what proofs in general and geometric proofs in particular mean, what relation the subject has to the rest of our thought life and its meaning to the actual interests of men, become so enthused with the subject that occasionally, after some especially neat, clean-cut demonstration of a difficult problem, it would break out in applause as spontaneously as if the demonstration had been the rendering of some work of art-which it really was.

3. The next consideration has to do with our interpretation of this thing we speak of so loosely as religion. It means a variety of things, interpreted in all gradations, from the most crystallized stratum of conventionalized religion up to the highest point in spiritual progress, and all the way from the most intellectualized notions about God and duty to the deepest springs of feeling and conduct. My appeal would be that we read it out more than we do in terms of life-life at its growing points, the life of each in relation to all, and in relation to his highest sense of reality-and in terms of the spirit one carries into these relations. It is exactly this for which Christ came and lived, and it is this for which every great reformer has existed. I have been profoundly impressed, during recent months, in trying to figure out as dispassionately as I could, from the Sermon on the Mount and the parables and sayings of Christ, what his theology was, and what were his "doctrines" of ethics and religion. He lives and speaks with a higher authority than reason. Instead of a theology, one finds an exalted sense of a divine presence, which sometimes, for want of a better name, he called "Father." Instead of a system of ethics, one finds the cup of cold water, a warm, loving heart, and a clear vision that could see the great truths of life reflected in growing seeds and plants and in working men and innocent children. Try it yourself, and I believe you will