Common Sense Applied to Religion; Or, The Bible and the People

by Catharine Esther Beecher

So in regard to education; although intelligence has diminished the acerbity of sectarianism, it has led to a higher appreciation of educational institutions as an element of sectarian influence and respectability. From this has come the struggle to multiply colleges and female seminaries in each of the several denominations. Each is now acting as a sect in starting new institutions all over the land, that demand immense investments for buildings, apparatus, and endowments, and this without reference to the actual wants of the community. For example, in Indiana, where the low state of common school education makes such institutions least patronized, there are eleven endowed institutions, with an aggregate income from these endowments of $14,000 per annum, besides tuition. In Ohio there are twenty-six colleges and professional schools, with an annual income from endowments of $25,000; and yet, as appears in the public prints, $100,000 has been subscribed in one city in this same state to start another college for the Old School Presbyterians, who are expected to raise as much more among that sect. Besides endowments to support teachers, vast sums are expended in buildings, some of which are standing unused for the purpose for which the money to build them was given. This is a fair specimen of what is transpiring in most of the other states in raising new institutions or increasing the funds of those already started. In this way, two, three, and four colleges are often found as competitors in a section that could properly patronize scarcely one.

After each sect has thus reared an institution, it must then struggle to find pupils, and thus multitudes of young boys, who are to go into future pursuits where such knowledge will be of little or no service, are pressed into a Latin and Greek course, which probably the larger portion of them forsake before it is completed, with little knowledge of ancient literature, and far less of their own mother tongue. The waste of educational benefactions in this way is little realized, while the effect of congregating the young in boarding-school life, away from home and parental influence, is most disastrous.

How can it be otherwise? To take the unformed youth at the most excitable period of the nervous system, at the point where temptations are strongest, and habits of self-control the weakest, away from mothers, sisters, and home influences; herd them promiscuously with good and bad; stimulate the brain to excess; end all the healthful domestic exercise, and what could be expected but just such wrecks of health, morals, home habits, and all that is good and pure, as is constantly going on in such institutions?

If parents could hear the details that have come from mothers and their young sons of the experiences of boarding-school and college life all over the land, especially in reference to that most contaminating and horrible literature and prints that no care can exclude, they would understand only a small part of the evils included in such institutions for the young.

Not only colleges, but female seminaries, and even private schools, are becoming more and more sectarian, as especially patronized by some one denomination, and relying on this for success.

All this sectarian influence in education is, in fact, operating to sustain the Augustinian theories by the pains and penalties that first enforced them; for no teacher of a school, or college, or female seminary could avow a dissent from theories so powerfully sustained, without subjecting himself, his institution, and his sect to attacks from other sects and institutions, as one mode of supplanting a rival.

It was this powerful array of antagonistic influences that for years withheld the author from any public expression of some of the views set forth in this work.

It has been stated in the introduction that, while teaching mental science, in connection with the Bible, to highly gifted minds, an octavo volume was printed, but not published, which embraced the leading features of this work. In that, the principles of reason and interpretation were not applied to the theories of a depraved mental constitution, which at that time were not, to her own mind, satisfactorily solved, but to theories on the character and atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ, where relief was first experienced by the writer.

On taking advice as to the publication of such a work, it became clear that it would probably result in such powerful theological influences as would end a connection with a public institution, and all labors as a teacher.

In obedience to the counsel of friends, it was concluded to go quietly on as an educator, and work out practically all that could be done without innovating on accepted opinions, and wait till time and circumstances should afford more maturity and completeness to the writer's own views; for it was soon perceived that no one ever objected to having children trained exactly according to the author's present views, provided nothing was said against the accepted theological theories. So faithfully has this method been pursued, that it is probable that there is not an individual with whom the writer has been associated as an educator, who will not, for the first time, learn her views on the Augustinian and Calvinistic theories from this work; while, even in her own family circle, though opinions have been expressed freely, all discussions on this subject have been avoided.