“1. For infancy, the school should be the mother’s knee.
“2. For childhood the school should be the vernacular school.
“3. For boyhood, the Latin school or gymnasium.
“4. For youth, the university and travel.
“A mother should exist in every house, a vernacular school in every hamlet and village, a gymnasium in every city, and a university in every kingdom or in every province.... The mother and the vernacular school embrace all the young of both sexes. The Latin school gives a more thorough education to those who aspire higher than the workshop; while the university trains up the teachers and the learned men of the future, that our churches, schools, and states may never lack suitable leaders.”
In the system known as Christian education the division is about the same, the years of student life extending perhaps to thirty instead of twenty-four, with this division: the first ten years are spent in the home school; from ten to fifteen in the church school; from fifteen to twenty in the industrial school, and the years from twenty to twenty-five or even thirty are devoted to study and active work in the training school for workers.
Should Protestants educate?
The time now is when those who are true Protestants will demand Christian education, and when no sacrifice will be considered too great for the accomplishment of that object. The prophecy of Zechariah, recorded in the ninth chapter, gives the words of God concerning the contest to take place near the close of time between the sons of Greece and the sons of Zion. “Turn you to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope; even to-day do I declare that I will render double unto thee; when I have bent Judah for Me, filled the bow with Ephraim, and raised up thy sons, O Zion, against thy sons, O Greece.”
Greece is recognized in the Scriptures as emblematic of worldly wisdom,[189] but by that wisdom the world knew not God; in fact, by that wisdom the world was led away from God. God will, then, raise up the sons of Zion, the representatives of His wisdom—the divine philosophy—against the sons of Greece, or the students of the wisdom of the world; and in the final conflict, when truth wins, it will be evident that those who are numbered with the victors have forsaken the wisdom of Greece for the wisdom of God. It is not theory, but the most solemn fact, that the preparation for a life with God demands that we and our children receive a far different education than has been offered in the past. If we wish the highest culture, if we long for soul development, our education must be spiritual in nature; we must leave the low, turbid waters of the valley for the snow waters of Lebanon. This is Christian education.