Living Fountains or Broken Cisterns: An Educational Problem for Protestants

by E. A. Sutherland

Protestants to-day see their children slipping from the fold. Every inducement in the way of entertainments, form, ceremony, and oratory is used to attract the youth to the church, but still the world allures them. Ministers are beginning to search for the reason, and are attributing it to the character of the education now given in our schools; in saying this, they strike at the root of the trouble. Protestantism is dying; the form of godliness, which denies the power thereof, is spreading its dark mantle over the earth. It is in vain that we point to stately edifices or noted divines; if we can not recognize the difficulty, it but proves that we are ourselves under the cloud, and recovery is all but impossible.

We talk of the spread of Christianity; we give of our means for the conversion of the heathen, while our children perish within our very homes. The spirit and power of Elias, which was to accompany the preaching of the kingdom of Christ, was “to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children.” Cries the prophet Joel, “Gather the children, and those that suck the breast.... Let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep between the porch and the altar, and let them say, Spare Thy people, O Lord, and give not Thine heritage [the children] to reproach, that the heathen should rule over them.”

Ministers, fathers, mothers, look to the welfare of your children, or the cause of Protestantism is lost in America. Take up your first, your all-important duty, and give your children a Christian education, and instead of a decline in church membership as now reported, there will be an increase; instead of formalism, there will be life. This will be the means of bringing the heathen to your door, and to a knowledge of the gospel.

“Lift up thine eyes round about, and behold; all these gather themselves together, and come to thee. As I live, saith the Lord, thou shalt surely clothe thee with them all, as with an ornament, and bind them on thee, as a bride doeth. For thy waste and thy desolate places and the land of thy destruction, shall even now be too narrow by reason of the inhabitants.... The children which thou shalt have, after thou hast lost the other, shall say again in thine ears, the place is too strait for me; give place to me that I may dwell. Then shalt thou say in thine heart, Who hath begotten me these, seeing I have lost my children, and am desolate?... Who hath brought up these? Behold, I was left alone; these, where had they been? Thus saith the Lord God, Behold! I will lift up Mine hand to the Gentiles, and set up My standard to the people; and they shall bring thy sons in their arms, and thy daughters shall be carried upon their shoulders. And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers; they shall bow down to thee with their faces toward the earth, and lick up the dust of thy feet.... For I will contend with him that contendeth with thee, and I will save thy children.”[190]

How will He save the children?—“All thy children shall be taught of the Lord.” When will the Gentiles come bringing their children to supply the places of those now lost?—When Protestants can show to the Gentiles that they have a system of education which is free from the errors now so prevalent; when they can teach the Gentiles the truth.

“Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord. Enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of thine habitations: spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes; for thou shalt break forth on the right hand and on the left; and thy seed shall inherit the Gentiles.”[191]

When shall these things be? The same chapter of Isaiah answers. When “all thy children shall be taught of the Lord.” When Protestants educate according to the principles of true Protestantism, then will the words of the same prophet, recorded in the sixtieth chapter, be fulfilled. “Arise, be enlightened, for thy light cometh.... The Gentiles shall come to thy light and kings to the brightness of thy rising.... Thy sons shall come from far, and thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side.”[192]

Christ came, fulfilling in every particular the prophecies quoted. “As thou hast sent Me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world,” are the words of Christ to His church. As Christ was a teacher, so that church which does the work which the Christian church must do, will have a system of education, and its members will be educators indeed.

Of Christ as a teacher it is written, “He raised Himself above all others whom millions to-day regard as their grandest teachers. Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed, to say nothing of Greek and Roman sages, are not worthy to be compared with Christ.” Says Paroz: “Jesus Christ, in founding a new religion, has laid the foundation of a new education in the bosom of humanity.”