"In common with all good citizens, we rejoice in the progress of the cause of popular education in our land. The intelligence of our citizenship is a bulwark to the country. But unless the education of the future citizen is complete and symmetrical, the body politic becomes a body partly of iron and partly of potter's clay. The education of the head and the hand without the heart is not enough.
"The popular education has no place for the heart in all of its splendid equipment. This is not a reflection on the fine system. It is merely the statement of a melancholy fact. The average state school, high or low, is absolutely colorless as to religion. Even the morality that is taught is not the morality of the Christian religion, but of philosophical ethics that differ but little from the ethics of the pagan.
"Our state schools have no place for the God of the Bible, nor for the Bible of the only living and true God. The poetry of Homer and Horace are sufficiently honored, but the finer poetry of Moses, Job and David are unknown in the courses of study of our schools, except now and then as specimens of Oriental song. The wise sayings of Plato and Socrates are reckoned worthy of profound study, while the vastly greater sayings of our Lord Jesus and Paul are unknown. Cicero and Demosthenes are commended as great models of public address, while Isaiah and Ezekiel are seldom mentioned in the four years of college life, or in the longer years of the secondary schools.
"That education is incomplete and inadequate for life's best, which does not include the whole man, and put first things first. If the heart be not educated and the conscience be not enlightened, the best trained hand may strike in a wrong manner, and the best trained mind pronounce wrong judgments.... Our citizenship must be Christian if it is to promote a Christian civilization."
IV
THE AMERICAN NEGRO
RELIGIOUS INSTINCT.—LOYAL AND PATRIOTIC.—THE FREEDMAN.—HOMELESS AND ILLITERATE WHEN EMANCIPATED.—FIRST SCHOOLS DURING THE CIVIL WAR.—FREE NEGROES AND COLLEGE GRADUATES.—50th ANNIVERSARY.
"All nations whom thou hast made shall come and worship before thee and glorify thy name." David.
RELIGIOUS INSTINCT
In commendation of woman's loyalty and sense of obligation to our Lord Jesus, it has been said of her, "She was last at his cross and first at his grave, she staid longest there and was soonest here." In recognition of this fact when he rose from the dead he appeared first to one of them, Mary Magdalene.