The British Government has likewise adopted the same principle of public education for the Catholics and the Protestant dissenters of England; while, with her traditional and malignant hatred of the Irish people, she still denies them the justice which she extends to all of her other subjects, at home or in the colonies, even to the Hindoos and Mohammedans of her Indian empire!
And thus the most powerful and enlightened nations have decided that Christian civilization cannot be maintained upon pagan ideas; and that the safety of every commonwealth depends upon the Christian education of the people. They have also clearly seen that doctrines, discipline, morals, and "the religious atmosphere" must be kept united, and made to penetrate and surround the school at all times; and that, however greatly the Christian denominations may differ from each other, or even err in their belief, it is far better for society that their youth should be instructed in some form of Christian doctrine, than be left to perish in the dreary and soul-destroying wastes of deism. Experience has proved to them that moral teaching, with biblical illustrations, as the piety of Joseph, the heroism of Judith, the penitence of David, will not suffice to establish the Christian faith in young hearts, or to quiet the doubts of inquiring minds. The subtle Gibbon, mocking the cross of Christ, will confront the testimony of the martyrs with the heroes of pagan history. Voltaire did the same for the French youth of the last century, to their destruction. No. The experience of wise governments is this: that morals must be based upon faith, and faith made efficient in deeds of practical virtue; for faith worketh by charity. And another experience is this, which is best given in the very words of the eminent Protestant statesman and historian, M. Guizot: "In order to make popular education truly good and socially useful, it must be fundamentally religions. I do not simply mean by this, that religious instruction should hold its place in popular education and that the practices of religion should enter into it; for a nation is not religiously educated by such petty and mechanical devices; it is necessary that national education should be given and received in the midst of a religious atmosphere, and that religions impressions and religious observances should penetrate into all its parts. Religion is not a study or an exercise to be restricted to a certain place and a certain hour; it is a faith and a law, which ought to be felt everywhere, and which after this manner alone can exercise all its beneficial influence upon our minds and our lives." The meaning of which is, that not a moment of the hours of school should be left without the religious influence. It is the constant inhalation of the air which preserves our physical vitality. It is the "religious atmosphere" which supports the young soul. Religion cannot be made "a study or an exercise to be restricted to a certain place and a certain hour." It will not do to devote six days in the week to science, and to depend upon the Sunday-school for the religious training of the child. M. Guizot is right. The enlightened governments of Europe have accepted his wisdom and reduced it to practice in their great national school-systems.
Now, the Catholics of the United States have said no more than that; have asked no more than that; and yet, a wild cry of anger has been raised against them at times, as though they were the avowed enemies of all popular education. They pay their full quota of the public taxes which create the school-fund, and yet they possess, to-day, in proportion to their wealth and numbers, more parochial schools, seminaries, academies, colleges, and universities, established and sustained exclusively by their own private resources, than any other denomination of Christians in this country! Certainly this is no evidence of hostility to education! And why have they made these wonderful efforts, these unprecedented sacrifices? It is because they believe in the truth uttered by M. Guizot. It is because they believe in the truth established by all history. It is because they believe in the truth accepted and acted upon by enlightened men and governments of this age. It is because they know that revealed religion is to human science what eternity is to time. It is because they know that the salvation of souls is more precious to Christ than the knowledge of all the astronomers. It is because they know that the welfare of nations is impossible without God. And yet, they fully understand how religion has called science to her side as an honored handmaid; how learning, chastened by humility, conduces to Christian advancement; how the knowledge of good and evil (the fruit of the forbidden tree) may yet be made to honor God, when the sanctified soul rejects the evil and embraces the good. Therefore the Catholic people desire denominational education, as it is called.
That is the general view of the question; but there is a particular view, not to be overlooked, and which we will now briefly consider.
The most marked distinction between pagan and Christian society is to be found in the relations which the state bears to the family. Scarcely was the Lacedaemonian boy released from his mother's apron-string, when the state seized him with an iron hand. The state was thenceforth his father and his mother. The sanctities and duties of the family were annihilated. Body and soul, he belonged to the Moloch of Power. Private conscience was no more than a piece of coin in circulation; it was a part of the public property. Christ restored the family as it existed in Adam and Eve. Christian civilization denies that the state can destroy the family. The family is primary; the father the head; the mother the helpmate; the children in subjection, and for whom the parents shall give an account to the Father in heaven. The Christian state has no authority, by divine or human appointment, to invade this trust. It has, therefore, no mission either to coerce conscience or to dictate the education of it. It is the duty of the state in every way to facilitate, but it cannot arbitrarily control the mental and moral training of the people's children. That right and that responsibility are domestical, and belong to the parent.
Now, the Catholic parent is aware that there are between his creed and all others the widest and most irreconcilable differences, and that it is impossible to open the New Testament, at almost any page, without forthwith encountering the prime difficulty. To read the Bible, without note or comment, to young children, is to abandon them to dangerous speculation, or to leave them dry and barren of all Christian knowledge. In mixed schools there is no other recourse; because it is impossible to make any comment upon any doctrinal teaching of Christ and his apostles, without trenching upon the conscientious opinions of some one or other of the listeners. "The Father and I are one;" "The Father is greater than I;" here at once we have the Unitarian and the Trinitarian at a dead-lock!" This is my body;" "It is the spirit which quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing;" here we have the primitive Lutheran, who believed in the real presence, (consubstantially,) and his Calvinistic coadjutor in reform squarely at issue! "Unless you be born again of water and the Holy Ghost," etc.; here we have the Baptist and the Quaker very seriously divided in opinion. Nevertheless, widely as they differ the one from the other, there is a fundamental assimilation between all the Protestant sects, which may render it possible for them to unite in one educational organization; and yet, we find many of the most enlightened and earnest among the Protestant clergy of America now zealously advocating the denominational system, such as we find in the European countries above referred to. They believe that education should be distinctly based upon doctrinal religion; and they are liberal enough to insist, that, by natural right, as well as by the constitutional guarantees of our free country, no doctrine adverse to the faith of a parent may lawfully be forced or surreptitiously imposed upon his child. It is well known, however, that, between the Catholic faith and all Protestant creeds, there is a gulf which cannot be bridged over. It would, therefore, be simply impossible to adopt any religious teaching whatever in mixed schools without at once interfering with Catholic conscience. No such teaching is attempted, as a general rule, we believe, in the public schools of the United States; and hence we have only a vague announcement of moral precepts, the utter futility and barrenness of which we have already alluded to. Catholics, agreeing with very many enlightened and zealous Protestants, believe that secular education administered in that way is not only vain, but eminently pernicious; that it is fast undermining the Christian faith of this nation; that it is rapidly filling the land with rationalism; that it is destroying the authority of the Holy Scriptures; that it is educating men who prefix "Reverend" and affix "D.D." to their names, the more effectually to preach covert infidelity to Christian congregations; that, instead of the saving morality of the gospel of Christ, which rests upon revealed mysteries and supernatural gifts, it is offering us that same old array of the natural virtues or qualities which pierced, like broken reeds, the sides of all heathen nations. And more than this, Catholics know by painful experience, that history cannot be compiled, travels written, poetry, oratory, or romance inflicted upon a credulous public, without the stereotyped assaults upon the doctrines, discipline, and historical life of their church. From Walter Scott to Peter Parley, and from Hume, Gibbon, and Macaulay, to the mechanical compilers of cheap school-literature, it is the same story, told a thousand times oftener than it is refuted; so that the English language, for the last two centuries, may be said, without exaggeration, to have waged war against the Catholic Church. Indeed, so far as European history is considered, the difficulty must always be insurmountable; since it would always be impossible for the Catholic and Protestant to accept the same history of the Reformation or of the Papal See, or the political, social, and moral events resulting from or in any degree connected with those two great centres and controlling causes. Who could write a political history of Christendom for the last three hundred years and omit all mention of Luther and the Pope? And how is any school compendium of such history to be devised for the use of the Catholic and Protestant child alike? And if history be philosophy teaching by example, shall we expel it from our educational plan altogether? Or shall we oblige the Protestant child to study the Catholic version of history, and vice-versa? Certainly, it is quite as just and politic to oblige the one as the other! Shall the "majority" control this? Who gave "majority" any such power or right? With us, the "majority" controls the "state;" and we have seen that the "state" becomes a usurper when it attempts this! We are quite sure that, if the Catholics were the "majority;" in the United States, and were to attempt such an injustice, our Protestant brethren would cry out against it, and appeal to the wise and liberal examples of Prussia and England, France and Austria! Now, is it not always as unwise, as it is unjust, to make a minority taste the bitterness of oppression? Men governed by the law of divine charity will bear it meekly, and seek to return good for evil; but all men are not docile; and majorities change sides rapidly and often in this fleeting world! Is it not wiser and more politic, even in mere regard to social interests, that all institutions, intended for the welfare of the people, should be firmly based upon exact and equal justice? This would place them under the protection of fixed habit, which in a nation is as strong as nature; and it would save them from the mutations of society. The strong of one generation may be the weak of the next; and we see this occurring with political parties within the brief spaces of presidential terms. Hence we wisely inculcate moderation and justice in political majorities, under the law of retribution.
Profoundly impressed with these views, and impelled by this commanding sense of duty, our Catholic people have created a vast network of schools over the country, at a price which the world knows little of—the sacrifice which the poor man makes, who curtails the wheaten loaf that he may give to his child the spiritual bread! Ah! how many humble cottages and dreary tenement-houses could testify to that! There are six millions of them here now; and still they come, from the deserted hearths beyond the seas. They are upright, industrious, and love the new land like the old! In war, they shoulder the musket; in peace, they are found filling every avenue of labor and enterprise. They contribute millions to the public revenue, and hundreds of millions to the productive industry of the country. Their own welfare and the highest interests of the country demand that their children and their children's children should be well instructed in secular learning, and thoroughly grounded in moral and religious knowledge. As we have shown, they cannot avail themselves of the public school system, as now organized, though they contribute largely to its support by their taxes. They do not desire to interfere with that system, as it seems at present to meet the wants, or at least the views, of their Protestant fellow-citizens; and they are, therefore, not "opposed to the common schools" in the sense in which they have been represented to be. They simply ask that they may be allowed to participate in the only way open to them, that is, by the apportionment to them of a ratable part of the fund, in aid of their existing schools, and of such others as their numbers, in any given locality, may properly enable them to establish, subject to the limited supervision of the state, as we have before explained. We need go no further than Canada to witness this system operating harmoniously and to the best advantage. The argument generally used against it is, that this would destroy the unity and efficiency of the whole. Why is it not so in Prussia, Austria, France, England, and the British Colonies? Besides, the Catholic populations in this country are very much aggregated, as in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Brooklyn, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, and in the large agricultural settlements throughout the North-Western States. Certainly, in such localities there could be no difficulty. It is contemplated by the school law that all these are to be educated. Then, why can they not be permitted to organize separate schools, as in the countries referred to? Such organization would be an integral part of the whole system; and the cost would be precisely the same. In fact, we learn from the Reports of Assistant Superintendents Jones and Calkins, made to Hon. S. S. Randall, the City Superintendent, and also from his Report made to the Hon. Board of Education, in December, 1866, that the school room provided in the city of New York (especially in the primary department) is altogether inadequate; and yet we know that tens of thousands of Catholic children could easily be cared for, if the means were afforded those who, even now, with the scantiest resources, are erecting parochial schools all over the city.
It would be impossible in a brief article to enter into details. Our purpose has been rather to set this question before a liberal public in its great leading aspects, as we are quite willing to trust to the wisdom and experience of our legislators to devise the proper plan and specifications. They will be at no loss for precedents. The statute-books of half a dozen countries may be consulted profitably. All we ask is, that this momentous question may be candidly considered and justly and generously disposed of. We hope that the day has gone by when such a question as this shall be met with passionate declamation or the obsolete cry of "no popery." Disraeli has failed to stem the tide of popular reform in England by reviving the insane clamor of Lord George Gordon. The world has outgrown such narrow bigotry. Vital questions, affecting the conscience and the rights of multitudes of men, and deeply involving the welfare of nations, must henceforth be settled by calm and just decisions. Christendom will tolerate nothing else now. And surely, this free and wise Republic will not be the last to put into practice those principles of equality before the law, justice, and generous confidence in human nature, which it published to all the down-trodden nationalities of the earth, almost a century ago, over the signatures of Hancock, Livingston, and Carroll of Carrollton.