But, he says, the children attend the Sunday-school, which supplements the instructions of the weekday-school. True; but every earnest pastor who has any positive creed or doctrine to teach his children will tell you that one or two brief meetings on Sunday are not enough for this purpose. We ourselves are forced to the painful conclusion that the Sunday-school system does not give sufficient control over the children to form in them any earnest Christian character. It is like reserving the salt which should season our food during the week, and taking it all in a dose on Sunday.
The Sunday-school should be diligently used to supply, as far as may be, the lack of religious instruction in the common schools, but that it alone is inadequate to this purpose is shown by the constantly increasing number of our young who follow not the footsteps of their parents in the ways of a Christian life.
The author then, changing his base, argues that intellectual education alone tends to prevent sensuality and crime, and adduces statistics to show that the majority of convicts in our prisons are from the uneducated class. But if he attended to other statistics recently brought to light by Rev. Dr. Todd, Dr. Storer, of Boston, and others, he would discover that sensuality, only more refined, is permeating American society, and that hidden crime is depopulating some of the fairest portions of our land. It is true, perhaps, that those crimes which are taken cognizance of by the police courts may be more numerous among the uneducated, but it is those secret crimes against God and the moral law that corrupt society and endanger a nation's life.
In New England, which the author holds up as the ideal of what the common-school system can produce, physicians testify that immorality and hidden crime prevail to such an extent that the native American stock is literally dying out, the number of deaths far exceeding the number of births. Intellectual culture alone will not preserve American society from corruption, any more than it did pagan Greece and Rome.
The author seems to feel the force of this objection, which, as he says, "is urged with seriousness by men whose purity of motive is above question, and whose personal character gives great weight to their opinions," and admits that "religious teaching does not hold that prominent position in the course of study that it should hold; but he seems forced, like many of his fellow-educators whom we have known, to argue and apologize for the common-school system, because they see no way of securing universal education and at the same time providing for proper religious training. If they turn, however, to the educational systems of France, Austria, or Prussia, they would find the problem solved. Even in Canada, the British Parliament has avoided by its provisions those serious errors under which we labor, and which are making our system daily more and more unpopular.
By "An Act to restore to Roman Catholics in Upper Canada certain rights in respect to Separate Schools," passed May 5th, 1863, they provided that "the Roman Catholic separate schools shall be entitled to a share in the fund annually granted by the legislature of the province for the support of common-schools, and shall be entitled also to a share in all other public grants, investments, and allotments for common-school purposes now made or hereafter to be made by the municipal authorities, according to the average number of pupils attending such school as compared with the whole average number of pupils attending schools in the same city, town, village, or township." (Cap. 5, sec. 20.)
And also that "the Roman Catholic separate schools (with their registers) shall be subject to such inspection as may be directed from time to time by the chief superintendent of public instruction." (Cap. 5, sec. 26.)
Let our separate schools that have been and may be established, in which the children receive a proper religious training, receive their due proportion of the public fund, and by the inspection of a board of education be kept up to the highest standard of secular learning, and the grievances under which we now suffer will be removed.