Three solutions have been suggested: 1. The first is to exclude the Bible and all religious teaching, or recognition, in any way, shape, or manner, of religion, from the public schools. This is the infidel or secular solution, and, so far as Catholics are concerned, is no solution at all. It is simple mockery. What we demand is, not that religion be excluded from the schools, but schools in which we can teach freely and fully our own religion to our own children. It is precisely these purely secular schools, in which all education is divorced from religion—from the faith, precepts, services, and discipline of the church, as well as education combined with a false religion—that we oppose. Nor will this solution satisfy the more respectable Protestant denominations, as is evident from the tenacity with which they insist on reading the Bible in the schools. They do not believe any more than we do in the utility, or even practicability, of divorcing what is called secular learning from religion. All education, they hold, as well as we, that is not religious, is necessarily anti-religious. This is a case in which there is and can be no neutrality. We find this conclusively shown by some remarks in The Christian World before us, credited to Professor Tayler Lewis, the most learned and able thinker we are acquainted with among our Protestant contemporaries. The professor's remarks are so true, so sensible, and so much to our purpose, that, though not so brief as we could wish, our readers will hardly fail to thank us for transcribing them:
"Let us test this specious plea of neutrality. What does it imply? If carried strictly out to the exclusion of every thing religious, or having a religious tendency, it must consistently demand a like exclusion of every thing that in the least manifests the opposite tendency, under whatever specious disguises it may be veiled. It does not alter the case in the least that opinions, regarded as irreligious, or as undermining or in any way weakening the grounds of belief, take to themselves the specious names of literature, or politics, or political economy, or phrenology, or the philosophy of history. No such sham pass-words should give to Buckle and Combe admittance where Butler and Chalmers are shut out. Every thing that makes it less easy for the child to believe his catechism, 'taught at home,' as they say, is a break of the supposed concordat. The mere objection is to be heeded. It is enough that things seem so to serious men, as capable of correct reasoning as any on the other side; or that it is the opinion, the prejudice, if any choose so to call it, of a devout ignorance. The thoughtful religious man might be willing to forego his objection if there were or could be real impartiality. He might trust a true moral and religious training as fully able to counteract any thing of an opposite tendency. But to let in the enemy, and then take away the weapon of defence—this is a neutrality hard to be understood.
"Now, there can be no doubt of the fact that there is admitted into our schools, our colleges, our educational libraries, into the reading-rooms connected with them, much that is thus deemed irreligious in its tendency—at least, by the holders of our stricter creeds. There is much that is silently alienating the minds of their children from the doctrines held sacred by their fathers. We might go further: there is much that tends to undermine all religious belief, even of the freest cast. What young man can have his mind filled with the atheistical speculations of Mill and Spencer, or be exposed to the uncounteracted theories of Darwin and Huxley, and yet retain unimpaired his belief in a providence as taught by Christ—a providence that 'numbers the very hairs of our heads'—or listen as before to the prayer that ascends from the family altar? These writers profess a kind of theism, it is said; but wherein, as far as any moral power is concerned, does it differ from a belief in quadratic equations, or the dogmas of heat and magnetism?
"The matter, as we have stated it, would be too plain for argument were it not for those magical words, secular and sectarian, that some are so fond of using. 'The state knows no religion,' they say; it is wholly 'a private concern' between the individual and his Maker. 'The state knows no God.' They wonder the zealous bigot cannot see how clear this makes every thing. If he would only assent to propositions so easy, so self-evident, we should have peace. But set these confident logicians to define what they mean by terms so fluently employed, or ask them to show us how the state can keep clear of all action, direct or indirect, for or against an interest so vital as religion, so all-pervading, so intimately affecting every other, and how soon they begin to stammer! What is secular? The one who attempts to define it would perhaps begin with a negative. It is that which has no connection with religion; no aspects, no relations, no tendencies, no suggestions, beyond this world, or, the narrowest view of it, this age or seculum. Now, let him apply it to particular branches of education. There is the learning of the alphabet, spelling, reading. But what shall the child read? It would be very difficult to find a mere reading-book—unless its contents were an empty gabble, like the nonsense Latin verses of some schools—that would not somewhere, and in some way, betray moral or immoral, religious or irreligious ideas, according to the judgment of some minds. But let us waive this, and go on. Arithmetic is secular. Geography is secular; though we have seen things under the head of physical geography that some classes of religionists might object to as betraying a spirit hostile to the idea of the earth's creation in any form. But go on. Including the pure mathematics, as being pure mathematics and nothing else, we have about got to the end of our definition. No thinking man would pretend that the departments of life and motion, chemistry, dynamics, physiology, could be studied apart from a higher class of ideas. But secularity would interfere here in a very strange way. When these roads of knowledge thus tend upward toward the eternal light, it would shut down the gate and eject the book. Natural philosophy, as taught by Newton and Kepler, gets beyond secularity. When, on the other hand, after the manner of Humboldt, Lamarck, and Darwin, its progress is in the direction of the eternal darkness, the study of it becomes entirely unsectarian; it violates no rights of conscience!
"In other departments, it is still more difficult to set the secular bound. History, the philosophy of history, political philosophy, psychology, ethics, however strong the effort to dereligionize them, do all, when left to their proper expansion, spurn any such bounds. Art, too, when wholly secularized; poetry stripped of its religious ideality; how long would they resist such a narrowing, suffocating process? A lower dogma was never maintained than this of a wholly secular education, or one more utterly impracticable. The subject must inevitably die under the operation, and religion must come back again into our schools and colleges, to save them from inanity and extinction.
"There may be stated here some reasons why this plea of neutrality, though so false, is yet so specious and misleading. It arises from the fact that the statement of moral, religious, and theological ideas demands clear and positive language. The hostile forms, on the other hand, are disguised under vague and endlessly varying negations. They are Protean, too, in their appellations. They take to themselves the names of literature, art, philosophy, reform. This procedure shows itself in reading-books intended for our primary schools; in text-books prepared for the higher institutions; in essays and periodicals that strew the tables of reading-rooms attached to our colleges and academies; and, above all, in the public lecturing, male and female, which may be said to have become a part of our educational system. For example, should the writer of this attempt to explain before such an audience 'the doctrines of grace,' as they are called, or that unearthly system of ideas which can be traced through the whole line of the church—patristic, Roman, and Protestant—in their production of a strong unearthly character, then would be immediately heard the cry of bigotry, or the senseless yell of church and state. And now for the opposing 'dogmas,' as they really are, notwithstanding all their disguises. They make their entrance under endlessly varied forms. Pantheism has free admittance; but that is not dogmatic—it calls itself philosophy. In some lecture on progress, or history, the most essential of these old 'doctrines of grace' may be sneeringly ignored or covertly assailed; but that is literature. Darwinism is expounded, with its virtual denial of any thing like creation; or Huxleyism, which brings man out of the monkey, and the monkey out of the fungus; that is science. Or it may be the whining nonsense which glorifies the nineteenth century at the expense of the far honester eighteenth, and talks so undogmatically of the deep 'yearning' for something better—that is, the 'coming faith.' And so goes on this exhibition of impartiality, with its exclusion of every thing dogmatic and theological."
Neither Catholics nor Protestants who believe at all in religion will consent to be taxed to support infidel, pantheistic, or atheistic education; and all so-called purely secular education is really nothing else. The temporal separated from the eternal, the universe from its Creator, is nothing, and can be no object of science. The first suggested solution must then be abandoned, and not be entertained for a moment by the state, unless it is bent on suicide; for the basis of the state itself is religion, and is excluded in excluding all religious ideas and principles.
2. The second solution suggested is to adopt in education the voluntary system, as we do in religion, and leave each denomination to maintain schools for its own children at its own expense. We could accept this solution, as Catholics, without any serious objection; but we foresee some trouble in disposing of the educational funds held by several of the States in trust for common schools, academies, and colleges, and in determining to whom shall belong the school-houses, and academy and college buildings and fixtures, erected, in whole or in part, at the public expense. Besides, this would break up the whole public school system, and defeat the chief end it contemplates—that of providing a good common education for all the children of the land, especially the children of the poorer classes. Catholics, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Episcopalians would establish and support schools, each respectively for their own children; but some other denominations might not, and the infidels, and that large class called nothingarian, most certainly would not. Only they who believe in some religion see enough of dignity in man, or worth in the human soul, to make the sacrifice of a penny for education. The Darwins, the Huxleys, the Lyells, and other unbelieving scientists of the day, were never educated in schools, academies, colleges, or universities founded by infidels. They graduated from schools founded by the faith and piety of those who believed in God, in creation, in Christ, in the life and immortality brought to light in the Gospel; and if they have devoted themselves to severe studies, it has not been from love of science, but in the ignoble hope of being able to dispense, in the explanation of nature, with God the Creator, and to prove that man is only a monkey developed, a condensed gas, or, as Dr. Cabanis defined him, simply "a digestive tube open at both ends."
Moreover, though we deny the competency of the state to act as educator, we hold that its duty toward both religion and education is something more than negative. We hold that it has positive duties to perform in regard to each. It cannot decide what religion its citizens shall accept and obey; but it is bound to protect its citizens in the free and full enjoyment of the religion they adopt for themselves. We cannot, for the sake of carrying a point which we hold to be true and certain to be of great importance, ally ourselves with infidels, or lay down as a universal principle what our church has never approved, and what we may in the change of the tide be ourselves obliged to disavow. The state, with all its powers and functions, exists for religion, and is in all its action subordinated to the eternal end of man. As the church teaches, and as the New England Puritans held, this world is never the end; it is only a means to an end infinitely above itself. We will never dishonor truth so much as to concede for a moment that the state is independent of religion; that it may treat religion, as a coördinate power with itself, with indifference, or look down upon it with haughty contempt, as beneath its notice, or to be pushed aside if it comes in its way. It is as much bound to consult the spiritual end of man, and to obey the law of God, which overrides all other laws, as is the individual.
We, of course, deny the competency of the state to educate, to say what shall or shall not be taught in the public schools, as we deny its competency to say what shall or shall not be the religious belief and discipline of its citizens. We, of course, utterly repudiate the popular doctrine that so-called secular education is the function of the state. Yet, while we might accept this second solution as an expedient, we do not approve it, and cannot defend it as sound in principle. It would break up and utterly destroy the free public school system, what is good as well as what is evil in it; and we wish to save the system by simply removing what it contains repugnant to the Catholic conscience—not to destroy it or lessen its influence. We are decidedly in favor of free public schools for all the children of the land, and we hold that the property of the state should bear the burden of educating the children of the state—the two great and essential principles of the system, and which endear it to the hearts of the American people. Universal suffrage is a mischievous absurdity without universal education; and universal education is not practicable unless provided for at the public expense. While, then, we insist that the action of the state shall be subordinated to the law of conscience, we yet hold that it has an important part to perform, and that it is its duty, in view of the common weal, and of its own security as well as that of its citizens, to provide the means of a good common school education for all its children, whatever their condition, rich or poor, Catholics or Protestants. It has taken the American people over two hundred years to arrive at this conclusion, and never by our advice shall they abandon it.
3. The first and second solutions must then be dismissed as unsatisfactory. The first, because it excludes religion, and makes the public schools nurseries of infidelity and irreligion. The second, because it breaks up and destroys the whole system of free public schools, and renders the universal education demanded by our institutions impracticable, or unlikely to be given, and in so far endangers the safety, the life, and prosperity of the republic. We repeat it, what we want is not the destruction of the system, but simply its modification so far as necessary to protect the conscience of both Catholics and Protestants in its rightful freedom. The modification necessary to do this is much slighter than is supposed, and, instead of destroying or weakening the system, would really perfect it and render it alike acceptable to Protestants and to Catholics, and combine both in the efforts necessary to sustain it. It is simply to adopt the third solution that has been suggested, namely, that of dividing the schools between Catholics and Protestants, and assigning to each the number proportioned to the number of children each has to educate. This would leave Catholics free to teach their religion and apply their discipline in the Catholic schools, and Protestants free to teach their religion and apply their discipline in the Protestant schools. The system, as a system of free schools at the public expense, with its fixtures and present machinery, would remain unimpaired; and a religious education, so necessary to society as well as to the soul, could be given freely and fully to all, without the slightest lesion to any one's conscience, or interference with the full and entire religious freedom which is guaranteed by our constitution to every citizen. The Catholic will be restored to his rights, and the Protestant will retain his.
This division was not called for in New England in the beginning; for then the people were all of one and the same religion; nor when only those who used the schools were taxed for their support. It was not needed even when there were only Protestants in the country. In demanding it now, we cast no censure on the original founders of our public schools. But now, when the system is so enlarged as to include free schools for all the children of the state at the public expense, and Catholics have become and are likely to remain a notable part of the population of the country, it becomes not only practicable, but absolutely necessary, if religious liberty or freedom of conscience for all citizens is to be maintained; and it were an act of injustice to Catholics, whose conscience chiefly demands the division, and a gross abuse of power, to withhold it. It may be an annoyance to Protestants that Catholics are here; but they are here, and here they will remain; and it is never the part of wisdom to resist the inevitable. Our population is divided between Catholics and Protestants, and the only sensible course is for each division to recognize and respect the equal rights of the other before the State.
One objection of a practical character has been brought against the division by the New York Tribune. That journal says that, if the division could be made in cities and large towns, it would still be impracticable in the sparsely settled districts of the country, where the population is too small to admit, without too great an expense, of two separate schools, one Catholic and one Protestant. The objection is one that is likely to diminish in force with time. In such districts let each school receive its pro rata amount of the public money: if too little, let Catholic charity make up the deficiency for the Catholic, and Protestant charity for the Protestant school. Besides, in these sparsely settled districts there are few Catholics, and their children are far less exposed than in cities, large towns, and villages.
The more common objection urged is, that if separate schools are conceded to Catholics, they must not only be conceded to the Israelites, but also to each Protestant denomination. To the Israelites, we grant, if they demand them. To each Protestant denomination, not at all, unless each denomination can put in an honest plea of conscience for such division. All Protestant denominations, without a single exception, unless it be the Episcopalians, unite in opposing the division we ask for, and in defending the system as it is, which proves that they have no conscientious objections to the public schools as they are now constituted and conducted. The division to meet the demands of the Catholic conscience would necessitate no change at all in the schools not set apart for Catholic children; and the several denominations that are not conscientiously opposed to them now could not be conscientiously opposed to them after the division. We cannot suppose that any denomination of Protestants would consent to support a system of education that offends its own conscience for the sake of doing violence to the conscience of Catholics. Do not all American Protestants profess to be the sturdy champions of freedom of conscience, and maintain that where conscience begins there the secular authority ends? If the present schools do violence to no Protestant conscience, as we presume from their defence of them they do not, no Protestant denomination can demand a division in its favor on the plea of conscience; and to no other plea is the state or the public under any obligation to listen. If, however, there be any denomination that can in good faith demand separate schools on the plea of conscience, we say at once let it have them, for such a plea, when honest, overrides every other consideration.