Here we were entertained in magnificent simplicity for a day, and here Alpaz discoursed to me on the many matters in which I was interested, and which fell within the sphere of his Curatorship. I cannot recount them all, but shall endeavor to bring out the main points.
"You would learn something of our educational system?" he said, as though I had plied him with a question.
"It is quite simple. It involves no complexities. We follow only the path of nature. From birth to the age of ten the infant is in the exclusive control and tutorship of the mother. She alone is entirely capable of moulding the infantile mind, and setting its feet aright in the pathway of manhood and womanhood.
"In your land, as in others, all too often she delegates this great duty to alien and unfit hands, and reaps the bitter harvest of sorrow in the afternoon of motherhood.
"At the age of ten, when the mother has fitted the mind for stronger impressions, the child enters the broader field of learning. Our temples, which you meet everywhere, are our schoolhouses, our altars of Learning and Knowledge, the cherubim of Wisdom.
"These temples are the abode of Knowledge and Wisdom, handed down in the records of the ages, showing each successive step taken and to what it led. Here they are taught by the older men and women, who having retired from the activities of life, with a competence assured them, matured in thought, filled with knowledge and possessed of wisdom, perform their final labor, a labor of love for the younger generation.
"At the age of fifteen every boy and every girl develops the line of effort to which they incline in the respective spheres of the sexes, and thereafter, to the age of twenty for females and twenty-five for males, they are instructed along these lines by their tutors, in the meantime devoting a part of their time to some useful occupation. The result is men and women in every way fitted to fulfill their destiny.
"No; we have no clergy, no ministers as you term them, to teach either the old or the young in what you name religion. We have no churches. Reverence for the Supreme Principle of the Universe is instilled into every mind, from infancy up, and all our people live these teachings. They do not listen to them one day in seven and neglect to follow all or the majority of them for six.
"We know nothing, except as lamentable facts, of the various so-called religious divisions which convulse the rest of the world—Confucianism, Hindooism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism, Judaism, Polytheism and Christianity, and the many warring or antagonistic sects into which they divided and subdivided.
"We know only loving reverence for the Supreme Principle of the Universe, filial love and piety, and justice to all creatures. This is the soul and essence of your religion, Christianity, and the basic principle of all others. We prefer the last analysis to the inchoate mass of contending creeds, that have drenched the earth with blood for time out of mind, and filled it with doubt and misery; and even now, in the twilight of your Nineteenth Century, and in the name of the Child of Nazareth, promulgates Christianization and evangelization at the cannon's mouth and with the sword and torch, of peoples whose only offense is that they believe that their God requires thus and so at their hands as a prerequisite to their entrance into His heavenly kingdom.