The Education Question [pp. 504-544]

The -Education Question.
of experience; and we beg every man who has the welfare of
his country, or the good of his fellow-men at heart, to look this
fact deliberately in the face, and to pause before he gives his
sanction to the popular doctrine of an exclusive secular popular
education.
But, in the second place, the whole theory of separate secular education is fallacious and deceptive. The thing is impossible. The human soul is in such a sense a unit, that it is impossible the intellect should be cultivated without developing,
favourably or otherwise, the heart and the conscience. You
might as well attempt to develope one half of a man's body,
and allow the other half to remain as it is. It is impossible to
introduce ideas and facts beyond the mere relations of numbers
and quantity, into the mind, without their calling into exercise
the other powers of our nature. If a child is to read, it must
read something. But what can it read in prose or poetry, in
history or in fiction, which will not bring up the ideas of God,
of right and wrong, of responsibility, of sin and punishment,
and of a future state? How can a teacher reprove, exhort, or
direct his pupils, without an appeal, more or less direct, to moral and religious motives? If he tells a child that a thing is
wrong, can he avoid telling him why it is wrong, what is the
standard of duty, and what are the consequences of wrong conduct? He cannot appeal to conscience without awakening the
sense of responsibility to God, and creating the necessity of instruction as to what God is, and as to our relations to him as
his creatures. If it be true that we live and move and have
our being in God, if our finite spirits are at every point in contact with the Infinite Spirit, the attempt to ignore God, and to
bring up a child in ignorance of the Supreme Being, is as absurd and as impracticable as the attempt to bring up a living
creature, out of contact with the atmosphere.
This, however, is not the worst of it. The separation of
religion from secular education is not only impracticable, it is
positively evil. The choice is not between religion and no religion; but between religion and irreligion, between Christianity and infidelity. The mere negative of Theism is Atheism.
The absence of knowledge and faith in Christianity is infidelity.
Even Byron had soul enough to make Lucifer say:
"He that bows not to God, hath bowed to me."
1854.]
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