What is your relation to Christian education? Speaking of some of the fundamental weaknesses among the intellectual classes, Whitelaw Reid, our ambassador to the Court of St. James, said: "It is the consciousness of the decay of faith within the man who outwardly denies it, inwardly feels it." Speaking of the effect of modern secular intellectualism, Thomas Huxley, the great agnostic scientist, said: "It makes the cotter child subtler than the beast of the field and infinitely more dangerous. The first centuries of the race struggled against ravenous beasts and venomous serpents; the future generations must struggle against the devils incarnate in men. The natural man is [110] a beast; the natural man educated without faith is a devil." Now, brethren, these two statements I should be very reluctant to make if they had been made by preachers or theological professors, but one of them is made by a man of the world, a diplomat, an editor, a politician, and the other was made by perhaps the foremost agnostic of his day. It is well for us, then, to post them at the front of our discussion; they may point to the imperative task that is laid out for Christian men in the removal of that doubt of which they speak by making secular education Christian.

      We are distrustful of that expert training that throws away all moral considerations and sells itself to the highest bidder and in courts of law under oath will do injustice and will defeat the best with the worst if the tariff for that service be only revised upward. When our outlook takes a wider sweep we are not reassured, notwithstanding our boasted common school system, our vast university plants and endowments, and our swarms of specialists "made in Germany." Winds blowing from the Pacific Islands, from our teeming city tenements and from the Standard Oil sheds cool our fevered, happy optimism in the grapple with enlarging political problems, growing social ferments, and unmanageable industrial developments. A certain conquering moral quality in our very nerve and tissue is missing. The whole fabric of modern society seems sometimes to groan and creak like a ship strained by a storm at sea. And never so much as now do we need educational guides who are in league with the heavens. Is it the sense of that need that is making the educational interest outside of the church ready to welcome St. Paul in education instead of Mephistopheles? We are beginning to send to the rear the highly trained rascal with the system that produced him, and to bring to the front such enlightened experts in righteousness and truth as Charles E. Hughes, for instance, and the system that produced him.

      What was that system? This: he first drank in manful power on his knees before God with his sweet Christian mother. He was trained for college by his devoted, scholarly Baptist father; four years he breathed the Christian atmosphere of Colgate and Brown. That is Christian education. Knowledge and power come through Christian parents, teachers and schools, and it is that for which I am pleading.

      "The light of the world," says the Lord, "may become darkness." "The salt of the earth may lose its savor wherewith it has been salted." And Christ himself exclaimed, "How great is that darkness!" The word "Christian" is not only the emphatic word in our subject, it is its cutting edge. Without that word you are lost in educational indefiniteness that neither finds you nor grapples with you. With that word this subject of ours becomes a kind of wrestler with an undergrip.

      If Christian education be the educational interest outside of the church and family, it will be inside of the church and family. I doubt not that there are rare Christian families in all the churches that you represent that will prove this to you. Now, then, here is the condition facing us. We are shut out of the State schools by statute and law. What then? This: the obligation to plant and nourish Christian schools. The State schools far too often are only cemeteries where thousands of our brightest youth bury their Christian hopefulness and come forth spiritually barren. As a nation we are a conglomerate of races and religions. These religions presented great difficulties in the solution of our educational problem. Out of these difficulties we chose the easiest way: we took the secular route, shutting out the Bible and silencing the Christian teacher. That secular education has now become our great difficulty and danger. Brethren, the influences that will meet that difficulty and that will beat it must be Christian. If you can not demand the Bible and the Christian teacher for your State school, you must build the Bible and the Christian teacher into your Christian school and into your children.

      You must make your Christian schools to differ from the State schools in their vital religious atmosphere and in the Christian character and influence of every teacher whatsoever his [111] subject. Now, I grant you that there may be no such thing as Christian chemistry or religious biology, but there must be such a thing as enlightened disciples of Christ teaching both of these sciences to your sons and daughters. Worldlings and skeptics, tobacco-smoked and beer-soaked, should have no place in your faculties, though they wear the degrees of Berlin or Leipsic. Your demand for Christian education will be challenged by your own families unless you go thus far to show that you mean it and that you will not have the mildew of infidelity breathed upon the fresh, hopeful souls of your children.

      But you must go further; you must see that Christian schools do not become religiously colorless and become robbed of their godly birthmark and inheritance. Our schools must be the brooding nests of the highest enlightenment and the sanest morality. These have never had but one source--an ever-living, vigilant, energetic faith. That is the bedrock of everything precious in the State. We have had nothing worthy to perpetuate that has not come to us through Christian education in family, church and school. The entire history of all that is best in this nation is terse and graphic. You may run and read it thus: Holy men and women believed in the existence of God, in the authority of Christ, in the responsibility of man, in the value of prayer, in everlasting life, and acted accordingly. Their homes, their churches, their schools, their institutions became a sort of social structure compassing truth and faith and life. Make the church like the school. Make the school like the church. Make the home like both. Make the Christian parent like the old-time Jewish father, spiritual head of his house, caring most for a present blessing from heaven upon his family, and for the transmission of that blessing to children's children. That is the picture of the ideal of the Old Testament. Shall ours be lower in these New Testament days? His faith laid that care upon him. What does your faith lay upon you? Is it to make the home, the church, the school, society--Christian? is it? That is what the whole sweep of Christian worship and work everywhere most needs to-day--and must have.

      Brethren, it is the masculine element, the rescue of all Christian endeavor and work from excessive femininity! Surely God has given us many women. God bless them, he could not give us too many; but even the godly women will join us in this prayer: God give us men, men who are Christian, and men who care for Christian institutions and Christian obligations. When we have such men the prophecy of John Milton will become realized to us, and we through our open eyes will see what he saw four hundred years ago through his blind eyes, as looking into the future he exclaimed: "I seem to see in my mind a great nation, a great nation, entering the glorious way of truth."

[CCR 110-112]