wish to have his children taught in the Protestant faith. The Infidel also objects, saying that the whole version is a mass of fictions; and that he ought not to be taxed to support religious superstitions, and that the public school for which he is taxed ought to be available for his children, without this objection.

All these objectors happen to be citizens of the State in which they reside, and under our political system they stand upon the same level with Protestants. They share in the burdens of government and are amenable to its laws. The State of which they are citizens, considered as a civil power, existing and acting for temporal purposes, is no more Protestant than it is Catholic, and no more Christian than it is Jewish or Mohammedan. It is simply a political body; and, as such, it has no religion to teach or sustain or compel the people to sustain. Such is the essential character of an American State; and such it should be, since it is only by this feature that the rights of conscience in respect to religion are guaranteed against encroachment. . The objection, therefore, of the Catholic, the Jew, and the Infidel against any Protestant régime in the public school is a valid one, and admits of no answer unless we abandon the fundamental principles of our republican system. It is as much an act of tyranny and wrong to tax a Catholic or a Jew to support a religion in which he does not believe as it is to apply the same principle to a

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Protestant. There is essentially no difference in the two cases. Mere numbers can never make a difference, unless religious liberty is a question of numbers, which is not the fact.

Discarding, then, as we must, by the stern demands of logic and, as we believe, by the demands of a true religion, this fifth solution of the School problem, we still press the question: What shall the State do? But one answer is left, and that answer constitutes the sixth solution, which is the one we adopt and describe as follows:

The State, by which we mean the people acting in their organic capacity through the machinery of law, should say to all the religious sects, to all antireligionists, and indeed to all classes of citizens, that its ground as to the public schools is the one of absolute and impartial "neutrality" with reference to the doctrines and tenets of religion, whether drawn from the Bible or elsewhere; that the ends. for which it exists do not include such doctrines and tenets, either as a means or an end; and that the only aspect in which it can consider Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Rationalists, Infidels, indeed, every man, woman, and child subject to its jurisdiction, is simply that of citizenship, without any discrimination for religious reasons. The public school is not a Church, or a synagogue, or a theological seminary; but a piece of State machinery, organized and supported for purely temporal ends -as really as a court of justice, a constitutional

convention, or a legislative body. Its function is not to make or unmake Christians, or predispose children to this or that form of religious faith. It does not propose a complete education; and does. not propose a religious education at all, either partial or complete. It proposes to do a certain thing, on the ground of its necessity and utility to the State, and to stop there, by not entering that field which lies beyond the purview of civil government. In short, it proposes a secular education, and that only-an education that would be needful and useful in this life, if there were no God and no future for the human soul.

This we believe to be the true ground on which to place a school system organized and conducted by the authority of an American State. It is the proper language of the State to the Catholic, and just as proper to the Protestant, the Jew, or the Infidel. It is the one answer to be given to everybody who asks the State to use its school system for any other purpose than that of secular education. To all such claimants and all such petitioners the State should turn a deaf ear, and confine its system of education within the limits of the ends for which it exists as a State. They should all be practically taught that the State will protect them in the exercise of their religious liberty, and will not on the subject of religion extend its agency the breadth of a hair beyond this point.

The general argument on which this doctrine

rests will be presented in its proper place. Yet it may be well here to say that the objections to the doctrine urged by those who dissent from it, when traced to their final application, are simply objections to the system of government which the American people have chosen to adopt and under which they are now living. The objectors, in effect, find fault with the theory of a State that has no religious creed to teach, support, or enforce. Their argument, if good at all, is good to rehabilitate the machinery and prerogatives of a state religion. They really object to the American doctrine of a State. We do not; but heartily accept it as true, being willing, without qualification or reservation, to extend it to all its legitimate applications. As a Protestant and a Presbyterian, we have no objection to the reading of King James's version of the Sacred Scriptures in the public schools, and should have none to the teaching of the "Shorter Catechism" there, regarding it as a most excellent compendium of Christian doctrine; yet, as an American citizen, taxed in common with all others for the support of these schools, we ask for no such tribute to our faith in distinction from the faith of the Catholic or the Rationalist, and concede no such claim to any religious sect or creed.

The Supreme Court of Maine, in the case of Donohue vs. Richards (38 Maine Reports, p. 401), expressly rejected the idea that Christianity, before the law, is entitled to any higher or other privileges

than those that are common to "the Pagan and the Mormon, the Brahmin and the Jew, the Swedenborgian and the Buddhist, the Catholic and the Quaker." This is simply carrying out the American theory of civil government by an impartial application of its principles. Those who are not willing that an American State should occupy this position either do not understand the theory of such a State or are not content to abide by its fundamental doctrine.

V.

SECULAR EDUCATION.

Bishop Butler remarks that "the constitution of human creatures, and, indeed, of all creatures that come under our notice, is such as that they are capable of naturally becoming qualified for states of life for which they were once wholly unqualified." This presents the fundamental law of human improvement. The first and for a considerable period the only form of its action we find in the nursery, where infant children gain that stock of information and those mental and physical aptitudes by which they become miniature men and women. Speedily they quit the nursery and enter upon the sterner and more methodical task of a higher culture. What meets them in the outset is common educa