THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM AND

PROTESTANTISM.

HE public school question has assumed a new phase. New parties have entered the field of controversy, while one of the old ones has retired. The new parties to which we refer are Protestants, who have taken opposite sides, while the party that has retired from the field of strife is the great body of Catholics in the United States.

We do not mean to imply that Catholics have changed their convictions respecting the public school system, its unfairness and defectiveness, and its pernicious influences. On the contrary, their convictions on all these points have become deeper and stronger. But they have ceased in great degree from arguing the question with the advocates and defenders of the system. There is a time to speak and a time to be silent. As long as there was any probability that Catholics could turn non-Catholic public opinion in a right direction by protest and argument, they protested and argued. But protest and argument have not availed, and the only course. the Catholics of the United States can consistently adopt is to withdraw their children from the public schools, and establish special Catholic schools for their education.

Meanwhile, the public school system has gone on extending itself, and completing itself after its own fundamental ideas and principles. It has taken possession of the whole field of non-Catholic education excepting collegiate, technical, and professional education; and even the non-Catholic colleges and other like institutions that have not been absorbed or destroyed by the public school system, have adopted, or are rapidly adopting its principle of ignoring religion.

While the public school system has thus had full opportunity to extend and develop itself and to exert its legitimate but pernicious influence upon non-Catholics, the Catholic population of our country are being gradually, and, of late years, with increasing rapidity, brought under the influences of a Catholic school system. Already more than half a million of children are being educated in Catholic parochial schools, and the number of these schools is not only increasing, but they are also growing as regards comprehensiveness of scope and thoroughness of instruction and discipline. The Church in the United States has committed itself to the work of establishing a general and complete system of parochial school education, and, with a few exceptions here and there, bishops, priests and laity

are heartily and vigorously engaged in carrying on this good and all-important work.

To this there are some exceptions. There are those who continue lukewarm and dilatory as regards this subject. There are parishes abundantly able to establish parochial schools that are still destitute of them, and other parishes which could have excellently equipped and organized parochial schools, but which have schools that, in the shabbiness and slovenliness of their arrangements and the insufficiency and inefficiency of their instruction and discipline, are a shame and a disgrace to those parishes. A like remark is, perhaps, applicable to a few populous dioceses which are financially able to engage vigorously in the work of establishing a parochial school system, but which have not as yet undertaken it. But these are exceptions. The time seems near at hand when Catholic schools for Catholic children will be established throughout our country, and Catholic children will be almost entirely withdrawn from the public schools.

All this is a sore disappointment to Protestants who expected and hoped that the public school system could be so managed that it would be an efficient instrumentality for Protestantizing Catholic children. They hoped and expected that Catholic children would largely adopt the Protestant idea of private judgment, and recruit the membership of Protestant "churches." This expectation has utterly failed of realization. The public schools do tend to de-Catholicize the Catholic children who continue to attend them. Their influence does certainly weaken the faith and the spirit of obedience to ecclesiastical authority and the precepts of the Church. But this de-Catholicizing process does not furnish recruits to the Protestant sects. The Catholic pupils of the public schools who are thus de-Catholicized, do not generally become Protestants; they become indifferentists, practical rationalists and infidels. Protestants, therefore, gain no accession of strength from this tendency of the public school system.

And while the public school system has disappointed Protestants as regards Catholic children, it has also disappointed them as regards its effects upon Protestant children. Instead of serving as a help to the Protestant sects, and training up the children of Protestants to become active members of those sects, as many Protestant ministers contended they would, they tend to weaken the respect of those children for the religious opinions and practices of their parents, and to inoculate them with rationalistic and materialistic ideas.

This tendency of the public school system, and its hostile influences as regards what is commonly called "Evangelical" or "Orthodox" Protestantism, have become so obvious that a number of

more discerning and thoughtful Protestants acknowledge it, and are searching for a remedy. Many of these, there is reason to think, believe in their hearts that the Catholic position with regard to the present public school system is the right one. But they despair of convincing the Protestant sects of the fact, or rather they despair of inducing them to act energetically and practically upon it. They see that they are hopelessly divided as respects religious belief and practice, and they think that this division among themselves creates an insuperable obstacle to their uniting in any common effort to introduce positive religious instruction into the public schools. Moreover, they know that it would be futile to propose to the members of their respective sects to adopt the Catholic method of practically solving the question, by each "Orthodox" Protestant sect establishing schools for the children of its own members, maintained by voluntary individual contributions. For they are fully aware that the members of those sects are lacking in the zeal and Christian generosity and the sense of Christian obligation necessary to induce them to consent to bear the burden such an arrangement would involve.

As regards this last mentioned point, they are undoubtedly correct. Their religion is entirely lacking in the elements which induce and enable Catholics to make the sacrifices which they constantly make, and feel that they must cheerfully make for the sake of religion; among which is that of sustaining Catholic schools. But, as regards the point first mentioned, they are partly right and partly wrong.

The divided, self-antagonistic condition of " Orthodox" Protestants is unquestionably a difficulty in the way of their finding a common ground on which to unite in contending for the introduction of religious education into the public schools. Yet it is not an insurmountable obstacle.

In fact, the real difficulty, so far as it is a difficulty, consists not so much in the fact of the existing differences and divisions of the "Orthodox" Protestant sects, as in that of their mutual jealousies, and also in the general indifference and lukewarmness of Protestant parents as to the religious education of their children.

Protestant sects could unite, without any serious difficulty, upon a plan or method of introducing religious instruction into the public school system, were they able to forego or subordinate their mutual jealousies of each other, and their common jealousy of the Catholic Church.

That this is possible is proved by the fact that, in other countries than the United States, the difficulty has been more or less successfully surmounted by different methods, and with, at least, approximate justice to the civil and religious rights of the mem

bers of all religious denominations, and an approximately equal distribution both of the burdens and the benefits of the educational systems maintained in those countries.

The methods are different in different countries, but they all have a common aim and object, viz., the maintaining of such a system of public education as will enable parents of different religious beliefs to avail themselves of the system, without violation of their rights of conscience; or, in other words, to have their children, under the public school system, trained up and instructed in their respective religious beliefs, as well as in merely secular knowledge.

This principle, in fact, is acknowledged and in more or less successful practical operation in every country in Europe, excepting Russia, France and Italy, In semi-barbarous Russia there is no system of common school education, and the State-supported technical schools and colleges and universities are simply nests for hatching out infidels of the most pronounced atheistic type. In France, the very name of God has been banished from the public schools and excluded from the text-books; and, since reference to His divine and incommunicable attributes can not be excluded from human thought, these have been heathenized, by employing, wherever reference to them is necessary, the names of the false gods of Roman and Grecian mythology, Jupiter, Jove, Minerva, Mars, Mercury, Apollo, Venus! In Italy, the whole influence and action of its government is openly and avowedly against all religious education, and in favor of a purely materialistic and irreligious education.

Is it not a shame and a disgrace to the people of the United States, and especially to the great majority of the Protestants of the United States, that, professing, as they do, to be firm believers in Christianity and ardent supporters of "a pure Gospel," which they desire shall be propagated over all the earth, they yet sustain and defend a system of education which undermines, in the hearts of their children, their own declared belief; which refuses to adopt any of the plans or methods of European nations that recognize the necessity of religious education, and which, in principle, follows the example and adopts the ideas (though, as yet, it dare not openly carry them out to their full extent) of the infidel governments of France and Italy!

We have said that there are different plans and methods by which Protestants, thrusting into the background their mutual jealousies, may obtain the benefits of a religious education of their children by a modification of the present public school system, without any serious advantage or disadvantage to any Protestant sect. With deliberate intention, we exclude all reference to Cath

olics from this part of our discussion. For, it is a fixed conclusion, a matter now of absolute certainty, that, whether the public school system shall eventually be so modified, or not, as to permit the introduction of positive, distinctive, denominational religious instruction, Catholics and the Catholic Church in this country will see to it that the children of Catholic parents shall receive Catholic religious instruction and training.

Moreover, not only Catholics knew from the first, but Protestants have learned from the actual practical operation of the present public school system, that it is utterly vain for them to expect (as unquestionably many of them did expect) to obtain recruits to the membership of their different sects from the Catholic children who attend the public schools. It is an undeniable and most deeply to be deplored fact that many of these children do fall away from belief in the Catholic religion, and still more of them from practising it and attending to their religious duties. But these apostates from the faith or from the practice of the Catholic religion do not become, except in a very few and rare instances, members of any "Evangelical" or "Orthodox" Protestant sect. The vast majority of them become entirely neglectful of and indifferent to religious obligations, or practical infidels.

Of different methods or plans for introducing and maintaining distinctive denominational instruction in public schools, without favoring any religious denomination to the disadvantage of others, we will refer to only two.

One of these methods is, that each religious denomination shall establish its own denominational schools with such arrangements as the educational wants of the children of each denomination require. Then, in order to distribute the moneys arising from public school taxation proportionately and fairly between each denomination (and so, too, as regards undenominational and entirely secular schools), each taxpayer is allowed to designate, according to his individual preferences, what schools, whether denominational or undenominational, the school-tax he pays shall go to support. In this way the schools of each denomination and those of no religious denomination form parts of the public school system and stand on a basis of perfect equality in the eye of the law.

A modification of this plan is to allow each taxpayer personally to pay over the amount of his school-tax directly to the support of such denominational or undenominational schools as he may prefer. On payment of his school-tax in this way, he receives a written voucher, which, when exhibited to the public school treasurer or collector, is accepted as proof that he has paid his school

tax.

This plan, under either form, is theoretically fair and just. But