Christian Education

Christian Education
CHRISTIAN EDUCATION.
BY HENRY ELI SPECK.

I. Introduction.
What makes schools necessary, and what art they for? We are all familiar with the facts which answer these ques­tions. Schools exist for three reasons. There are those who have the ability to learn, there are facts and ideals that should be taught, and there are people who make the claim of being able to teach. A conception of a goal, or a kind of life that is really worth living, presides, explicitly or implicitly, over all edu­cational effort. Education gives to children the benefit of experience other than their own, and in advance of their own. Thus the factors involved in the idea of education are these: an immature being, a goal or destiny for life, and older people who can help the younger to realize this goal or destiny.

It might be well to stop just here long enough to define education. As a definition is a relative thing, let us con­sider several definitions.
"I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply the form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends. I believe that education therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living." —Dewey.
"Education is a gradual adjustment to the spiritual possessions of the race." —Nicholas Murray Butler.
"Education is the sum of the reflective efforts by which we aid nature in the development of physical, intellectual, and moral faculties of man, in view of his perfection, his happiness, and his social destination." —Compayre.
"Education can not be better defined than by calling it the organization of acquired habits of conduct and ten­dencies to behavior. James.
"To prepare us for complete living is the function which education has to discharge." —Spencer.
"The true end of teaching is one with the true aim of life; and each lesson must be presented with the con­scious purpose of making the most out of the life of the one taught." —Tompkins.
"The question to be asked at the end of an educational step is not what has the child learned, but what has the child become?" —Monroe. For the sake of convenience of language, and especially because the public schools of our country do not give re­ligious instruction, we have designated education as general, technical, professional, religious, and so on. This has re­sulted in an unfortunate habit of thought. Education in religion is looked upon as some sort of special training, or as a side current apart from the main stream of education, or the exploration of the polar regions, religion is supposed Like the training of musicians, the study of mathematics, to pertain only to those who have a special interest, therein. Religious education can no more accept this place than religion can consent to be a mere department of life. If religion were just a specialty of priests, monks, and nuns, or if it belonged only to Sunday, or if it applied to only a part of our conduct or ideals, then religious education and general education might be compared with each other. Re­ligion claims to belong to the man. Whatever religion may have been to the ancients, or whatever it may mean to the civilizations that are to follow; to us, it is an all-inclusive, all-commanding principle — the very stuff that human life is made of. In keeping with this idea then religious educa­tion is simply education in the complete sense of that term, or else it is not education, but mere training.

Education is not divided against itself. It is a unitary process. Education is not made up by aggregating parts, each of which exists on its own account, any more than life realizes itself in the various organs of the human body. The unity of education is seen from a psychological point of view. The idea of education is that the whole child is at work in each of his studies, not memory in one, reason in another, and perception in a third. The idea is not so much that the child acquires one thing and then another as it is that he is one thing and develops into something else. (Not so much what he learns as what he becomes). This carries us to a consideration of the ethical point of view and this too is a unity. For the ethical view of life is an effort to introduce into life, or rather to discover in life, organization, harmony, and unity. That is, ethics tries to develop towards an ideal self in which this ideal presides as mistress over the whole process. The unified self with which ethics has to do is the social self or the self realized in society. And just here we see unity in education from the religious point of view, for religion looks to the unifi­cation of the self with its entire world. Thus religion in­stead of being a department of education is an implicit motive thereof. It is the end that presides 'over the begin­ning and gives unity to all stages of the process. The relation of education and religion seems so intimate that we cannot separate them without disturbing the founda­tion of each. As education presupposes immaturity in the taught, so religious education presupposes a positive reli­gious nature. This does not imply that the child is all right as he is, that he can grow up properly without divine help, that the life principle in the child can take care of itself, that the child has any definite conscious religious ex­perience, or sense of God; but speaking positively it means that the child has more than a passive capacity for spiritual things, and that nothing short of union with God can bring a human being to himself.

II. CHRISTIAN EDUCATION AND ITS INFLUENCE
An education may be religious, however, and not be Christian. Christian education sets the perfect man Jesus as its ideal. Paul declares that he and his associates labored, "teaching every man in all wisdom; that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus." God makes the heart hungry, and in Christ He responds to this hunger. Feeding upon Christ we grow in the likeness of God —that is we develop —we are educated. Christian education then con­sists in so presenting Christ to the immature souls that they shall be by him enlightened, inspired and fed according to their gradual increasing capacity, and thus made to grow continually within the courts of the Lord's House. But the question may arise, and has arisen, when should we begin Christian Education? Is there a time when, and a place where? Some say begin it as soon as language is ac­quired while others oppose all religious training of the young on the ground that religion should be a matter of deliberate and rational choice which, they say, is not possible, before maturity. Both of these views are based upon false assump­tions. The first is the intellectualist's view of man, which makes life grow out of knowledge instead of knowledge out of life. The other is the notion that training with respect to religion can be postponed until some definite or particu­lar period of life. Not for a single moment does the mind remain neutral or blank with reference to the interpretation of life. Very early the child witnesses specific religious phenomena. We can not hide from him our Bibles, our churches, and our worship. The real question then is never, when shall Christian training begin, for it really begins with the beginning of the child's experience. The real question is what kind shall it be? Shall it be positive or negative, sym­metrical or distorted, repressive or emancipating.

We speak of America as a Christian nation. It is Chris­tian in sanction, in public opinion, if we use the term to differentiate the religion of America from the pagan or other religions. There was a time in the history of this nation when it was Christian in purpose. The forefathers sought out this country as a place in which they might serve God in freedom and in peace. A profound faith was in the very bone and sinew of national life. The development was along religious lines, and it seems to me that almost everything good and great that the American commonwealth has stood for among the nations of the earth has been pre­eminently Christian. The greatness of the people came from the spirit of the religion that possessed them, and whatever greatness there is in us today is due to the inheritance of religious faith which we have. We are living on the in­heritance of Christian faith bequeathed to us by men and women who were ardent believers in the God of our fathers, and who were devoted professors of His holy law. But what is the new spirit of America? Without allow­ing ourselves to become pessimistic, we must confess that there are numerous signs of degeneration forcing themselves upon us, and we can not but deplore the sinking of religious ideals into a very inferior place. Before the nations of the world we stand for money making. This is perhaps the first time in the history of the world when the temples of mammon overtop the cross that crowns the spires of the temple of God. It is to be hoped that the present world conflict will change this greed for gold into a consuming passion for service. But until the last year or so that sorbid principle "Get money honestly if you can, but get money," has been leading men of place and power into ways that are dark and devious, whose ends are destruction; so that there has been a moving picture of one public man after another standing for a moment under the white lights of public investigation and then going down in shame and dis­grace because his questionable business methods could not bear the gaze of public scrutiny. The Gospel of Christ would have us, "lay up treasures in heaven" —"Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness." So far we drifted from these ideals that we have begun to glory in our false standards, and to point to our material prosperity as a sign of our marvelous progress. But Christianity doesn't consist in the abundance of things which we possess.

Another sign of how much we have forgotten or how far we have drifted from Christian ideals is the cheap way in which we hold human life. There is no mark of distinction between a Christian and a pagan that is more noticeable than the value placed on a human soul. It was made a little lower than the angels. It cost the blood of the Son of God for its redemption. All the treasure and measure of this earth would be as nothing compared to the loss of one soul. The constant affirmation of this fact will save the weak from the oppressive tyranny of the strong. It guards the life of the unborn and protects helpless in­fancy. It struck the shackles from the limbs of the slave as he stood on the auction-block in the slave market. It stretches out its hand to helpless women and safe guards the most precious jewel in her crown. If a man to-day enjoys civil and religious liberty it is because of the Chris­tian affirmation of his individuality in the possession of an immortal soul, and his rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness because of his infinite redemption by our God manifest in the flesh. Pagan civilization has no such idea of the value of man. An Assyrian monarch wrote on the stones of Ninevah. "I took prisoners, men young and old. Of some I cut off the hands and feet; others I mutilated. Of the young men's ears I made a heap, and of the old men's skulls I made a tower. The children I burned in the flames, (Sounds as if it were written by the Kaiser). Paganism to-day under the flag of a new world religion is drenching the allied nations in similar blood. But in our own America every day hundreds of lives are being snuffed out in order that our dividends, our salaries, and our coupons may satisfy our greed. Little wonder that when we bow down before the golden calf, the worship of this false god demands false sacrifice, but the pity of it all is that on consuming altars are laid helpless womanhood and weak innocence. The incidents of the last three years have in a measure stopped us in our mad rush for gold. We stand paralyzed with amazement when we hear the agonizing cries of our neighbors, and live in constant dread and won­der of what another day may bring. I believe we are really being touched with the feelings of others infirmities.

What is it that has changed our standards? The thing that is going out of our American life is the spirit of re­ligion. How has it been brought about? The answer is patent. For two or three generations the young have been educated in our schools in which the name of God is prac­tically forbidden and from which the dogmas and precepts of religion have been driven. Are we not inviting dis­aster by shilling God out of our schools? If our perpetuity as a people depends on the stream of the spirit of Christ that flows in our veins, are we not rushing on to a speedy death by shutting off those streams? How long can we live on the inheritance of religious faith bequeathed to us by an older generation, if we are spendthrift and profligate and do nothing to conserve the inheritance we have re­ceived?

III. EFFORTS TO OBTAIN THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIAN EDUCATION
There is absolutely no way to conserve the inheritance of Christian faith on which the perpetuity of our national institutions depends, nor to make Christian ideals again dominant in our civic life unless the teaching of Christian doctrine and the practice of Christian faith are in some way or other conjoined with the great public school system by which the youth of our land are trained to citizenship. We are shut out of the public schools by the laws of the land. What shall we do?

We have presumed that we might relegate the teaching of religion to the homes. The American home has never been able to do that —especially is this true of the modern home.

Wre have thought the Sunday school, or Bible study, if you prefer to call it that, would help out the homes and re­lieve the schools of the necessity of teaching Christianity; but how miserably incompetent it is when we make the most of it. No science can be learned by being taught only one hour a week. I do not mean to say that the Sunday school stands for a Sunday religion. I consider the Sunday school a factor in Christian education. But re­ligion is to our daily life what salt is to our food. It enters into every act. To follow a method of living that carefully withholds the salt from our food six days in the week and gives us a peck of unadulterated and undiluted salt to eat on Sunday is not the best way to preserve our health and to continue in our mouth the pleasing taste for salt. In an effort on the part of some of our best thinkers to keep alive the sentiment of religion, some sort of ethical culture has been injected into the curriculum of our public schools to supply this need by simply teaching the principles of morality. In the course of study for the Boston schools, we find the following statement: "In giving instruction in morals, teachers will at all times exert their best endeavors to impress on the minds of the youths the principles of piety and justice and a special regard for truth, love of country, humanity, universal benevolence, sobriety, industry and frugality, chastity, moderation and temperance." This moral instruction, it is declared, shall have no trace or shadow of sectarianism or doctrinal teaching. It is very plain that this will eliminate the teaching of the existence of God. The Atheist may be a good American citizen and desire to send his child to a public school, but he will not allow the ears of his child to be offended by teaching the existence of God. The Hebrew denies the divinity of Christ. And just so, we could eliminate all moral and spiritual teaching. The law says morality must be taught without any dogmatism. It is absolutely impossible. If it were possible then we should have a solution for this prob­lem at least. But you may just as well try to grow apples without a tree. You may just as well try to build the walls and roof of a house without the foundation. Dogmatism is the foundation of all morals. Eliminate all the dogmatic teaching and you cannot formulate a complete code of morals. What motive for well doing can be suggested if there is no Law-giver who rewards the faithful and punishes the violator? Will you say to me, be good because it is nice, because it is gentlemanly, because you will be happier? The only power by which we can enforce our moral teaching is the fact that there is an eternal Law-giver who has the right to bind our wills and the power to vin­dicate that right. The mere knowledge of the beauty and fitness of an act will no more compel me to do it, or not to do it, than the mere knowledge of geography will compel me to travel around the world. Man must recognize the absolute authority of the Law-giver and His compelling power, so that His love, His power to punish, can over­come all allurements to present immoral pleasures. Morality can not be inforced without such dogmatic teaching.

There is still a more serious aspect. In teaching, or try­ing to teach, morality separate and apart from Christianity, we make the wrong impression on those we teach. They can have little respect for Christianity although we consecrate it in the church and defend it in the home, if it be condemned in the schools and driven from its doors. Children love school life, and if Christianity is so hurtful a thing as to be denied admission into their studies during school hours, are you going to be surprised to find them scoffing at it in after life? Can we hope to build up a God-fearing people, a people fit to be entrusted with domestic management and the guardianship of this great commonwealth, if they are trained with the conviction that Christianity, the only perfect basis of morality, is an outlawed thing during the best and brighter hours of the day, through the tenderest and most impressionable years of life?

If, then, we can not teach morality without Christianity, and if the home and Sunday school are not adequate; and since we must have it in some way or other if we are going to fulfill our God-given mission; in what way must it come? The problem is pressing for solution. The crisis may be nearer than we think. Of course we never realize a danger until the crash comes. They were eating and drinking and merry-making when the handwriting shone out on the wall It was so when the waters come and covered the earth. It was so when the Assyrians came down on Babylon, and when the Goths and Vandals swept over the mighty empire of Rome. It was so when the iron fist of the Teutonic hordes cursed the twentieth century civilization with its hell­ish slaughter. It will be so "when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven, with His mighty angels in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God and that obey not the Gospel of Jesus Christ."

I have laid bare the disease. Perhaps I have been too ex­plicit. I may have sounded the note of a pessimism or of an alarmist, but I have had only one desire, and that is to be as conservative as the facts allow. But what is the remedy?

It is difficult to realize how it was even possible to give over our magnificent public school system to the agnostic and the godless to serve his purpose and yet we have done so. You might be surprised to know that in one of these United States of America, the teacher who conducts any sort of devotional service in his school will have his certifi­cate cancelled. There are other states in which the laws are almost as radical. I have taught ten years. I have never taught one day without having gone to God in prayer. I am too weak, too apt to err, to take responsibility of teaching one of God's highest creations without his blessing me in a special way. The door is perhaps forever shut against Christianity in the public schools. What are we going to do? What are we doing?

IV. Some Historic Reflections
L,et us notice the history of religious movements in this respect. History bears irrefutable witness to the fact that education and the growth of Christianity are inseparably connected. Every great religious movement has been im­mediately followed by an educational revival, and the move­ment has been successful and permanent only in so far as it has taken the schools into its alliance. A striking example of the power of education under religious influence is to be seen in the case of the Scotch Presbyterians. Through the leadership of Knox, Scotland established a system of schools in close affiliation with the church. Ever since that time the ministers have been search­ing out the most gifted boys, and encouraging them to get an education and enter the ministry. It has been this splen­did co-operation between the church and schools which has made Scotland the land of great preachers.

Another remarkable historical evidence of the value of schools in strengthening a religious movement is to be seen in the case of the Jesuits. When the Roman Church had lost all northern Europe through the Protestant revolt, and was being threatened even in Italy itself, she sought defense in the establishment of Jesuit colleges. Every one knows what the result was. So insidious and persistent were these colleges that for almost two centuries they trained and controlled the leading intellects of the Continent, both Protes­tant and Catholic. Do you want to know what the Catholics are doing in America? It was decreed in the last Plenary Council of Baltimore, in 1885, that within two years of the date of the proclamation of the decree every parish priest must provide an adequate school for the children in his parish or give the reason of his inability in writing to the Bishop. This official attitude towards the school question gave such a renewed impetus to school building that there are now 1,350,000 children educated in schools immediately under the control of the Catholic Church, and during the last three generations, $300,000,000 have been spent for this purpose.

Quoting from Dr. Eby on Baptist statistics we have these startling facts, "At the beginning of the 19th century the Baptists in the entire Dominion of Canada numbered about ()00 and they had no schools. Denominational lines had all along been very closely drawn, and expansion could take place only under the most difficult circumstances. With heroic faith the small body established Acadia University, in the Maritime Provinces: Feller Institute in the very
heart of Catholic Quebec: Me Master University, with its two adjuncts in the expansive Northwest. At the end of the centure there were approximately 100,000 Baptists in Canada. More than any other factor these Christian Col­leges are responsible for the result. At the beginning of the 19th century there were 100,000 Baptists in the entire American Union; today there are about 6,000,000. At that time they possessed only one institution of learning, now there are over 200 in all. These schools have been an indis­pensable factor in this marvelous development." The story is the same, no matter where we look. Will I be considered an heretic if I say that today if "we as a people" ever intend to come into our own and to make the influence of the religion of Jesus Christ felt through us, we must build, maintain, and perpetuate a system of schools in which Christianity in its beauty and simplicity may be taught in some way co-ordinate with the state schools. And I am willing to go on record today as being one who is not in sympathy nearly so much with the idea that now prevails, wherein any one who chooses may establish a school of this sort, as I am with a systematized, organized, purposeful effort on the part of all the Christians of all the congrega­tions of God in all the counties of all the states of these United States. Call that a system of "Church schools," or what you wish. I am willing to go one step further, and say that that individual who purposefully puts himself in the way of the progress of Christian education through the Christian college is either ignorant of the opportunity it affords, or he is a slacker in the army of Jesus Christ, and a traitor to His cause.

V. What Shall We Do?
Whatever you want a people to become put that thing in the schools. Education was imposed as a divine obligation upon every Jewish parent. The dwellings of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were at once the home, the school, the state, and the church. It was especially the duty of every father to teach his children the significance of the Passover feast, and other ceremonial observances, God made the teaching of the divine law compulsory upon every parent in the most imperative terms. We read. "Now these are the command­ments, the statutes, and the judgments, which the Lord, your God commanded to teach you, that you might do them in the land whither you go to possess it. That thou mightest fear the Lord thy God, to keep all his statutes and his command­ments, which I command thee, thou and thy son, and thy son's son, all the days of thy life; and that thy days may be prolonged, that it may be well with thee,, and that ye may in­crease mightly, as the Lord God of thy fathers hath promised thee, in the land that floweth with milk and honey." "Hear, O, Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord, and thou shalt love the Lord, thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might and these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and thou shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall he as frontlets between thine eves. Thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house gates." They wore the word of God on their wrists as we wear our watches, and had a copy of it on the gate posts and door facings. No other people in all the world's history have been so completely immersed in an atmosphere of religious instruction as the Jews have been. The whole Mosaic econ­omy was an educational enterprise of the most far reaching character. The law was their schoolmaster, pedagogue, to lead them to Christ. Jewish institutions were to be pre­served in no other way than through religious education. Has God's method in the respect of having his people taught changed? Is the Church of God to be built up in any other way than through teaching? Is there any imperative reason why the Church as an institution should interest her­self in education? Some one has said that there are three E's which stand for the promulgation of Christianity. They are, evangelism, education, and expansion. The latter seems to come as a consequence of the first two. Evangelism and Christian education are inseparable, and this fact may be more obvious the next generation.

There are many new obligations, responsibilities, and op­portunities ushered in with every generation. The business of Christian education is to prepare us for their solution. Never has Christian civilization been confronted with such large and difficult problems as today. Some of which are, the liquor question, divorce, child labor, the white slave traffic, increased criminality, political corruption, the rela­tion of labor and capital, rampant materialism, education, the redemption of the segregated districts of the large cities, universal peace, and the salvation of the world. With the solution of these problems comes a demand on Christian education for a trained ministry and for an in­telligent layship. The solution calls for great preachers, well trained. Those of the past though sometimes largely un­trained, did work heroically. The preachers of the next generation must have all the eloquence and evangelistic fervor of the pioneers, and they must add to these the learn­ing, the social interest, the sympathy, and the teaching power that conies through college training. We all admit the need of a trained ministry. What we need more is a generation of trained elders, deacons, —Christians. The greatest service that Christians can render in the immediate future lies in the training of a new type of laymen. I wonder what our vision would be if we could realize the tremendous power of a trained and consecrated body of laymen. (God hasten the day when our loved ones at home may enjoy the oppor­tunities of a week like this.) Give us men of militant faith and deep piety, trained not only to feel that God has a mighty work for them to do but able to do it. To how many places have you gone where you had to lead in every­thing? The church needs men and women trained to teach, to sing, men as leaders, men into whose hands the care of the Church can be placed. We are conducting a young men's meeting every Sunday afternoon for this very purpose —that we may send back men and women, and especially men, to a community trained in the work of the l,ord. May the shame of neglected duty rest upon us if ever there goes from this place a Christian boy who is not trained to lead in some public capacity.

Whether in the Church assembled, the Sunday school, some individual, the Christian college, or in whatever way it may come. Christian Education must lead every member of the Church of Christ to know that "religion is no mere matter of ceremony; no merely beautiful thing for esthetic admiration; no mere practice of self mortification; no mere idle longing for heaven; or an awaiting of some miraculous deliverance from hell; no bare adoption either of abstract principles, or anything arbitrarily laid upon him from with­out, external and foreign to him; no mere negative aim of any kind; but that positive will of God, laid down in the very structure of our being, that means the kindling of great and new enthusiasm, great devotions as great sacrifices." Christian education must teach the world to know that the prayer "Thy will be done," is no slave's submission to superior strength; no plaintive wail; no outcry of an en­feebled, broken will, as we may be sometimes tempted to think. Rather it is the highest reach of a will sublimely disciplined to a world task, enlightened by a reason that can think the thoughts of Cod, inspired by an imagination that sees the ultimate consummation, warmed by a heart that feels the needs of men, and glows with the greatness of the Father's purpose for them."

Whatever attitude others may assume, or whatever course they may pursue with reference to Christian educa­tion. Father, give me a life full of opportunities to spend and be spent in Thy Church, growing in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, that I may be able to teach others also.