Manhattan was a child of French parentage, a son of Julien Vigne. He well understands that the stream of immigrants pouring into this country at the rate of more than a million every year, is merging and submerging every ethnic element of our older population. In handling merely the immigrants of last year at the one port of New York, interpreters for no less than eighty different languages and dialects were necessary. To-day the blood of the representative American is no longer Puritan or Cavalier, English or French, Teutonic or Slav, European, Asiatic, or African-it is the "one blood" of which Paul spoke to the Athenians on Mars' Hill, the one blood of which God hath made all nations for to dwell on all the face of the earth.

Now just as we have slowly come to glory in the cosmopolitanism of our great Republic, so ought we, as Christians, to glory in the breadth and variety and fullness of America's spiritual heritage. More than any other people we are heirs to every Christian literature and art. Every past triumph of Christian principle and of Christian heroism belonged to one or another group of our fathers, and we their children have entered into its possession. To-day Saint Paul has more converts in our American churches than he has in all the churches he originally founded. The first Bible printed in the United States was Luther's, and twelve millions of our people are of German lineage. Wesley has ten times more followers in our country than in the kingdom which he revolutionized by his preaching. Hither all streams of Christian influence are pouring their floods, and the result is to be a finer, completer and diviner type of Christian life-individual and institutional-than the world has ever yet seen.

In the production of this awaited type our own Church and League have been given a unique place and call. Our origin was international. Our founder was a man to whose making Rome and Geneva and Wittenberg and Canterbury had all contributed. He was English, but back of him, and privileged to be his spiritual father, was Peter Böhler, a German. Our first theologian was a Frenchman of Swiss nationality, who served in the Dutch army, and later became the saintly English Fletcher of Madeley. Our first missionary was an Irishman. Refugees from the German

Palatinate, dragooned by the French, converted in Ireland, were the nucleus of our first American societies. A converted Hebrew, with a converted German Roman Catholic for a wife, first planted our Church on the Continent of Europe. To-day we are preaching the gospel on every continent, and on one of them is seven and thirty different languages. Never think of the Methodist Episcopal Church as a church of English-speaking people. Even in the one state of Massachusetts, it is a church of ten different nationalities, worshiping in ten different languages. Our Epworth League makes use of many tongues, and a convention in which all should be represented might well attract the gaze of holy angels. Let us glory in the fact that we belong to a universal Church-a Church whose roof is as wide as the arch of heaven, and whose growing fellowship is winning and holding peoples of every tongue and kindred of our world-wide human family.

The exhortation to which all these facts lead up is this: Be a friend to the incoming foreigner and seek his good. Let him be as one of the home-born among you, and love him as thyself. His fast coming children are native Americans like yourself. They will be in the same school with your own children. Win them, and they will make yet greater and stronger your Church, your League, your country. Win them, and from among them God will raise up devoted preachers, brave missionaries and princely benefactors of mankind. Somebody loved and cared for a little German boy in New York city some years ago, and as a result the boy became the Christian man now known as Louis Klopschthe man who in his lifetime has raised two millions of dollars for the feeding of famine-stricken peoples in Europe and Asia. Had I been the person who led that lad to Christ-had you been the person-how great would be our joy, how great our reward!

Did time permit, I would gladly outline a plan for a new and most promising line of work for each League Chapter represented in this convention. I can offer but a suggestion. First, that the work may be approached intelligently and tactfully, let every member of the chapter undertake a course of reading, carefully selected, and in any case including the little half-dollar book by

Samuel McLanahan, entitled Our People of Foreign Speech. Let the president and vice-presidents, with the assistance of the pastor, collect and report reliable information as to the nationality, language and religious antecedents of the immigrants residing in your town or parish. If any children or youth from the foreign families are in the Sunday school, make sure of their prompt promotion into the League, and see that they are made doubly welcome. If none are in the school gather in some at once. If, as will usually be the case, these young people can use two languages, show that you consider them the more valuable members for that very reason. If they should chance to be Swedes, get them at some meeting to recite a portion of Tegner's beautiful Swedish poem, 'The Children of the Lord's Supper.' Then let an American follow, giving Longfellow's translation of the same verses. So with other languages. Longfellow alone translated from nine to ten. Get these young helpers to bring to the Sunday school and League others from their home associates. If through them you can learn of any older brothers and sisters, or parents, who cannot go to the day school, but who greatly desire to gain a better mastery of English, offer to conduct for their benefit once a week an evening class in English readings and conversation. You will be astonished and delighted to see how gratefully these young Epworthian children of the stranger will respond to your friendly advances, and how effectively they will help to win you their elders. You will quickly discover that they can carry into their homes religious and patriotic influences which no native American colporteur, or missionary, or professional preacher is able to carry. I do not hesitate to prophesy that after a year or two of such work as is here suggested in any town, not a few of these families of incipient Americans will be found more American than some of our American families, more Christian than many of our Christians. Whoever doubts this prophecy has only to test it, and I will abide by the result.

Wm. 7. Wann

ART. VII. THE BIBLE AND EDUCATION

THE aim of this paper is not to show the place that the Bible has had in the curriculum of the world's education; nor yet is it to show the effect that the Bible has had upon the world's instruction. The Bible has been the supreme textbook, even as it has been the supreme force, in the schools of nearly two millenniums. These facts have been set forth forcefully in various treatises. The primary purpose now is simpler: To trace to its main sources the influence which the Great Book has had upon the intellectual life of the race.

We are met at the outset by the singular fact that the Bible has little to say specifically concerning education. It offers no divine command on the subject. Nowhere do we read: "Thou shalt found schools." The literalist who started out to find a biblical order for education, as such, would come back from an unrewarded search. But we have long ago discovered that the silence of the Bible does not constitute a commandment. The truth is that there are some things stronger than detailed orders. An outer law that has fought an inner sanction has usually fared badly in history. On the other hand, the inner sanction, unenforced by any objective form of obligation, has gained some large victories. Witness the barons at Runnymede, the colonists at Concord, and Garibaldi at Rome. An explicit command to act as an immortal is not half so powerful as the implicit conviction that we are immortal. It is only stating a safe principle to say that the implications of the Scripture are often as deep and abiding and meaningful as its explications. If, then, the flowers of knowledge bloom not by commandment in the fields of the Bible, may we still find there the seeds out of which such flowers inevitably grow? If the school building is not definitely prescribed, as was the temple of Solomon, does the Book yield in a spiritual sense the wood and stone and mortar by which the school building must surely stand? Answers to these figurative questions will go far toward determining the relation of the Bible to education. The contention now is that the Bible has been the fountain whence

streams of intellectual life have flowed, and that, minor influences being freely admitted, these streams may be traced to the Scriptures' implicit doctrine of human responsibility.

I. In discussing the relation of the Bible to learning much has been made of the example of the Scriptures' mightiest characters. In all the eras, it is pointed out, the leader has been an educated man. Now this fact is striking, and it gives itself readily to popular treatment. The average man takes a truth more eagerly when it is offered to him in a human setting. Hence it may be granted that the spirit of the Book in its bearing on education has been splendidly supplemented by its concrete examples. In the patriarchal era the majestic figure is Abraham. Of course, man's mind must precede man's education. Inasmuch as the world's passion for learning has always expressed itself in some institutional form, we could not expect to find organized education in the most primitive days of human and religious history. A very ardent educator may be allowed to presume that, if a good college had existed in Haran or Chaldea, Terah would have sent Abraham thither! But, after all, education is relative. An eminent American graduated from Harvard in 1836 at sixteen years of age. In this day his sixteen years and his completed course of study would barely admit him to a freshman class. So Abraham's education must be graded by the standard of his dim and far age. Tradition represents him as reaching the conclusion as to the divine unity and spirituality by a distinct process of reasoning. You may say of his physical journey that he went out not knowing whither he went; but you cannot say that concerning his intellectual journey. While his feet pressed an unknown way his mind and heart marched straight toward the discovered God. If the best educated man of a generation is he who sees most deeply into the essential truths and problems then Abraham was the supreme scholar of his day. As the life of the chosen people reaches more definite form the place of education is more clearly seen. Doubtless most men would agree that Moses was the arch-figure of the Old Testament. There seems to be no questioning the fact that he had the best mental furnishing of his period. The Book of the Acts says of him that he "was