This official attitude toward the school question gave a renewed impetus to school building so that to-day there are one million two hundred and fifty thousand children being educated in schools immediately under the control of the Church, and during the last generation three hundred million dollars have been spent for this object.

We have the system now pretty well perfected, as it goes all the way from the kindergarten through the university. The time was when the poor people were not able to spend much money in school buildings, but now we have splendid schools, almost every one in fire-proof buildings.

We have a corps of competent teachers. In this country there are fifty thousand women alone consecrated to the work of teaching in the Catholic schools. These women have given up father and mother, houses and lands, and devoted themselves to this work, and expect to stay in that work as long as they live, so that their ideals are for teaching. The consequence is we get good results. Time was when that was not so, but all the energies of the Catholic Church for a generation have been expended in perfecting the system until now as a whole the system will compete very favorably with any other system in the country.

So that the Catholic Church hesitates not to say that while giving a religious education to the children, she will give as good secular education as can be obtained anywhere else. Her theory is that the child is made for God and for Heaven. This world is but a stopping place. The best hours of the child's day, and the best years of a child's life what are we to do with them? If we believe in the divine side of the child, are we going to give them to God or not? The Catholic says they should be spent in an atmosphere where there is some religion.

The parish school system as an educational factor has come to stay. A generation now educated in the parish school are its best defenders. Inaugurated by ecclesiastical efforts it is now lodged where it belongs, with the parents. A generation grown up in parish schools, many of whom are in professional and mercantile life, are the best defenders of the system. When you see the statement in the public press that the Catholic school is a matter of priestcraft, that it comes from the priest and not from the people, do not believe it. The parish school system is lodged with the parents. A generation brought up in the parish schools are willing to give all they have for them because they love them. The parish school has come to stay, and it is something we must reckon with.

We are coming, some people think, on dangerous times. Socialism is in the air; socialism means lawlessness. If you bring a child up under religious auspices, he learns reverence for law, obedience to parents.

So one of our best remedies against socialism is education under religious auspices. The time may come when the state will see the necessity of this settlement. The Catholic Church does not ask one cent to teach religion. If it were offered us to-morrow we would not accept it. The Catholic Church likes the American policy of non-interference with religion. She would not change the policy were it in her power to do it. We want no union of Church and State. So when it comes a matter of the State helping the Church to teach religion we say, "no!" But when the State finds existing agencies ready to do its own work why not utilize them? It does so in the case of hospitals which it charters. Wherever it has found agencies to do its work it has found it good economy to make use of them. So the parish school is ready now to submit to inspection and examination and if it can show results as good as those of any other schools, if it does the State's work, is it wrong for the State to pay for it? There is our position.

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL EDUCATION IN THE UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES

SOME SALIENT POINTS IN THE REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE OF SIX

WALLACE NELSON STEARNS, PH. D.

PROFESSOR WESLEY COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH DAKOTA, GRAND FORKS

The growth of our universities and colleges is not keeping pace with the development of the country. One hundred and thirty thousand students is not so large a number as it may seem at first sight, being but one to about 600 of our entire population. While these institutions have increased one-half per cent in attendance, the increase in population has equalled four and eighteen and one half per cent or about a million and a third a year.

As a people we are not making enough of religious education. We are too much impressed with the idea that salvation with all its appurtenances is free. Philosophy and ethics are rated as collegiate studies, but such studies as Biblical literature and history are too often solicited for smaller salaries, and Hebrew and Biblical Greek are too often tacked on to the college course as an afterthought. Colleges that expend thousands of dollars for the natural sciences, and equally large amounts for history, economics, or modern languages, give grudgingly for subjects that can be construed as falling under the head of religious education. If religion is to receive due homage, it must be invested with proper dignity. Students are quick to detect differences, real or artificial, and they know as well as the officers of administration the attitude of the public mind. Stock the shelves with books and periodicals representative of current thought, require that the instructors be men not only of godly mind but of scholarly training, judge the department by results, raise the courses to the standard grade of excellence, put off the apologetic air, and assure fair play, and there will be a gradual cessation of talk on the decline of religious interest. So long as scholarship produces only the truth, piety need fear no violence. Peril is not from criticism,

1 For convenience in conference the work of the Department of Universities and Colleges was printed in RELIGIOUS EDUCATION for February, 1907. It consisted of a report, by a committee of six, on Religious and Moral Education in the Universities and Colleges, for the preparation of which information was solicited from 402 universities, colleges and technical schools, or seventyone per cent of the number listed by the Commissioner of Education. The report actually represents 141 institutions, or twenty-three per cent of the total number. The statement is fairly representative, forty states and three provinces, (Canada) being included.

but from indifference and from contempt born of weakness. Equal chance will produce equal results.

2. The schools almost uniformly express an interest in religious education. This is true not only of the denominational colleges but of state institutions as well. Hampered as they are by the present state of public opinion, state universities have been misunderstood as being hostile to religious interests. This is not the case. The instructors are, very many of them, actively interested in religious work and are members of our several churches; the students are from the same homes and have grown up under the same conditions as other students; and student organizations and other religious interests are zealously cared for and promoted. Limitations arise not from the schools themselves, but from the will of the people whose they are.

3. There are indications of a coming change in regard to education. Professedly church schools, founded and built under church auspices, are beginning to assume the part of non-sectarian schools. Either denominational schools are losing popularity or people are coming to regard education as a civil, rather than a religious form of activity. Already the field of secular education is much occupied; in cutting loose from church ties it will be well for these schools, in changing their policy, to make sure of resources and friends.

4. Educational institutions could easily give more serious attention to the collecting of religious statistics. For a church college to proclaim its indifference to denominational preferences of its students, and for a state institution to express its unwillingness to meddle in private affairs, are equally unjustified. It is not a matter of compulsion. In the final analysis the student is always a free moral agent and needs no champion of his personal liberty. As matters stand in most of our universities and colleges, the way is blocked for anything like definite religious work. Even special seasons of excessive activity cannot accomplish the results of steady, quiet, business-like, everyday effort. Pastors, teachers, students, societies, and other friends are anxious to render service if they can only secure information. The student who thus gives away the awful secret of his church affiliation, is not placing himself at the mercy of an inquisition, but in the hands of friends who would help him. To name one's church ought not to be a more serious matter than telling one's age or political preference. Students must be approached intelligently as well as with enthusiasm, and the first step is the securing of data.

5. We must bear in mind that religion is not merely a matter of sentiment but of business. Every year scores of youths go up to our

universities and colleges with more or less aversion to things religious. These young people must be brought to the right view-point. They must learn that it is as lamentable to be ignorant of Isaiah as of Shakespeare, or of the Psalms as of Omar Khayyam. They must learn that ignorance must be as modest in the treatment of religious as of scientific problems. They must come to know that society justly expects them to contribute to the public welfare through the activities of the Church as through those of the State. As things are, too many enter college with a child's ideas of art, science, and religion, and after four years of discipline leave college with a man's ideas of science and art, but with a child's idea of religion. Unsymmetrical education is hazardous, detrimental. Its peril is that very lack of symmetry, which warps the vision, distorts the judgment, and so far disqualifies the candidate. Religious education is now universally accorded a place in our discipline; it is not a luxury but a necessity; it is not a question of sentiment but a matter of business, and should be allowed to stand in its proper niche and over its own title.

6. The question of religious exercises is complicated. Instead of being ideal institutions where a strict classification is maintained in regard to age, advancement, and maturity, all ages and mental conditions are comprised in one stupendous whole from preparatory to postgraduate. There are no lines of demarcation; nearly every class is more or less heterogeneous. Too often, too, the matter of chapel service is regarded as a "stint" to be worked off. Two plans are now in operation - daily prayers and occasional (e. g. weekly) convocation. Legislated piety is of doubtful efficiency. In the Middle Ages the armies drove the crowds into the stream while the clergy performed the ritual, but to-day all are agreed as to the result. Compulsory attendance on divine worship is not the highest type of service. Students who have attained to years of maturity are not in need of enforced chapel services, especially if they are able to enroll in the university or senior colleges; on the other hand, youngsters just away from the restraining influences of home, enjoying their first experience of semi-independence, are not competent to manage the entire matter from the start - they need to have the religious habit inculcated in them.

A further difficulty, if not injustice, is to require students living some distance from the chapel to break up a valuable study period, thus losing a quarter of a day of precious time, as is the case if they have no lectures in contiguous periods. Occasional assembling together of the academic body is invaluable, enhancing the esprit de corps. Drawing the line sharply between college and academy, compulsory services do not best befit the college and university. The problem is not one of required