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Religious Education

BY

ROBERT WELLS VEACH, M.A., D.D.
Associate Director Department of Social
Service, New Era Movement

NEW YORK

IR

CHICAGO

Fleming H. Revell Company

LONDON AND EDINBURGH

Copyright, 1920, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street

699 1395 me

T

FOREWORD

HE forces involved in the war are so bound

up with the currents of history that time only can reveal their full significance. "He is a blind man," says Robert E. Speer, "who does not see that one great lesson that this war has taught is the importance of education to national character and purpose. The Christian churches are facing a problem the right solution of which is vital to the very life of Christianity." In a speech at Manchester, Lloyd George asked this very pertinent question, "What is the next lesson of the war?" and he answered, "We must pay more attention to the school. The most formidable foe we had to fight in Germany was not the arsenals of Krupp or the yards in which they turned out submarines but the schools of Germany. They were our most formidable competitors in business and our most terrible opponents in war. This fact was only half comprehended here before the war."

The war was the direct result of a certain theory or philosophy of life which for two generations was taught unchallenged in the schools and universities of Europe and America. It is also true that the glorious victory won can be attributed to certain other educational forces at work in national life. The one may be called the materialistic view and the other the Christian conception of life. The con

flict between these two theories of life is still going on and the conquests of peace must first be made in the schools and the coclleges of the land. It is to religious education as promoted by the Church, that we must chiefly look, for those distinctively Christian influences that, permeating all of our institutions and life, will make for final victory. Whatever light, therefore, the meaning of the war can throw on the future work of religious education is of the utmost value.

Philadelphia, Pa.

R. W. V.

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