From the Southern States, including contributions from Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and New Mexico, we received last year $227, precisely the average for the preceding five years.

In order to meet the average annual expenditures for the support

of our missionary work in the foreign field, we need an advance in the regular contributions from the churches of about 20 per cent. Let the New England churches aim for an average of $2 a member, and the Western churches for an average of $1 a member, and we shall move forward along the path which God is opening before us with good courage. It is poor economy, as related to all our benevolent causes, not to be raising continually the standard of our gifts to foreign missions. It continues true from year to year that "God has blessed our work to such a degree that for us to remain stationary has become impossible without a manifest and perilous disregard of duty."

I cannot close without declaring to the representatives of the churches assembled in this National Council our warm appreciation, at the missionary rooms, of the confidence which has been frequently expressed in the wise and economic administration of the great trust committed to us by you for the spread of the gospel in heathen lands. That trust, I can assure you, will never be betrayed. We mean to be worthy of your confidence, and to give ourselves to the work in fellowship with those who go as our messengers abroad, in a genuine missionary consecration. May God enable us all to be faithful!

PAPERS.

THE BIBLE IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

BY REV. THEODORE D. WOOLSEY, D. D., LL. D., NEW HAVEN, CONN.

THE relations of the state towards education, including the control of the public schools, may be briefly summed up under the following heads:

1. The state's right of teaching is a clear one, founded on the immense importance of the education of the young to the general welfare. This is disputed by Mr. J. S. Mill, who, however, maintains that the state may compel parents or guardians to educate those of whom they have the control. But this is objectionable, both in what it affirms and what it denies, if the two parts are to be taken together. There is a large class of parents in every state who are incompetent to educate their children themselves and are too poor to pay tuition fees to others. If compulsion is or can be defended, it must be on the ground of the rights of the child, the immense benefit of education to the child, and the vast advantage of educated children to a community. The state then ought to provide an education at least for those who are too poor to pay the expenses of private tuition.

2. The state's right to educate does not exclude the rights of private persons to set up schools of their own, and to direct the education of their children. Some rights of states are exclusive, as that of administering justice in civil and criminal cases, and of inflicting penalties, the right of taxing, and of raising armies; but this right of educating is concurrent with a liberty of teaching, which private persons, under a certain supervision, no doubt ought to be permitted to exercise.

3. The state may compel parents to send their children to school. We defend this interference on the simple ground that the state, as guardian of rights, protects the child from the parents' negligence, and for public reasons may demand that the people should be intelligent and moral. If the parent sends his child to a private school, well and good. If he cannot, the public schools are for all that

want to make use of them. A small sum may be charged for what the children consume, or the education may be entirely gratuitous. 4. Whatever system is adopted by the state, whether the system is under public supervisors or local committees, or both, there is a necessity and a duty of teaching moral duties to the children in some shape or other. This does not proceed from the state's being the great moral teacher in a political body, but from the vast interest the state has in a moral education. There are hundreds of children in the most well-trained communities who receive no moral instruction at home, who learn to lie, swear, get drunk, to become lewd and dishonest, from the parents themselves. It is of no benefit to the state that they could become intelligent without becoming moral, for such a person is so much the greater pest to society in mature years. On all accounts, for the child's sake and the community's sake, instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography ought never to be divorced from moral instruction.

5. Can instruction in morals be separated in the concrete forms of earlier discipline from religion? We can, in a system of morals, considered in the abstract, separate religion from it, but in the practical part, even of a book on ethics, there is an unavoidable necessity of bringing the two into connection. If there is a God, and it can be made out that He abhors injustice, His opinions, apart from His penalties, are an efficient motive against injustice, against falsehood, fraud, and every form of evil. If He is believed to exist, the relation of the believer must be (according to the law of our feelings) one of reverence, and laws against blasphemy on our statute book show that this kind of legislation, on account of the good of society and of all its members, is almost unavoidable.

6. How shall the books used in schools be selected, and how far shall the master or mistress go in that which shall be called real instruction, without book? (a) The secretary of a board may select the books, or the local board may have some originating or concurring power. I see no necessity of absolute uniformity, but there is use, yes, and a necessity, of having among the reading-books such as will teach the children in some apprehensible way their duties, including those toward God. I would make this an imperative rule in all selections. (b) The teacher ought to be able orally to say such things to the scholars as would help the instructions in morality. As a friend placed over others, he ought to reprove, rebuke, exhort, in all moral earnestness and meekness. Especially ought he in private, as well as by communications addressed to all the school, to

prevent the rise of evil by contagion of example. If school is a place where lewdness, swearing, abuse of the smaller children, ill manners, can be propagated, the master ought to have the power of stopping the propagation, not merely by flogging, but in more persuasive ways.

7. If other books of morals including the existence of God can be and ought to be introduced, why not the Bible? The grand peculiarity of the religion of the Scriptures is that it is intensely moral, because religion and morality are united together. Morality is thus made religious and religion moral. The mythology, art, and literature of heathen nations divorce morals from religion. The often-quoted passage from the Roman dramatic poet, of the young man who excused his licentious amours by the picture of Jupiter and Danai, shows the genius of heathenism. Now, on account of this taint of the literature derived from mythology, moral writers like Plato would exclude the poets from influence over the young.

8. There can be no objection to the Bible as a reading-book in schools as it respects its style of English, its morals, and its religion, except from two extreme sources. On the one hand stand Jews, who reject the New Testament, with the infidels who reject the Old and the New; on the other, the Roman Catholics. As to the objection of the first two classes, they would not be offered in one out of fifty school districts, so that the objection is of very little practical importance. There the rule applies, "De minimis non curat lex." If there is any plea against the overthrow of the family faith, or want of faith, the remedy might be to allow the children of aggrieved parents to remain away while the Bible is read.

9. But the objections from the Catholics are more serious. If I understand them, they are coming to amount to this: Not only must no religious books, including translations from the Scriptures, be introduced into state schools, but nothing must be said or done by the teacher in depreciation of Catholicism, no books of history presenting the Protestant view of the Reformation must be taught or read in the reading lessons, and logically no prayers or singing of hymns must be allowed which spring from spontaneous feelings in which Protestantism mingles. There must be an embargo, as far as possible, on all Protestant views, on everything that would pervert the Catholic youth's mind, or neutralize the existing influences which aim at keeping the children in the faith of their fathers. This being so, I cannot see any possibility of a reconciliation between the views of education which the Catholics take and those which the