There never was a time since civilization began when its program called so loudly for championship and support. We live in the age of completed sinfulness. Righteousness, goodness, kindliness, meekness, and every other virtue which Christ taught, and with which he and the prophets and lawgivers before him sought to save the world have been derided as mere feebleness and unmanliness. Shall the world forsake this way or shall it turn upon the enemy and destroy him by borrowing his weapons and using them against him?

There never has been so clear a proof of the power of education in all history as that which Germany provides. Here was a people obviously devoted to idealism, to Christianity, to homely life, and to the simpler virtues, whose leaders many years ago set about converting it to their mad plan of capturing the world. They used the school and the schoolmaster as their instrument, and employed the drill sergeant and the parade ground to complete the work which he began. They pounded in patriotism, they indoctrinated every German with the thought of national superiority. They caused them to repudiate their own natural kindliness, to turn against the teachings of their faith, to make nothing of their habitual morality, to take little thought for life itself if it could be offered to help to build the new Moloch, which the nation was obsessed to erect.

We cannot make out how their minds work or understand why they value these things, we hate and abhor their actions, yet we must admit that their instructors have done the job thoroughly; there is

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among them a unanimity in wickedness, which is appalling. If we should bend ourselves with the same energy to teaching the lesson of righteousness, could we not hope for as complete a result?

A friend of mine has recently called my attention to this more encouraging aspect of things. His question concerned Democracy. "We know very well,” he said, “what notions destroy it, and what notions make it strong. We also know the public school is its conserver, that if it can be saved anywhere, the place of its salvation is the public school. Now let us, therefore, with one accord, after the German fashion, by incessant indoctrination commit the children of the public schools to the thoughts and actions which conserve democracy; for example, every public office is created to accomplish a certain work, not for the sake of providing a living merely to the person who holds it. Could we not by incessantly bearing down upon the fact that public office is opportunity for service, in a generation, create a body of public servants who would have no other notion of their work?"

It is a great undertaking, yet it can be done, but only upon one condition, that the teachers shall first be trained to the point of being obsessed by that idea.

The same thing is true of religious education. It is surely easier to train the young to an unflinching devotion to righteousness than it is to train them to an unnatural wickedness when all that it promises is an opportunity to die for its unholy cause. Yet the Germans have accomplished that, and we may profit by their experience to undertake the opposite.

Religious education is not different in anything, save in its purpose, from the other forms of education. The same principles apply, the psychological procedure and the methods are the same. The lessons

(I mean the collection of verses, and chapters in the hands of the learner) are not the chief thing. Next to the learner the teacher is. The choicest and most life-giving material in the whole Bible may become repellant and forbidding, or at least merely a tale which is told, in the hands of a poor teacher; whereas, it is sure to be surcharged with life in the hands of a good one. The main thing in this form of education, as in every other, is first to determine what it is we are trying to do, what result we are seeking to accomplish. The next step is to gather the tools, which contribute to that result, and of these the trained and skillful teacher is by far the greatest.

OUR UNDERTAKING AND WHY WE UNDERTAKE IT NOW 1

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THIS is a war of nations. It is everywhere conceded that the victory, when it comes, will belong to that nation or group of nations which comes out of the conflict least broken, best prepared in spite of the demoralization of battle to take up the pursuits of peace. To make war to the utmost, and at the same time to make as active preparation as may be for the only kind of peace which gives our war meaning or value, is our program. That is the program of England also. Of the many manifestations of her unconquerable spirit, none is more striking or convincing than that, contrary to what might have been expected, her people are not wholly consumed by the demands of war, but have energy and interest enough to plan a reform in their national education as significant and almost as farreaching as the reform of 1870. The very tension of war has aroused them to consider a thoroughgoing augmentation of elementary education as indispensable to the national welfare. Mr. Herbert Fisher, the eminent president of the British Board of Education, has for some months been riding a circuit of Great Britain telling its people that "the

1 Inaugural address, Los Angeles State Normal School, January 5,

1918.

whole future of our race, and of our position in the world, depends upon the wisdom of the arrangements that we make for education," and asking them to support the Education Bill that his department has introduced, which prohibits the employment of children attending an elementary school during the hours that the schools are in session, provides for all children a full-time elementary education up to the age of fourteen years, and prevents their education from coming to an end when they leave the elementary school, by requiring that all young persons who have not received a full-time secondary education up to the age of sixteen years or are not under suitable instruction, must attend daytime continuation classes for 320 hours per year from the age of fourteen to the age of eighteen. And, although the finances of Great Britain are at present under a somewhat heavy strain, yet the Commons is asked this year to appropriate $19,000,000 more for education than it appropriated last year. The Minister's appeal to his people to regard education as a most important branch of the national service has resulted in an active recruiting of the teaching forces by the college women of England. Though she is fighting for her existence as a nation, Great Britain is more alive to the needs of education to-day than ever before in her history.

It is not otherwise with France - a few months ago the regents of the University of New York sent their distinguished Commissioner of Education to study and report upon conditions there. "I went," says Mr. Finley, "to see the schools in which France's