ARTICLE II.-THE RELIGIOUS FACTOR IN EDUCATION. What THERE is an old irrational feud between the human heart. and intellect. One form of it appears in the jealousies and antagonisms of religion and learning. Such conflict ought to be impossible where there is a worthy estimate of man. man is determines the problem of his training. The capacity of his being is the measure of his becoming. A worthy idea of his person, place, use, and destination pledges a broad conception of his education. Education is nothing less than the development and training of all the potencies that have been lodged in man. It concerns itself with the full contents of his being and with all his possibilities. The claims of education are precisely the claims of manhood. If the ideal of manhood be low the product of training will be meagre and inadequate. The claims of religion upon education are precisely the claims of a complete manhood. If a man is worth educating at all he is worth educating roundly as a man. If the capacity of religion belongs to his manhood it is a crime against that manhood to ignore its rights or cripple its possibilities. It must be acknowledged that religion, in some form, has always been an immense power in the history of the human race. It has always been in fact the dominant power. Nor is it likely that it will cease to be in any most advanced period of the future. long as man is forced by the necessities of his own being to recognize a power which is other and more than himself and other and more than the universe in which he lives, so long religion will hold its supremacy, and this supremacy will be hardly the less apparent in whatever effort to suppress, pervert or limit its claims. No healthy growth can ever ignore it or pervert it or crowd it into a place of subordination or insignificance. This meagre world-power can never successfully displace that which represents what lies beyond the world. It is too real and too essential. The religious seems to be the primitive consciousness of the race. The limit of primitive history So and tradition is primeval religion. Beyond this we have nothing but speculation. It may be that we do not know prehistoric or pre-traditional man. But primitive man so far as we know him feels the invisible long before he understands much of the visible. There is a something in him that pushes him into the presence of a power behind the Universe, before the intellect has fairly grappled with the problem of such a power. The problem of origin and destination is summarily solved before the mind has had time to fairly comprehend the elements of the problem. Man does not attain to the idea of God by the action of the powers of nature upon his creative imagination. It is not the product of experience, meditation, teaching or even revelation simply. There were nothing to educate or cultivate "if there were not already presupposed an original God-consciousness as its practical basis and condition." A higher world and a higher power thrust themselves into the forefront of all our investigation of this lower world and all lower orders of existence. Mythology antedates history, and mythology is "religion gone mad." Religion is before philosophy or science or whatever highest product of the human intellect. Men begin to reflect, and generate philosophy, to investigate and generate science, to recollect and produce history, to utter their thoughts and produce literature, to give expression to feeling and the sense of beauty in the forms of imagination and produce poetry and art. But already they have begun to feel, in dim, vague fashion, the reality of an invisible realm. and the presence of invisible personalities and powers, which they do not profess to understand and already religion is born. And they have presentiment of the invisible powers before they have understanding of them. Religion is before theology. All earliest attempts, so far as we know them, in science, philosophy, history, literature, poetry or art, are religious, and this because man can not crowd back from his highest and noblest activities the realm of the unseen and unknown that lies beyond the borders of the Universe. Before this earthly existence there stretches an ocean at whose shores man stands longingly. While he is thinking and speculating upon the origin of things he finds already within him the necessity to try the vastness of the ocean that lies before him and bring back some report. Indeed there comes a report out of the great deep even before he has sought to launch. What we know of the invisible is given as revelation. And yet too, religion and theology are the necessity of the soul's outreach and striving to know what lies beyond. We are forever mingling these two realms. It is the vital force of a nature that has capacity for religion that effects this. Existence begins in religion, and it must end with it. It begins in the simplicities of undeveloped and untrained manhood. It must end in the complexity and completeness of the perfect man. It begins as a crude, confused product of nature perverted by finiteness and sin. It must end as the consummate product of a divine and human effort. It begins with spontaneity, it must end with conscious freedom and virtue. It begins in a garden. It must end in a city. Eden and the New Jerusalem! Here is religion without and religion with the developed contents of manhood. But always religion. If the Bible had intended to give a philosophical rather than a religiously historical and prophetic statement of the beginnings and endings of religion in the history of humanity, it could not have done it more successfully. Here we find the religious as the earliest historic consciousness. Man walks as a child with God. Without training he is not without religion. And in the consummation we behold still the dominance of religion. Intellect and power, art and achievement bring their glory and honor into the City of God, where religion is enthroned in all its fullness and majesty of power. The New Jerusalem is a city with all the splendors of decoration, but it is the city of God. Religion must crown as well as begin the history of the race. Man must be trained to the utmost of his capacity-and that means that he must be trained religiously. Education can never suppress nor displace religion. It can only pervert it, and in doing so perverts itself. Its highest aim is to develop religion into fullness of significance and power. The end of history is the kingdom of God. Religion has often been a blind, dark power, but always a power, and one whose greatness might easily suggest that it will not take care of itself; will not take itself out of the way; cannot be explained out of existence; cannot be trained into permanent silence; will not be ignored, and cannot be majestically put to confusion by the power of intellectual arrogance. If religion were only a coördinate factor in our education it would demand all that any other factor demands, for its rights are as great, and an education that would crowd it out of recognition would only be a garbled and false and so a dangerous education. Even those who allow it no higher dignity or significance than belongs to a product of feeling and imagination clearly see this. But if religion represents the realm of the absolute, and is the central and imperative power in man, the case iş other and more. Religion does not come into man's consciousness simply as a product of his thought. It is not a product of the intellectual activity in its speculation upon the origin of all things, as Rationalism claims. It is not a theoretic, but a practical power. It is more than knowledge of the infinite. It is knowledge realized as obligation. In religion we do not find man exacted upon by the powers and mysteries of the universe over against which he stands in his weakness and ignorance and dependence. Nor do we find him exacting upon himself in his isolation and centrality and supremacy. Nor do we find one department of his being exacting upon another. We find the whole man subject to an authority without him. Nor yet is religion wholly in the conscience, as moralism holds. It is not in the feeling alone, as mysticism holds. Nor is it in the aesthetic faculty. Nor in the will alone. Religion is realized only as the "unity of the soul revealed in feeling, willing, and knowing," and that soul in its unity becomes the organ of the revealing activity of God. Religion, therefore, as an authority from the realm of the absolute claims the whole man. It is the surrender of man to God in the thought of what is true, in the will for what is good, in the feeling of blessedness, as an immediate life from faith, in which man brings his life to God in order to receive true life from God." Religion, then, is the root of manhood, as well as its crown, and all rational and systematic development must proceed from this center. A something there must be in man which is to him what life is in the development of organism. This somewhat is the religious factor in him. Only as religion finds place in the growth and development of manhood do we attain to symmetry and completeness. But religion not only furnishes material to be educated, it also furnishes material which educates. It not only demands a place, and a commanding place, in every comprehensive educational product, it also provides that which aids in the development of that product. Whatever educates, whatever quickens, develops and trains the elements of manhood, is the material of education. Every capacity as it develops itself yields a product which in turn becomes an agency not only for the still larger development of that particular capacity but for the development of many others besides. The linguistic and mathematical capacities have furnished a vast store of material for the further development of these capacities, and the same is true of all others. But it is more to the purpose that they have all furnished large material for general education, and the worth, by the larger estimate, of any particular educational product is not simply in what it does for the capacity to which it corresponds, but in what it does for the broader and completer education of men. We do not study languages and mathematics solely with reference to the attainment of a special linguistic and mathematical skill. They are necessary to any broad and thorough education. Religion also yields material for its own fuller and completer development and culture. Religion as an historic product is always necessary to the training and culture of the religious capacities. Without it the capacity for religion would deteriorate. But we claim for religion a larger place than this in the education of men, and the claim we make also illustrates its supremacy. Religion has furnished a vast amount of material for general education. No one capacity has contributed so much to the general elevation of man. No single department of learning has the educational record that religion has. It has made an impression upon every department of human activity. It has colored the world's thinking and influenced the world's training as no other power has or can. Often, no doubt, a bad discoloration and perversion. But this, not because it had no legitimate place in the direction of human development, but only because it was itself a perverted religion. A revival of religion has often proved itself necessary to a revival of learning. The best trained races are the religious races. The experience of |