a practical sphere, wherein we seek to do the most good. The function of the state in education, the duty of the Christian church to give the state an education which is untrammeled by sect, the duty of the state to reject that and that only, which is so trammeled, all are so many suggestions of that unity, toward which the civilization of to-day is moving with rapid stride. This education is not a narrow one. There are no good books under ban. The world is our library. Thomas Carlyle, Coleridge and others opened to English readers, on both sides of the Atlantic, the treasures of the German tongue. There is no department of learning that has not felt the thrill, of new truth and new life which comes when one nation undertakes to learn of another. We have, of late years, come to see that the world is not such a very wide thing after all. We touch a wire and our thought flies to any part of the earth. We read a reply sooner than we could once hear from a friend in an adjoining township. Electricity has so far annihilated time and space, that we are obliged to reckon with the distant brother, whom we theoretically counted a man, but whose isolation kept him from any practical advantage arising from the fact. Perhaps no country of the modern world is growing more rapidly than Italy. The Roman church is seeing that her hope on both sides of the sea lies in education. All Americans, whether Catholic or Protestant, should see that the school laws are enforced, and that parochical schools are not employed as a substitute for the public schools. All honor to the liberality of our Roman Catholic friends of the public school. Let the friends of education and peace cement the union which believes that truth can be trusted. The citizen is fast learning that he can never again be put under spiritual bondage to any man or set of men, any hierarchy, whether Papal claim or Protestant authority. All faiths should unite to uphold our public schools. If some are taxed twice for education, once by the government and again by the priest, let them rejoice if they are receiving a double measure of a good thing. No true Catholic should ask to take support from the public schools, so long as so many of his own faith support them with their patronage and prayers. These advances in education, which match every church with a public school-house, which open great free public libraries, galleries of art and reading rooms, which furnish aids for those who are self-supporting, are a wisely timed philanthropy to help self-help. Here and here alone is the open sesame, namely Christian education, an education which unifies the world and makes mankind realize its kinship, declaring to every man in unmistakable voice, "Nothing human is indifferent" to you. At the present time the University Extension Movement is a timely union of hand and brain workers. If there has been a divorce between the schools and the politics of our land, neither should much longer suffer from such cause. "Book larnin", formerly consisted of "readin, ritin, and rithmetic," and these were not deemed quite necessary. We advanced to make them indispensable. But at this stage parents would take their children out of school, regarding them as knowing quite enough. Some allow their children to go further, but are very sure that no one ought to study a dead language. They are sincere in their ideas, but succeed chiefly in leaving the impression upon educators, that what was good enongh for the parents is good enough for the children. Another note of race unity, I discover in the oft abused word, and culminating thought, of liberty. Doubtless many have no high and true conception of the word. It is such a broad word that it has been attenuated so as to drop the preserving moral element. No one can deny that the savage has a sort of freedom to roam from place to place, a freedom which you and I call slavery, without the slightest particle of hesitation. What ought we to mean by a true freedom which is the note of unity between nations worthy of the name civilized? We have already seen that it must have thrown away war as its reliance and staple in life, that it must be developed by an education which brings into exercise the facts of a complete science and that a complete science inclndes a religion though not a church for the state. Liberty then, must be that tranquility and practiced ease, into which man enters by the door of habit, until he finds it easier to do right than to do wrong. This is the Millennium, a state which I believe to be a reality, however far removed. That the World does move toward it, is evident to every thoughtful mind. That things are too free with us, is doubtless true. But one thing is ever to be remembered, that a young country, like a young child, learns the true freedom of walking by falling. There is danger in the liberty given, but greater danger in not giving it. There is the danger which comes to all self-reliant efforts to touch the stove, to walk from chair to chair, or to learn any art. Russia is a government, which lacks this safety, and so has the hardest falls after all. It would gather up the little one, learning the self-government of standing on his own feet, and carry him all the time. The result is he never learns to walk, an effort to do so, being treason resulting in banishment to Siberia, ostracism and even murder. These three characteristics of unity, in the civilization of to-day, stand out preeminent, peace, education, liberty; all fruits of the doctrine of the brotherhood of man. They find their original source in the Fatherhood of God. Though all members, of the great family, have their special points of superiority; not any being given the palm in every field of contest, yet I am glad to believe that in this broad domain it is given us to lay new foundations. If we have peculiar opportunities and advantages, we have peculiar dangers. We ought to be worthy leaders in the cause of peace and brotherhood. If, as yet, we cannot lead in technical education, if we cannot command the leisure and wealth to surpass the old world in this respect, yet in that free education for common men, resulting in the distribution of the fruits of labor more evenly, it is ours to emulate the practice of democratic ideas which have nad such wide use in many of the great cities of Great Britain during the last quarter of a century. There is great danger that we shall only be democratic in name, while nations monarchical in name, shall become democratic in fact. Is there one among us who desires to take down from our banner the strange device "Excelsior," a device we were taught to be of Divine origin, with the history of the Earth for its track of progress; and with the United States for its newest, freest, and most fruitful application? We will not forsake a device which traces its continuous living inspirations, not only to the Statue of Liberty in the port of New York, but across the ocean, across the channel, over the Alps, to the birthplace of the race and to the heart of Him who brought peace and good will to all, a peace insured by Christian education and culminating in Christian liberty. |