Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/18

12 been its temples, and threatened to become its graves, into the general life of the community at large. Yet the West, I believe, is not irreligious. One Western man, at all events, raised from a low estate to the dizziest elevation, and there set to contend with appalling perils, was kept calm and wise by his strong sense of the constant presence and the over-ruling providence of God. If I am not misinformed, there is a great craving among the Western people for theological truth of a certain kind. Talk to them of the questions that come before our Ecclesiastical Courts and they will probably pay you little attention: but if you have anything to say in singleness of purpose about the great and vital truths of religion, there, if I mistake not, are the ears that will hear and the hearts that will understand you.

Christianity, as the religion of light, has always—always at least where her own light has not been turned to darkness—preached and practised the duty of education. The Reformers, appealing from tradition to individual reason and conscience, and to the Written Word, were great revivers of this duty. Of popular education, in fact, they may be said to have been the founders; for the educational charity of the middle ages was, for the most part, practically confined to poor children destined for the clerical order. The common school in America is the offspring of the Puritan church. To adapt it to a society of various creeds it has been in a certain sense secularised, but it still retains a religious character, as do the motives which support it, and is a bond not only of social and political but of Christian union in the nation. There are, I doubt not, great local inequalities and grave general defects in American education. In the higher education