Political Science Of The State

414 POLITICAL SCIENCE.
of things and the final issues of conduct ? The ancients in
their best systems of education did far better service to chil-
dren's natures, considering what they knew and what they did
not know, than we do under the modern dispensation. They
aimed by a public training of children to improve the habits
and character, to make the young obedient to the law and
good citizens when they should grow up, and they called in
religion, which, poor as it was, added its sanctions to moral-
ity. In the middle ages, the instruction of the young was
mainly in the hands of ecclesiastics and had too exclusively
religious a cast. In modern times this is passing away. The
extreme is reached among us where religion is full of benevo-
lent helpfulness within its own sphere, but a definite line pre-
vents it from invading the sphere of state education. We
have not yet quite reached the extreme that the teacher must
never mention God to children's ears, but it must logically
come, if modern unbelief is to have the career that many look
for. Shall it come to this that not even the existence of the
Supreme One is to be assumed in the schools, nor any book
introduced which expresses any definite faith in regard to
providence and final causes ? Or, if this should be the course
of opinion growing out of the doctrine of personal and family
rights, will not one of two things happen—that all the churches
will become dissaffected towards the common schools as the
Catholics now are, and provide teaching for themselves, while
the schools will be left to the f&x infima populi ; or that some
kind of compromise will be made between the sects and the
state, such as all of them with one exception would now dis-
approve.
$249-
VIII. We have seen that no man has a right to be supported
^u. v . by the state, or even the right to be supplied
Public chanty. , p >-,- . . •-
with work ; but the benevolence of Christianity
and the sympathies of man for his brother man will not allow
the rule of strict justice to govern in society. Private com-
passion towards the poor, the stranger, the exile, is natural