Signs of the Times

with contributions from Hortense Levi

[The West Australian Church News]

Christians cannot accept the view sometimes advanced which would regard a humane or liberal education as suitable only for those entering the professions, and which would estimate the success of the education offered the great majority of the population by its ability to qualify them for merely more efficient labor in their various occupations. There must be diversity of educational methods, because there are diversities of gifts. But the basis of differentiation should be differences of taste or of capacity, not differences of class or of income. The manual worker needs a liberal education for the same reason as the barrister or the doctor—that he may develop his faculties and play a reasonable part in the affairs of the community.

Is there nothing more required? Yes, the greatest thing of all. Men cannot live the full life by bread alone. There is something more wanted. Man is a living soul, and even here in this world it is true that righteousness exalteth a nation. Drunkenness, sexual depravity, dishonesty, idleness, wastefulness, are all dangers to a community. They hinder progress, they enfeeble the bodies and the minds of our people, and so are a drag upon prosperity. We have work to do to train the young, to be good citizens, in bringing back the wanderer, and lifting the fallen out of the gutter so as to make them men again.

[Hortense Levi in New York (N. Y.) Tribune]

Educate doesn't mean to talk sweetly and softly to the violent radical who is actively spreading dangerous and destructive propaganda. It means the instruction of the masses whom the radical finds so easy a prey. It means to fortify the people—the great majority—with truth and facts, to arm them with clear understanding. Then they will not accept their first practical civics lesson given them on the street corner by the anarchist. And they will not be blinded to the general or the ultimate good by the appeal to class action and the promise of plunder.

Teach the principles upon which our government was founded and which are to-day the basis of our Constitution and laws; teach us to understand and uphold these principles: teach us to apply them and not to destroy them in our seeking after governmental perfection—and there will not be room for an anarchist from Maine to California.

[The York (Neb.) Republican]

A mind harrowed by fear is the finest ground in the world for the propagation of seeds of disease. But simply telling people not to be afraid because it is dangerous to their health to be afraid is not likely to get one far. The Christian Scientist professes a reason for his complacency, and that is why the seeds of fear are not so likely to take root in his consciousness and grow into manifestations of disease.

[Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends]

History is replete with lessons of the folly of suppression. Many a religious and political martyr should have taught us long ago that you may torture and kill and silence men, but you do not silence truth. The ancient truth spoken when Christianity was the feared and hated doctrine still holds to-day: "If this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it." Yet while suppression cannot silence truth, it can work many evils. It can produce stagnation of men's minds, and in so doing cut the taproot of democracy. It can bring disaster to those who impose it, as it did when the Federal Party passed the Sedition Law of 1798 and, in the words of a leading historian, "from the day the bill became law, the Federal Party went steadily down to ruin." It can produce revolution. Let France and Russia bear witness. "I will make them conform or I will harry them out of the land," cried James I of England against the Puritans, and these words, it has been said, "heralded the struggle which within half a century was to deliver up James's son to the executioner."

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