The Portland daily press., 1876-02-08

quire the Catholic 10 send his child into what
he believes is everlasting peril; and that it is
inconsistent for the sons of the Puritans to
deny men ''the tight to worship God accord
ing to the dictates of their consciences." He
thinks it no argument that we are right, for
that does not justify legal or torcble interfer-
ence with another mans conscience. 1t is
not because he loves Catholicism, he says,
that he argues thus, for he looks upon it as
''tbe breeding mother of all superstitions,
the murderess of free thought, the bar to all
progress" But he wishes to remove all just
ground for Catholic opposition to education,
to remove every pretext that in any reasona-
BILE mind can justify Catholic objection to the
universal spread of the common school. 'By
taking the Bible out of the schools,' he says,
eve shall be able justly and righteously to
compel the Catholics to go in, and compelling
Catholicism to enter the halls of popular edu-
cation is like driving ghost into daylight
he vanishes into thin air." There is no dan
ger that the Bible cannot hold its own where
every child can read. On this point he dis
courses thus eloquently:'
Our Christian religion ought to receive the
contempt of mankind if 1t dare stoop to ask for
odds in its battle for the supremacy of the
world Ii, indeed, as her adherents claim, she
be the divine creature that God has commits
stoned and sent for the salvation of humanity,
wearing on her brow the coronet of universal
dominion, and bearing in her hand scepter
on which is written "All power is given unto
me in heaven ond on earthp'-if, 1 say this be
her character, her friends ought to be ashamed
OF themselves to beg for her the pitiful backing
OF congressional majorities and constitutional
amendments. The sun asks no odds in the
battle with the darkness when he rises in the
east. Let the heather set up their Dagons be-
fore the ark of Jehovah; and if they do not
fall on their faces before it, let the ark be voted
a box of boards, full only of emptiness. If,
with all the vantage of Gldtime possession,
grounded in the popular veneration, rich in en-.
dowments of college and church and hospital,
with her Bible in every home and on every rail-
road train, and her precepts saturating all our
llteratnre-if, 1 say, with these advantages
Christianity cannot sustain herself against all
the world that chooses to come to our shores,
then it ought to die.
1t will be seen that all these men entertain
the highest reverence for the Bible and its
teachings, that they would have every child
read it at his mothers knee, in his Sunday
School, everywhere except in the public
schools. But they hold that the state should
force no child to read it, inside the school or
out for that is abridging the liberty of pri-
vate judgment; that we should leave no
weapon that we can remove in the hands of
those who aim to destroy our school system /;
that we should take away all pretext or the
| assertion that denominationalism is taught in
our schools, an assertion that strengthens the
| hands of the Priest; and that the Bible is so
strongly entrenched by the weight of its own
claims, and by prescription, in the minds of
our people that it can easily hold its own
without the doubtful aid which comes of its
hurried, fragmentary and ineffective reading
in the schools. God will surely see that his
| message does not fade from out the minds Of
men.