RELIGION IN THE SCHOOL. 299 
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ing, this being specially true in childhood, and so it becomes desirable in 
moral training to quicken religious emotion. Experience shows that the 
most effective means of awakening religious feeling include the reverent 
reading of the Bible, prayer (oral or silent), and singing ; and one or more 
of these exercises have long had a place in American schools, and they are 
still permitted in the great majority of these schools, and the singing of 
sacred songs is nowhere forbidden. 
But whether desired religious feeling is awakened depends much on the 
spirit and manner in which the exercise is conducted. The reading 
of the Bible in a perfunctory and indifferent manner neither increases 
reverence for it in the pupils nor touches deeply their religious emotions. 
We have no hesitation in saying that it is much better to omit the exer- 
cise altogether than to conduct it in an irreverent manner. It must 
ever be kept in mind that what the school needs is not religious ceremony 
as such, but religious influence for moral ends. 
We are, however, far from conceding that these religious exercises, 
when properly conducted, have little or no moral value. A writer who 
assumes to know intuitively what is true in the experience of others, 
declares that ¢“ no boy or girl ever received a religious impression of the 
least value in the devotional exercises in school ” ; but teachers who have 
;hus impressed for good hundreds of pupils, know better, and hundreds of 
persons know that this was not true in their own experience as pupils. 
But all must concede that whatever may be the value of these religious 
exercises, it cannot be pleaded as an offset to a violation of the reli- 
gious scruples of pupils, when this is the result. 
It must, however, be admitted that it is easy to overestimate the moral 
influence of perfunctory religious exercises in school, and too much is 
often claimed for the moral value of the reciting of the catechism and 
other formal religious instruction. There is, certainly, no justification 
for the claim that the absence of such formal religious exercises in school 
eaves no basis for moral training. 
What is needed, that religion may serve the ends of the school, is not the 
{ormal teaching of the Bible, or the catechism, or other technical religious 
mstruction; not formal religious services or worship, but the wise and 
reverent use of those common religious sanctions and motives which 
quicken the conscience and enforce moral obligation. And these may be 
made effective in school by the use of means that give no offense to the 
religious scruples of pupils or patrons. 
On the other hand, there is no justification of the demand that all 
religious truth and influence be excluded from the public school. The 
attempt to exorcise religion from the school would not only despoil its 
literature, its music, and its instruction, but would inevitably result in 
lowering its moral efficiency and seriously lessening its value to the pupils, 
to society, and to the state.