today for the process of denominational fission has gone steadily forward, and as this energy of the religious influence weakens the strenuosity of maintenance strengthens.  With our 157 varieties of Protestantism confronting Catholicism, Hebraism, and a mass of frank rationalism and infidelity as large in amount as all others combined, it would seem at first sight impossible to harmonize free public education with concrete religion in any intimate way.  So it is; but if the principle is recognized and accepted, ways and means will offer themselves, and ultimately the principle will be embodied in a workable scheme.

For example; there is one thing that can be done anywhere, and whenever enough votes can be assembled to carry through the necessary legislation.  At present the law regards with an austere disapproval that reflects a popular opinion (now happily tending towards decay), what are known as “denominational schools” and other institutions of learning.  Those that maintain the necessity of an intimate union between religion and education, as for example the great majority of Roman Catholics and an increasing number of Episcopalians and Presbyterians, are taxed for the support of secular public schools which they do not use, while they must maintain at additional, and very great, expense, parochial and other private schools where their children may be taught after a fashion which they hold to be necessary from their own point of view.  Again, state support is refused to such schools or colleges as may be under specific religious control, while pension funds for the teachers, established by generous benefactions, are explicitly reserved for those who are on the faculties of institutions which formally dissociate themselves from any religious influence.  I maintain that this is both unjust and against public policy.  Under our present system of religious individualism and ecclesiastical multiplicity, approximations only are possible, but I believe the wise and just plan would be for the state to fix certain standards which all schools receiving financial support from the public funds must maintain, and then, this condition being carried out, distribute the funds received from general taxation to public and private schools alike.  This would enable Episcopalians, let us say, or Roman Catholics, or Jews, when in any community they are numerous enough to provide a sufficiency of scholars for any primary, grammar, or high school, to establish such a school in as close a relationship to their own religion as they desired, and have this school maintained out of the funds of the city.  This is not a purely theoretical proposition; after an agitation lasting nearly half a century, Holland has this year put such a law in force.  From every point of view we should do well to recognize this plan as both just and expedient.  One virtue it would have, apart from those already noted, is the variation it would permit in curricula, text books, personnel and scholastic life as between one school and another.  There is no more fatal error in education than that standardization which has recently become a fad and which finds its most mechanistic manifestation in France.