The difference between faith as religion and as superstition may be hard to define, the terms having become somewhat interchangeable through controversy, but in general we should doubtless use the pragmatic test. A vital and saving faith which actually justifies itself by results is religion; a faith which is without constructive effect on character and society, and is merely fanciful, fantastic, or degrading we call superstition. The old education which America brought from England and inherited from the Renaissance was a reasonable faith. It consisted of mathematics, classics, and theology, and while it produced, except in rare instances, no mathematicians, classical scholars, or theologians, it trained minds for the learned professions of those days and it gave the possessors of it intellectual distinction, and admitted them to the society of cultivated men everywhere. Its authority was largely traditional, but it worked in the world of that day much as the thirty-three Masonic degrees do in the world of Masonry. It may properly be called a religion, and in its rigid, prescribed, dogmatic creed it may be compared to the mediæval theology. At any rate, it suffered the same fate and from the same cause. Its system was too narrow for the expanding knowledge and the multiplying phenomena of the advancing hour. It failed to take account of too many things. The authority of tradition, by which it maintained its position, was challenged and overthrown, and private judgment was set in its place. Private judgment in education is represented by the elective system; President Eliot was the Luther of this movement and Harvard College his Wittenberg. Exactly as after the Reformation, however, the attitudes of assertion and subservience in spiritual matters continued to manifest themselves where the pope had been deposed, in Geneva and Dort and Westminster, so in spite of the anarchy of the elective system the educational function continues to impose itself in its traditional robes of authority, and to be received with the reverence due to long custom. And in this way education in America from being a saving faith has become an illusion. The old education, its authority challenged, its sway limited, and nobody caring whether its followers can quote Latin or not, is in the position of the Church of Rome; the so-called new education, uncertain in regard to material and method, direction and destination, is like the anarchic Protestant sects. Neither possesses authority; the old system has lost it, and the new ones have never had it. They are alike in depending upon the blindness of the masses which is superstition.