Parents read these statements with wonder and a feeling of horror, but only a few realize that the primary schools and the grammar schools, and even the high schools, are responsible for the health-destroying, brain-benumbing methods employed in our public schools. The cause for the present system and methods is to be searched for in the changes which time has wrought in those simple schools planted by the freedom-seeking Puritan fathers. Say, rather, that Protestantism offered a system of Christian education which, if it had been followed, would have prevented what we find to-day. [Sidenote: Modern reformers] It is gratifying to find that the decline has not proceeded undisturbed. Its history has not sped on as a smooth-flowing river. From time to time men have arisen offering educational ideas in advance of the age in which they taught. Such men were Comenius and Pestalozzi, who introduced object-study in place of the time-honored memory work; and Froebel, whose patient labors for the children of the kindergarten have not only endeared him to the heart of the true teacher, but have made him a benefactor of mankind in that he aroused queries in regard to the methods of instructing the human mind. These men, searching for truth, caught glimpses of the principles of true education as taught by Christ. Disciples of these men, instead of taking from them a borrowed light, have the privilege of going again to the source of true wisdom,—“the Teacher come from God.” Here is the secret of success for educational reformers of the twentieth century. [Sidenote: Effects of modern education] The tide has kept up a constant ebb and flow. When the tendency was growing strong toward the classics, natural science revived, and the spirit of investigation broke the band which memory work was weaving. Science, not content with lawful fields of exploration, is now delving into metaphysics, and sending to the world a race of skeptics and infidels; or, if professed Christians, students are confirmed evolutionists, casting aside the Word of God for the theories of geology, astronomy, or biology. The narrow cramming system of memory-teaching was killing the intellectual life of the children, when nature-study was introduced. This was an improvement indeed, for these studies are thought-producing; but here the tide set in the opposite direction, and faith in a Creator is destroyed.