Much is said concerning the moral education which every child should receive. Parents realize that the boy or girl who grows to maturity with only a physical or intellectual education is either a pugilist or a fit subject for the penitentiary, and hence they insist that the spiritual nature should receive some attention. But where is this spiritual education to be obtained? State schools have no right to give such training; indeed, they can not do it. True, they have attempted it, but it is a miserable failure. Protestants should no longer make the demand. The time has come for them to see that they should establish schools, whose object it is to develop character. These schools should receive support independent of the state; they should be free to follow methods entirely different from the formalism of the papal system; their course of instruction should meet the individual needs of the pupils, and be of a character which will develop Christians. To accomplish such results, the Word of God must be taken from the dust, and placed in the curriculum, not as a mere reference book of Jewish antiquities, but, as it is in deed and in truth, the light whose rays encircle the world. “The Holy Scriptures must be the Alpha and Omega of Christian schools,” wrote Comenius. Christ must be the teacher. The men thus far quoted have followed the light which shone upon their pathway. To-day we may gather the scattered gems of truth left by them; but, better far, we may go direct to the Word itself, and the Spirit of truth will guide into the paths of Christian education. As taught by Froebel, “The spiritual and physical development do not go on separately in childhood, but the two are closely bound up with each other.” [Sidenote: Man’s threefold nature] The human being has a threefold nature,—the physical, the mental, and the spiritual; and Christian education so develops these that they sustain the proper relation one to another. The spiritual nature was the controlling power in the man made in God’s image. In the degeneration of the race, he lost his spiritual insight, and passed first to the intellectual plane, then to the physical. This is seen in the history before the flood. Eden life was a spiritual existence; Adam’s life after the fall was less spiritual, and gradually his descendants came to live on the mental plane. There were master minds in the antediluvian world. Men had no need of books, so strong was the memory and so keen the insight. Through further disobedience, through an education which strengthened reason rather than faith, men sank to the physical plane instead of rising to the spiritual, until in due time the earth was destroyed by water. [Sidenote: Education since the time of Christ]