I am willing to assume and to accept as a fact that our theological differences make it impossible to introduce the teaching of any religious creed into the public school. I take the system as it is,--that is, as a system of secular education,--and I address myself more directly to the question proposed: What is or should be its scope? The fact that religious instruction is excluded makes it all the more necessary that humanizing and ethical aims should be kept constantly in view. Whoever teaches in a public school should be profoundly convinced that man is more than an animal which may be taught cunning and quickness. A weed in blossom may have a certain beauty, but it will bear no fruit; and so the boy or youth one often meets, with his irreverent smartness, his precocious pseudo-knowledge of a hundred things, may excite a kind of interest, but he gives little promise of a noble future. The flower of his life is the blossom of the weed, which in its decay will poison the air, or, at the best, serve but to fertilize the soil. If we are to work to good purpose we must take our stand, with the great thinkers and educators, on the broad field of man's nature, and act in the light of the only true ideal of education,--that its end is wisdom, virtue, knowledge, power, reverence, faith, health, behavior, hope, and love; in a word, whatever powers and capacities make for intelligence, for conduct, for character, for completeness of life. Not for a moment should we permit ourselves to be deluded by the thought that because the teaching of religious creeds is excluded, therefore we may make no appeal to the fountain-heads which sleep within every breast, the welling of whose waters alone has power to make us human. If we are forbidden to turn the current into this or that channel, we are not forbidden to recognize the universal truth that man lives by faith, hope, and love, by imagination and desire, and that it is precisely for this reason that he is educable. We move irresistibly in the lines of our real faith and desire, and the educator's great purpose is to help us to believe in what is high and to desire what is good. Since for the irreverent and vulgar spirit nothing is high or good, reverence, and the refinement which is the fruit of true intelligence, urge ceaselessly their claims on the teacher's attention. Goethe, I suppose, was little enough of a Christian to satisfy the demands of an agnostic cripple even, and yet he held that the best thing in man is the thrill of awe; and that the chief business of education is to cultivate reverence for whatever is above, beneath, around, and within us. This he believed to be the only philosophical and healthful attitude of mind and heart towards the universe, seen and unseen. May not the meanest flower that blows bring thoughts that lie too deep for tears? Is not reverence a part of all the sweetest and purest feelings which bind us to father and mother, to friends and home and country?