"If thy right hand scandalize thee, cut it off and cast it from thee; for it is expedient for thee that one of thy members should perish, rather than thy whole body be cast into hell."--(Matt. v. 30.) By the present Public School system, the State scandalizes the family, because it usurps the rights and duties that belong alone to parents; it scandalizes the tax-payer, because it takes money from him which it has no right to take; it scandalizes society, because, instead of teaching virtue, it teaches vice; it scandalizes the young men and the young women, because, instead of inspiring them with love for Christianity and their religious duties, it inspires them rather with contempt for religion, and turns them into actual unbelievers, and thus destroys the very life of society and the basis of every government; it scandalizes all nations, because there is not, and there has never been, any nation inculcating education without religion. By its present system of education, the State has weakened, and will finally break up and destroy, the Christian family. The social unit is the family, not the individual; and the greatest danger to American society is, that we are rapidly becoming a nation of isolated individuals, without family ties or affections. The family has already been much weakened, and is fast disappearing. We have broken away from the old homestead, have lost the restraining and purifying associations that gathered round it, and live away from home in hotels and boarding-houses. A large and influential class of women not only neglect, but disdain, the retired and simple domestic virtues, and scorn to be tied down to the modest but essential duties--the drudgery, they call it--of wives and mothers. We are daily losing the faith, the virtues, the habits, and the manners, without which the family cannot be sustained. This, coupled with the separate pecuniary interests of husband and wife secured, make the family, to a fearful extent, the mere shadow of what it was and of what it should be. What remains of the family is only held together by the graces and virtue of women. But even this last hope is fast breaking down, by the great facility of obtaining a divorce _a vinculo matrimonii_--a facility by which the laws of most of the States of the Union grant to lust the widest margin of license, and legalize concubinage and adultery. Now when the family goes, the nation goes too, or ceases to be worth preserving. God made the family the type and basis of society; "male and female made he them."