"The matter, as we have stated it, would be too plain for argument were it not for those magical words, _secular_ and _sectarian_, that some are so fond of using. 'The state knows no religion,' they say; it is wholly 'a private concern' between the _individual_ and his Maker. 'The state knows no God.' They wonder the zealous bigot cannot see how clear this makes every thing. If he would only assent to propositions so easy, so self-evident, we should have peace. But set these confident logicians to define what they mean by terms so fluently employed, or ask them to show us how the state can keep clear of all action, direct or indirect, for or against an interest so vital as religion, so all-pervading, so intimately affecting every other, and how soon they begin to stammer! What is secular? The one who attempts to define it would perhaps begin with a negative. It is that which has no connection with religion; no aspects, no relations, no tendencies, no suggestions, beyond this world, or, the narrowest view of it, this _age_ or _seculum_. Now, let him apply it to particular branches of education. There is the learning of the alphabet, spelling, reading. But what shall the child read? It would be very difficult to find a mere reading-book--unless its contents were an empty gabble, like the nonsense Latin verses of some schools--that would not somewhere, and in some way, betray moral or immoral, religious or irreligious ideas, according to the judgment of some minds. But let us waive this, and go on. Arithmetic is secular. Geography is secular; though we have seen things under the head of physical geography that some classes of religionists might object to as betraying a spirit hostile to the idea of the earth's creation in any form. But go on. Including the pure mathematics, as being pure mathematics and nothing else, we have about got to the end of our definition. No thinking man would pretend that the departments of life and motion, chemistry, dynamics, physiology, could be studied apart from a higher class of ideas. But secularity would interfere here in a very strange way. When these roads of knowledge thus tend upward toward the eternal light, it would shut down the gate and eject the book. Natural philosophy, as taught by Newton and Kepler, gets beyond secularity. When, on the other hand, after the manner of Humboldt, Lamarck, and Darwin, its progress is in the direction of the eternal darkness, the study of it becomes entirely _unsectarian_; it violates no rights of conscience!