"In other departments, it is still more difficult to set the secular bound. History, the philosophy of history, political philosophy, psychology, ethics, however strong the effort to dereligionize them, do all, when left to their proper expansion, spurn any such bounds. Art, too, when wholly secularized; poetry stripped of its religious ideality; how long would they resist such a narrowing, suffocating process? A lower dogma was never maintained than this of a wholly secular education, or one more utterly _impracticable_. The subject must inevitably die under the operation, and religion must come back again into our schools and colleges, to save them from inanity and extinction. "There may be stated here some reasons why this plea of neutrality, though so false, is yet so specious and misleading. It arises from the fact that the statement of moral, religious, and theological ideas demands clear and positive language. The hostile forms, on the other hand, are disguised under vague and endlessly varying negations. They are Protean, too, in their appellations. They take to themselves the names of literature, art, philosophy, reform. This procedure shows itself in reading-books intended for our primary schools; in text-books prepared for the higher institutions; in essays and periodicals that strew the tables of reading-rooms attached to our colleges and academies; and, above all, in the public lecturing, male and female, which may be said to have become a part of our educational system. For example, should the writer of this attempt to explain before such an audience 'the doctrines of grace,' as they are called, or that unearthly system of ideas which can be traced through the whole line of the church--patristic, Roman, and Protestant--in their production of a strong unearthly character, then would be immediately heard the cry of bigotry, or the senseless yell of church and state. And now for the _opposing_ 'dogmas,' as they really are, notwithstanding all their disguises. They make their entrance under endlessly varied forms. Pantheism has free admittance; but that is not dogmatic--it calls itself philosophy. In some lecture on progress, or history, the most essential of these old 'doctrines of grace' may be sneeringly ignored or covertly assailed; but that is literature. Darwinism is expounded, with its virtual denial of any thing like creation; or Huxleyism, which brings man out of the monkey, and the monkey out of the fungus; that is science. Or it may be the whining nonsense which glorifies the nineteenth century at the expense of the far honester eighteenth, and talks so undogmatically of the deep 'yearning' for something better--that is, the 'coming faith.' And so goes on this exhibition of impartiality, with