y called destructive criticism and
infidelity, that is now permeating much of the literature of our day to
the great injury of all who are influenced by it. Indebted to the
Scriptures for their ideas of "life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness," and, prizing them as the foundation of their civil and
ecclesiastical privileges, they manifested both their sense of
obligation to them and dependence upon them, by making them the corner
stone of every institution they established. The word of God in their
hand, like a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, led them to
locate in this land, awakened in them the spirit of heroism amid all
their privations and sufferings, and served as their common guide and
comforter, in all their struggles and progress.

If there are any who have the right to judge and to have their judgment
respected, as to the nature of the education needed in this republic,
surely those men of sagacity, patriotism, piety and comprehensive
statesmanship, who founded both the system of education and the
Republic, are among the number.

During the Colonial period the towns were little republics, with the
Bible for their foundation, and their schools were established for
general instruction in that book. The exclusion of the Bible from those
early schools would have been repugnant to their founders. They regarded
the Bible not merely as an authoritative book in all matters of
conscience, but as the charter of their liberty and their guide to the
independent ownership of land.

MASSACHUSETTS

The Colony of Massachusetts Bay, as early as 1647, less than twenty
years from the date of their first charter, made provision by law, for
the support of schools at the public expense; for instruction in reading
and writing in every town containing fifty families, and grammar schools
in those containing one hundred families. This noble foundation suggests
the religious foresight that laid it. The preamble to this school law
contained the following motives: "It being one chief object of Satan to
keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures, as in former times
keeping them in unknown tongues, therefore, that learning may not be
buried in the graves of our fore fathers, the Lord assisting our
endeavors, it is ordered," etc.

Horace Mann, secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, has left
on record this noble testimony for all the teachers of our country. "As
educators, as friends and sustainers of the