MORGAN'S HISTORY OF THE NEW JERSEY CONFERENCE Page 154
ticable report the condition of them at the annual conference. We further recommend that our ministers, members and friends do all they can in circulating the literature of our church and the Christian Recorder, the organ of our church, the defender of the race and the educator of the people. Our people must be educated. We feel the importance of it in our Sunday-schools and official boards as well as in other associations. We must have an educated ministry and educated people, then we shall have a refined system of worship and an intellectual class of worshippers, for God requires such to worship him in the spirit as well as in the truth.
The Committee on Education are rejoiced at the fact that all controversies as to the importance and value of the subject to them are numbered with the things that were. The world was dominated by civil and ecclesiastical despostism. Austria stood as the representative of a general political sentiment in teaching that "subjects ought to conduct themselves as faithful slaves towards their masters whose power extends over all their goods as well as their persons." Formerly the Roman Catholic Church only echoed the feeling, declarations and conduct of the entire ecclesiastical world in locking out the peasant from the Bible. But to-day, thank God, the Protestant Church and State are putting themselves on record as enthusiastically favoring general education. And the feeling is so strong that he who puts himself in opposition is regarded as a traitor to mankind and a conspirator against human happiness and progress. Knowledge, like the Angel of the Apocalypse, has now clothed itself with wings and is seen flying in the Heavens and proclaiming its truths to all the nations, kindreds and tribes and people of the earth. Its voice is the universal press, its carrier the illimitable power of steam, and its messengers the wind - for good or evil, for weal or woe, free and unshackled as the air we breath.
Previous Page in Book ****************************** Next Page in Book
|