Minoret al. v. Board of Education of Cincinnati et al. they do not want to send their children to any school where no religious instruction is given. But, says the answer of the defendants, there are many persons in this city who deny the divine authority of the Scriptures, and they ask to be protected. I have no embarrassment with this question. The law will not compel the infidel to believe-it will not compel him to support, or erect, or attend, any place of worship, or to maintain any form of worship. Thus far, and no further, will his rights of conscience be respected. For him, the Bill of Rights will be fully and fairly construed. He may teach infidelity, if he can find pupils, but shall he forbid the State to teach religion? He may have a system of morals derived from Epictetus or Seneca, and he may practice it, and teach it. But shall he deny the right to the State, representing the body of society, to prefer the lessons of the Bible, as the best means of raising up wise and good citizens? He may denounce the Bible, but the law of the State will yet give a Bible to the poor apprentice boy. The Constitution will yet require the promotion of "religion, morality, and knowledge," by the use of "schools and other means of instruction;" the law will yet enforce outward respect to religion, and the keeping of the Sabbath, and he can not stand in the way of these things. Whatever he may think upon the subject, the State thinks that "religion" is "essential to good government and human happiness," and has formed its policy upon that conviction! There are persons who think that legal restrictions upon rates of interest are wrong, yet have we the usury laws? There are persons who think that laws restraining the sale of intoxicating liquors are in excess of the just power of government, yet the liquor laws are upon the statute-book; there are many persons who dispute the justice of the right of eminent domain, holding it to be an unwarranted invasion of the sacred right of property, and yet even a cherished homestead must be surrendered upon the demand of a railroad or a turnpike company. Mere difference of opinion among the people, does not alter the policy of the State. That policy is fixed by law, in accordance with prevailing sentiment. There are, doubtless, persons who do not think that "religion is Minor et al. v. Board of Education of Cincinnati et al. essential to good government," but the State, giving authoritative utterance to the sentiment of its people, declares that it is, and will act upon that assumption, and if, perchance, while the laws of the State are being administered-while the institutions of the State are performing their several appropriate functions-even the child of the unbeliever should receive the impression that these laws and institutions are all founded upon religion, and that they are rightly founded, it would be simply the result of his presence in a society of which religion is the chief bond, and a State which is but the expression of the spirit of that society. No man appeals to sympathy more strongly than the honest, earnest, thoughtful doubter. Such an one, in the person of Thomas, appealed to the Savior of men, and did not appeal in vain ; but it seems to me that if I believed the Bible to be a fable and God a myth, I would not seek to disturb my fellow-men in their delusion, and I can not refrain from saying that the common schools of this country owe their existence to this Bible-that they were organized and are principally maintained by men who adhere to its teachings. Carry these resolutions into effect, and their interest in them and their duty toward them ceases. These resolutions forbid all religious instruction, as I before remarked. They are, in substance, a repudiation, not only of Christianity, but of all religion, in the broadest sense of which the term is susceptible. They clearly constitute such a case as was supposed by the Court in pronouncing the opinion in the Girard will case, but from which that case was distinguished. I desire to adopt and to submit to the Court as part of my argument every word of the great argument of Mr. Webster in that case-an argument that was not answered or denied by the Court, so far as its conclusions were concerned. The holding of the Court that Christianity might be taught in the orphans' college by pious laymen, avoided his conclusion without controverting his premises. These resolutions carried into effect signalize the complete surrender of the modern conception of education. The intellectual and moral faculties of man are so intimately blended that they can not be separately cultivated and developed. A being endowed with cultivated intellect without enlightened moral faculties would be a monster. Minor et al. v. Board of Education of Cincinnati et al. Upon this subject, I beg to.quote the language of a profound thinker, an eminent scholar, and a devoted teacher, Dr. Thomas Arnold: "Physical science alone can never make a man educated; even the formal sciences, invaluable as they are with respect to the discipline of the reasoning powers, can not instruct the judgment; it is only moral and religious knowledge which can accomplish this, and if, habitually removing such knowledge from the course of our studies, we exercise our thoughts and understanding exclusively on lower matters, what will be the result, but that when we come to act upon these higher points, in our relations as citizens and men, we shall act merely upon ignorance, prejudice, and passion? For notions of moral good and evil of some sort we must have; but if we take no pains that these notions shall be true and good, what will our lives be but a heap of folly and of sin? This should be borne in mind carefully; and if these merely scientific or literary institutions appear to us to be sufficient for our instruction, if, having learned all that they can teach us, the knowledge so gained shall hide from us our moral ignorance, and make us look upon ourselves as educated men, then they will be more than inefficient, or incomplete; they will have been to us positively mischievous." I now submit the cause to the court, so far as I am concerned. I can not take my seat, however, without submitting the inquiry: Where will the demand for the rights of conscience end? We are educated not only in schools, not merely by books, by painting, by sculpture, and by music, but by the experience and observation of daily life, by contact with men and things. The contemplation of a stately and beautiful church edifice, with its tall spire pointing heavenward, the solemn intonations of its Sabbath bell, borne out upon the quiet morning air, may awaken thoughts of God, of immortality, of accountability; may arouse a slumbering conscience, and ultimately lead a bleeding and contrite heart to the foot of the throne of God! If this be so, ought the children of the unbeliever to be thus exposed to this constant, silent teaching? And how long will it be until the demand will come that the church edifice shall be withdrawn from the public thoroughfare, or erected in the similitude of the private dwelling, with its spiral shaft displaced, and its muffled bell, to the end that the child on its way to the school in which the name of God is never heard, shall not see the one nor hear the other? Minor et al. v. Board of Education of Cincinnati et al. Argument of J. B. Stallo, For the Board of Education. MAY IT PLEASE YOUR HONORS-I thank my friend who has opened the debate on behalf of the plaintiffs in this cause, for the example of ability and thorough research which he has set me in the treatment of the subject under discussion, as well as for the frankness and candor so conspicuously displayed by him in stating the positions assumed by the plaintiffs and that large and respectable part of the community which they profess to represent. I can not hope to equal his ability, eloquence, and learning; but I will not be behind him, I trust, in candor. It is my purpose, as it is my duty, to reply to his argument, and thus to advance such of the propositions relied upon by us as are antagonistic to his own,after briefly indicating, however, certain other positions about to be assumed on behalf of the defense, of which the argument of my friend is not an anticipation. There is a branch of the subject to which he has referred very cursorily, but which is, nevertheless, in my judgment, a very important topic in the discussion of the merits of his cause. I refer to the attitude of this Court to what has been termed the main question at issue. What is this case? It is an application by the plaintiffs to this Court to inhibit by its restraining order the carrying into effect of certain resolutions passed by the Board of Education of Cincinnati, abrogating a rule, or rules, established by the same Board (or its predecessor, the Board of Trustees and Visitors of the Common Schools) some eighteen years ago. The injunction prayed for is obviously mandatory in its nature; it is in substance an order com Minor et al. v. Board of Education of Cincinnati et al. manding the School Board to enforce the reading of the Bible and the teaching of religion in the public schools. If it is within the power and among the duties of the Court to make such an order now, it would manifestly have been the right and duty of the Court to make a similar order, upon the application of the proper parties, if the School Board had never established a rule prescribing the reading of the Bible and other religious exercises in the schools committed to their care and supervision. It is plain that what your Honors are asked to do is nothing less than this: to wrest from the Board of Education the discretionary power vested in them by law; to usurp the functions of the School Board. Upon what ground are your Honors asked to do a thing so dangerous and subversive of the very foundations of our government and laws? I say dangerous and subversive of government and law, because at the very base of the structure of our government lies the principle of the mutual independence of, and noninterference between, its several branches. There is an article in the Constitution of Massachusetts-one of the oldest now in force-which expresses this so clearly and emphatically that I beg leave to quote it. It is the thirtieth article of the first part of that instrument, and reads as follows: "In the government of this Commonwealth the legislative department shall never exercise the executive or judicial powers, or either of them; the executive shall never exercise the legislative or judicial powers, or either of them; AND THE JUDICIAL SHALL NEVER EXER OF CISE THE LEGISLATIVE or EXECUTIVE POWERS, OR EITHER THEM TO THE END IT MAY BE A GOVERNMENT OF LAWS, AND NOT OF MEN." My learned friend on the other side has taken it for granted that the case at bar is one of the ordinary cases in which courts restrain the action of corporate bodies, when that action exceeds their delegated powers, is ultra vires, or is in contravention of law, or in which they annul legislative acts on the ground that these acts violate the express provisions of the Constitution, or their necessary implication. He refers to the injunction granted by your Honors in what is known as the Lamp-post case, and to the injunc |