d to feed the flock of Christ with the food of
truth and life, and to preserve the lambs of the fold from the contagion
of error, cannot approve such systems, which seem to have been invented
by the fashion of the day, a desire of innovation, or a spirit of
hostility to religion.

It was to His Church, and not to the State, that Jesus Christ gave the
command, "Go and teach all nations."--(Matt. xxviii.) "As the Father
hath sent Me, so do I send you also."--(John xx.) "Feed My lambs, feed
My sheep."--(John xxi.)

The office of the Church is to teach and sanctify all men. She receives
the child on its first entrance into the world, and, by means of holy
baptism, makes it a child of God. Like her Divine Bridegroom, she says:
"Suffer the little children to come to me."

Now the Christian school is the place and the provision made for the
training of those who are baptized into the Christian faith. They have
been made children of God, and as such they have a right to four things
belonging to them by a right of inheritance, to which all other rights
are secondary. They have a right to the knowledge of their faith; to the
training of their conscience by the knowledge of God's commandments; to
the Sacraments of grace; and to a moral formation, founded on the
precepts and example of our Divine Saviour. These four things belong, by
a Divine right, to the child of the poorest working man; by a right more
sacred than that which guards the inheritance of lands and titles to the
child of the rich. A child of God, and an heir to the kingdom of heaven,
holds these four things by a higher title; and his claim is under the
jurisdiction of a Divine Judge. But the school is the place and the
provision for the insuring of these four vital parts of his right to the
Christian child. They cannot be taught or learned elsewhere; there is no
other place of systematic and sufficient formation. And if so, then the
school becomes the depository of the rights of parents, and of the
inheritance of their children. The school is strictly a court of the
Temple, a porch outside the Sanctuary. It cannot be separated from the
Church. It was created by the Church, and the Church created it for its
own mission to its children. As the Church cannot surrender to any power
on earth the formation of its own children, so it cannot surrender to
any the direction of its own schools.

It was the Church, as I have shown in the second chapter, that gave life
and be