Schools Promote Agnosticism 1922

AGNOSTICISM IN THE SCHOOLS

A RELIGIOUS REVIVAL may be on the way, as some believe; but against this optimistic theory lies the charge that some of the country’s most prominent universities and colleges, and even many high schools, have become “incubators of agnosticism,” and are busy turning out atheists. Among the lecturers and writers who are alarmed over the present methods of teaching biology and Biblical history in some of our institutions of learning is William Jennings Bryan, who recently alleged in a public address, according to press reports, that professors of biology had led their pupils away from the Bible and had even advised them to disregard the Biblical account of the world’s history. On the other hand, we are told, the responsibility for much of the present-day atheistic tendency rests with the Church, since “its obscurantism has been making infidels faster than Mr. Ingersoll ever could.”

At a recent meeting of the Ministerial Union of Philadelphia the Rev. Dr. B. F. Daugherty, pastor of a Presbyterian Church at Lebanon, Pa., cited by name two leading colleges for women in which he alleged that professors systematically seek to convert their classes to atheism. In one of these, he declared, according to press reports, a professor teaches definite denial of the Deity and then has his pupils vote on the question: “Is there a God?” showing satisfaction when the vote is in the negative. The same doctrines are being taught, said this pastor, in grammar schools and high schools, as well as in many colleges and universities other than those he named. And yet, declares The Catholic Universe (Cleveland), “an education that is not merely non-Christian but actively anti-Christian, is destructive of character and antagonistic to every institution by which America has been made great. . . . The denial of God is the denial not only of authority but of any sense of moral responsibility.”

Agnosticism in Schools continued here…

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