ABSTRACT
God. Religion and education are intimately associated : education has been described as " t h e handmaid of religion", and religion as "education raised to its highest power" : and both have for their aim the establishment of the Kingdom of God upon earth. It is, therefore, no merely temporal citizenship of this world that we have in mind, when we speak of education as a social factor. Some years ago this question was asked in a paper on the Theory, History, and Practice of Education .set for the Education Diploma in a University Department : " A r e there any dangers involved in making good citizenship the aim of an educational system?" The answer to that question clearly depends on the interpretation that is given to good citizenship. It may be interpreted in a narrow political sense, as it is in the modern totalitarian State : the good citizen is then the efficient cog in the political machine, and all his education must be directed to ensure his efficiency : with that end in view, history must if necessary be re-written, the world re-mapped, science re-directed, morality re-interpreted, religion re-orientated, truth must be sacrificed
to the truth. The dangers of an educational system devoted to such an end are patent enough. It is not so that we in this country interpret good citizenship, and it has not so been interpreted in this book. It is rather, as I indicated at the outset, a two-fold citizenship that has been in view, such a citizenship indeed as every man is bound by the laws of his being to exercise. There is for each one of us a citizenship of the Kingdom of God and a citizenship of the kingdom of men, and it is the business of education to prepare us for both alike-to render unto God the things that are God's, and unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. Our acts as citizens must have reference to a social end, but they must no less have reference to a divine end. "Whatever act of thine ", says Marcus Aurelius, "has no reference either immediately or remotely to a social end, this tears asunder thy life, and does not allow it to be one." That is true enough, but what he says in another of his Meditations is equally true : "As physicians have always their instruments and their knives ready for cases which suddenly require their skill, so do thou have principles ready for the
understanding of things divine and human, even the smallest, with a recollection of the bond which unites the divine and human to one another. For neither wilt thou do anything well which pertains to man without at the same time having a reference to things divine ; nor the contrary." That puts the matter in a nutshell, and though the citizenship may appear two-fold, it is seen on reflection to be in reality single : such is the interpenetration of the two kingdoms, that we daily and hourly cross the frontier without being aware of what we have done : there are no barriers to trade or to travel, and no passports are needed : the same tongue is spoken on both sides of the frontier ; we hear it in the utterances of Jesus, and whenever a kind word is spoken, the note of sympathy sounded, or a vision of the truth put into words : we hear it in the music of the spheres, in the song of the birds, and in a symphony of Beethoven : it is the language of the saints, and is spoken by all those who have won the freedom of the United Kingdom of Heaven and Earth. It is a citizen for that United Kingdom whom I have had in mind : a man with a God-given
personality-body, mind, and spirit-to be worked into the divine pattern for human existence, realizing himself in order to give himself: rooted in the fundamental virtues of family life, which have been the seed-plot of all that is best in human experience : finding the authority which he craves, the sanctification of morality, and the standards to apply to social well-being, in a conception of God immanent in all activity and blending in one the secular and the religious : believing in himself with a work to do, and a contribution to make-taught to live in harmony with his surroundings, but to rebel against them when the need arises : with a body educated to exercise its skill and to create beauty, an intellect trained to think clearly and accurately, a mind stored with a knowledge of God as He works in the universe and in the lives of men : a lover of all beauty, and a hater of all vileness : with a developed conscience, a disciplined will, and a divine discontent : seeing all the things that men have done and all the things that men do sub specie aeternitatis. Such is the citizen of the United Kingdom, and if he is to proceed from our schools and universities,
nothing less than Civitas Dei is the goal of education. He alone can save the world. We see every day how ineffective is human machinery, how unavailing are pacts and agreements, how immoral are corporate societies-and the Sovereign State most immoral of all : where an individual will behave like an angel, the State will behave like a fiend. Moral Man and Immoral Society is the title of a book by Niebuhr, and the prime task of moral man is to transform immoral society, to make civilization not, as Niebuhr says, " a device for delegating the vices of individuals to larger and larger communities", but a device for delegating their virtues, to prevent the transmutation by patriotism of individual unselfishness into national egoism, and to make patriotism its transmutation into national unselfishness. This can only be done from within. " N o democracy can exist", I have read, "unless it has within itself an aristocracy sufficiently powerful and informed to direct general opinion"— and no free and full life for humanity at large can be achieved without that. It is that aristocracy whom we would train, the leaven
which in time can leaven the whole lumpfirst raising the life of the small community, be it home, school, Church, business, profession, immediately around us, and then in everwidening range till the vision of Civitas Dei becomes a reality, and we see amid the smoke and the chimney-stacks the pinnacles of the City of God. To produce such an aristocracy is a life-long task, and must ultimately be carried out by each man for himself. Education is a life-long process ; and only he who on the edge of the grave can look back without remorse upon himself and the society which he has helped to fashion, and look forward without fear to that larger society for which he is bound, realizing that both these societies are indissolubly connected and that both form the communion of all saints and of all souls, only he may consider himself as educated in all citizenship.
