# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1900_S26
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

26 Proceedings of the eighteenth convention

Added to this is that the Christian congregational school, in order to pursue education rightly on all sides, must draw the secular sciences also into its scope. There are in many of our congregations so-called religion schools, in which for some weeks or months religious instruction only is given. That is not what we understand by a congregational school. The congregational school is to educate the children as they ought to be, not only for heavenly but also for earthly life; it is not only to lead them to God through faith in Jesus Christ, but also to teach how they may prove this faith in love for the neighbor; it is not only to impart to them the powers of a new life, but also to enable them to use these powers in the right way in the service of God and of the neighbor. It is God's will that the gifts which he has given our children be developed and unfolded. Therefore they must also be well instructed in secular sciences. Only then is a congregational school complete when it so educates toward true Christianity that the pupils are also made fit for the exercise of their earthly vocation.

Someone might ask here: Why can we not, at least in the secular sciences, have our children instructed in the state school, if meanwhile we provide for their instruction in God's Word through a religion school? Is there then a difference between that instruction in the free schools and in the congregational schools? We answer: There is indeed a difference, and a tremendous one. To be sure, the congregational school teaches the same world history, the same geography, the same natural history. But it gives this instruction in the sense and spirit of Holy Scripture. It leads the children everywhere back to God as the first cause; in natural history it teaches them to know him as the almighty Creator and Preserver of all things, whose goodness and wisdom appear everywhere in visible nature; in geography it shows how wonderfully God the Lord created, ordered and arranged the earth; in world history it points out that God the Lord makes the nations what they are, that he directs their history according to his counsel and will. In American history especially it is not ascribed to Washington, Lincoln and other eminent men and great heroes that our United States have climbed to the high rank in the council of the nations on which they now stand, but it is shown that these men accomplished what they did of great things under God's governance and guidance, that God the Lord placed them at their post at the right time and smoothed the ways for them. If, now, the secular sciences must be taught in the sense and spirit of Scripture, and not in the sense and spirit of the age and of corrupted reason, if the children are not to go onto wholly crooked paths and suffer shipwreck of their faith, then only a complete