Education: Our Reasonable Service

• Share

(2 of 2)

Substitute for God. While the school is failing so wretchedly, however, so is the Church. For today, says Canon Bell, Americans have come to regard the Church as the "promoter of a respectable minor art, charming if it happens to appeal to you, its only moral junction to bless whatever the multitude at the moment regards as the American way of life ..." Indeed, "the Church has become to most of its adherents a substitute for God," a place for socials and smokers and innumerable Good Causes.

The best way to save America, concludes Canon Bell, is to raise up an elite, "servants of supersensible purpose," who will help the Common Man to perceive "what the good life is." The trouble with the Common Man is that "he has not learned to see life in all its possible richness . . . has lost contact with that which is greater than himself, from which (or Whom) he might gain courage to escape the crowd . . ."

Nevertheless, says Dr. Bell, he can "be saved; our culture can be humanized and human dignity restored; our education can be rescued from those who now emasculate it; the Church can become once more truth-centered, God-centered. All this can happen—but only if we raise up rebels . . . [against] the blather of the crowd. Against the latter we must be rebels, not because we hate the Common Man but because we love him deeply. This is our reasonable service, our religious duty."