the sanctification of the Lord's Day, and a practical application of
these doctrines to the life in the care of souls, establishes a standard
of membership that ought to make our churches sources of spiritual
power.


The Problem of Religious Education

Historically and doctrinally the Lutheran Church is committed to
week-day instruction in religion. Historically, because in establishing
the public school her chief purpose was to provide instruction in
religion; doctrinally, because from her point of view life is a unit and
cannot be divided into secular and spiritual compartments.

American Christians are confronted with two apparently contradictory
propositions. One is that there can be no true education without
religion. The other is that we must have a public school, open to all
children without regard to creed.

When our country was young, and Protestantism was the prevailing type of
religion, these two ideas dwelt peacefully together. The founders of the
Republic had no theory of education from which religion was divorced.
But the influx of millions of people of other faiths compels us to
revise our methods and to test them by our principles, the principles of
a free Church within a free State. Roman Catholics and Jews object to
our traditions and charge us with inconsistency. If temporarily we
withstand their objections, we feel that a great victory has been won
for religion when a psalm is read and the Lord's Prayer said at the
opening of the daily session of school. We still have "religion" in the
publie school.