Religion and Scientific Education
451
You were presenting the idea that education must stand as an inde-
pendent work. This mixing of religious matters and Bible doctrines
with scientific education you considered as a drawback in our educa-
tional work and as a hindrance in the work of carrying the students to
the higher degrees of scientific knowledge.
The great reason why so few of the world’s great men and those
having a college education are led to obey the commandments of God
is that they have separated education from religion, thinking that each
should occupy a field by itself. God presented a field large enough
to perfect the knowledge of all who should enter it. This knowledge
was obtained under divine supervision; it was bound about with the
immutable law of Jehovah, and the result would have been perfect
blessedness.
God did not create evil, He only made the good, which was like
Himself. But Satan would not be content to know the will of God and
do it. His curiosity was on the stretch to know that which God had
not designed he should know. Evil, sin, and death were not created by
God; they are the result of disobedience, which originated in Satan.
But the knowledge of evil now in the world was brought in through
[504]
the cunning of Satan. These are very hard and expensive lessons;
but men will learn them, and many will never be convinced that it
is bliss to be ignorant of a certain kind of knowledge, which arises
from unsatisfied desires and unholy aims. The sons and daughters of
Adam are fully as inquisitive and presumptuous as was Eve in seeking
forbidden knowledge. They gain an experience, a knowledge, which
God never designed they should have, and the result will be, as it was
to our first parents, the loss of their Eden home. When will human
beings learn that which is demonstrated so thoroughly before them?
The history of the past shows an active, working devil. He can
no more be idle than harmless. Satan was found in only one tree to
endanger the safety of Adam and Eve. He planned to attract the holy
pair to that one tree, that they might do the very thing God had said
they should not do—eat of the tree of knowledge. There was no danger
to them in approaching any other tree. How plausible his speech! He
laid hold of the very arguments which he uses today,—flattery, envy,
distrust, questioning, and unbelief. If Satan was so cunning at first,
what must he be now after gaining an experience of many thousands of
years? Yet God and holy angels, and all those who abide in obedience