Article I.—Announcement and Name.

The Friends of Progress have long deeply felt the want of a natural system of education—physical, intellectual, and moral-adapted to the senses, the mind, and heart of the young: and providing, by its completeness, attractiveness, and thoroughness, for the progressive development of susceptible minds in the principles of justice and truth, humanity and universal benevolence, and those noble and ennobling virtues and attributes, upon which is based and erected symmetrical individual character and the progress of all mankind.

The liberal and spiritually-minded portion of every community take a vital interest in a new and more harmonious system of page 9 Education, and they have come to feel its demands move imperatively, because everywhere, under the influence of believers in the doctrines of past ages, children are drawn into the popular currents of false theology, and thus receive a religious bias in the direction of error and baseless superstitions, wholly at variance with the principles of Harmonial culture, and growth in science, philosophy, truth, justice, liberty, and spirituality. In after years, when these erroneously-taught children are men and women, and become fathers and mothers, the opinions and prejudices they have acquired in the Sunday-Schools Bible-Classes, and by attendance at the sectarian institutions of common education, cling to them and appear in their families in the form of bigotry, uncharitableness, assumed righteousness, and unprogressive conservatism.

And, furthermore, we deem the popular systems of general and religious Education, for the most part, unnatural, unadapted to the young, and therefore unattractive and injurious to their confiding and impressible natures. The methods of the professional schoolmen are proverbially arbitrary, and constraining to the bodies and souls of the young. Their programme of instruction is external, and is valued chiefly for purposes of show and circumstance; while the routine of discipline is partial, unnatural, and frequently antagonistic to the established laws of life and health.

We believe, on the other hand, in a religion of justice, social unity, and physical progress—in the happy and complete cultivation and symmetrical development of body, soul, and spirit—to the accomplishment of which the whole life and the best talent of men and women should be consecrated. The body, mind, and spirit of the child should he drawn forth progressively, and educated in all the ways of love and wisdom. By pleasing and natural methods the young should be taught to understand and reverently love whatever is useful, and beautiful, and just, and wise, not only for immediate advantage in this world, but also for uninterrupted progress, and to secure higher happiness in the Summer-Land.

Therefore we have embarked in an educational system for truer and more perfect culture. And believing that an associative effort is far more effective than the individual action of the same persons, we do hereby form an organisation which shall be known as the "Children's Progressive Lyceum of the City of New York."