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RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF PARENTS
IN REGARD TO
THEIR CHILDREN’S RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
AND BELIEFS.
JTertot
DELIVERED BEFORE THE
SUNDAY LECTURE
SUNDAY AFTERNOON,
lith
SOCIETY,
NOVEMBER,
1875.
BY
WM. HENRY DOMVILLE.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
T I THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR RD., UPPER NORWOOD, LONDON, S.E.
1876.
Price Threepence. .
�LONDON :
PRINTED BY C. W. REYNELL, LITTLE PULTENBY STREET,
HAYMARKET, W.
�SYLLABUS.
Notice of the first Sunday Lectures at the Philosophical
Institute, Beaumont-square, Mile-end, in 1842.
The question in this Lecture is distinctly social, though
necessarily involving some consideration of theological pro
positions—particularly Eternal Punishment.
That is an open question, even in the Church of England,
by the Privy Council’s decision in the case of the Rev. H. B.
Wilson, one of the writers of ‘ Essays and Reviews.’
Parental claims to rights over their children’s religious
beliefs divided into—
1. —Their having caused their children’s existence.
2. —Their maintaining and educating them.
3. —Their love and devotion to their offspring.
4. —The conviction that want of a correct belief
involves loss of eternal happiness and entails
eternal damnation.
The difference between knowledge and belief.
Tradition.
Difficulty of proving authorship of any writings.
‘The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua.’
Belief in marvellous stories by all nations.
�iv
Syllabus.
Propagandism of beliefs.
Eternal punishment or torment. Its immoral tendencyexemplified by the preaching of the late Dr. Wilberforce,
when Bishop of Oxford.
Inutility of arguing with those who make a merit of
belief though irreconcilable with reason.
Allowance should be made for ‘Probable Error,’ as in
science.
The ground taken by the not strictly orthodox for teach
ing a theological belief, considered.
The theologian stands alone in his endeavour to prejudice
the young.
The Act of 9th Wm. 3rd., cap. 32, rendering liable to
outlawry and imprisonment all who have been educated
as Christians and who assert ‘that there are more Gods
than one; deny the Christian Religion to be true, or the ■
Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be of
divine authority.’
How far this Act affects modern free-thinkers.
The rights of the two parents when they differ in their
creed.
Children in one family brought up in different creeds.
Protestant bigotry, Sunday observance, &c
A really religious education.
What is it ?
�THE
RIGHTS AND
DUTIES OF PARENTS
IN REGARD TO
THEIR CHILDREN’S RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
AND BELIEFS.
--------- ♦---------
AM undertaking a difficult and delicate theme; "but
if I fail to do justice to it, the failure will not be
through want of care, for the subject has occupied my
thoughts for a long period.
Should I succeed in arousing your attention, and give
you some new points for earnest consideration, I shall have
done as much as the Lectures which our Society undertakes
to give are, as a general rule, intended for. These were in
the outset proposed, not as exhaustive—not as embracing
closely scientific lessons, to be given, as it were, before
students in a class-room; but rather to encourage the
search after desirable knowledge.
I may notice, in passing, that the idea of lectures on
general knowledge on the Sunday did not even originate with
the ‘Sunday Evenings for the People,’ so successfully
inaugurated in 1866 by the National Sunday League,
though temporarily stopped the same year by the equally
conscientious, though, as we believe, much mistaken Lord’s
Day Observance Society. The opening lecture at St. Martin’s
Hall, Sunday, January, 1866, was by Dr. Huxley, ‘On the
Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge.’
I have a lecture before me, dated in 1842, by Mr. Philip
Harwood, explaining the object of the Sunday Lectures at
B
I
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The Rights and Duties of Parents.
the Philosophical Institute, Beaumont-square, Mile-end a
liberal institution, founded by the late Mr. Barber Beau
mont, but afterwards closed by others who held different
views. I name some of the Lectures, that you may see they
were much on a footing with those of our Society :__
Two Lectures ‘ On Falsehood, as generated and
upheld by Social Usages and Institutions.’
One ‘ On the Love and Pursuit of Truth.’
Two ‘On Cheerfulness.’
Our ‘ Sunday Lecture Society,’ distinguished from the
‘ Sunday Evenings for the People ’ by its being confined
strictly to the delivery of Lectures on Science—Physical,
Intellectual, and Moral—History, Literature, and Art;
especially in their bearing upon the improvement and social
well-being of mankind, was, as many of you will recollect
formed at a public meeting held at the Freemason’s Tavern’
at which Dr. Huxley presided, on the 25 th of November’
1869. Our first Lecture was delivered in this hall by Dr’
W. B. Carpenter, on the 16th of January, 1870, on ‘The
Deep Sea; its Physical Conditions and its Animal Life,’
to an audience of nearly 800 persons,—a signal success for
a new institution.
The question I am bringing before you is a distinctly
social one ; one at the very root of family government, of
family ties. It is, therefore, strictly within the subjects
for discussion contemplated by our Society. I cannot,
however, avoid considerable reference to the popular theo
logy of the day, and particularly to that one dogma which
is so repulsive to many of us—probably the most extra
ordinary of all dogmas it has ever entered into man’s
imagination to invent—Eternal Punishment in Hell Fire !
In touching upon this dogma, I gladly remind you that even
the Church of England, by the decision of the Privy Council
in the case of Fendal v. Wilson (decided the 8th February,
1864, and reported in Jurist, vol. 10, p. 406,) is obliged to
�The Rights and Duties of Parents.
j
treat it as an open question. That judgment lays down
with most naive caution, but still in distinct language, that
they are not required ‘ to condemn as penal the expression
of hope by a clergyman that even the ultimate pardon of
the wicked who are condemned in the day of Judgment may
be consistent with the will of Almighty God.’
It is a dogma nowhere touched upon in the Thirty-nine
Articles of our Church, nor in the Apostles’ or Nicene
Creed. It is only to be found in the Athanasian Creed, and
it is there confined to those who do not believe in the Trinity.
It depends only upon a few isolated texts scattered through
the four .Gospels.
However, you will bear in mind that my lecture to-day
does not rest upon the truth of any dogma. It may be
absolutely true, for instance, that a God was born of a
Virgin Mary. It may be equally true that the twin demi
gods, Castor and Pollux, were the children of Leda. I
shall have little or nothing to say as to the actual truth or
falsehood of theological propositions of any kind. The
question is, Whether parents (orthodox or unorthodox) have
a right to instil any creed whatever into their children. At
the conclusion of the Lecture I shall briefly touch upon the
question what a religious education ought to be.
It would seem that, as in still earlier times the head of
the family looked upon his slaves or servants as his absolute
property, so, to this day, a sort of absolute right is tacitly
assumed by parents over their children, invariably up to a
certain age, and oftentimes comparatively late on in life ;
and not merely a right to obedience to the laws and regula
tions of the household, similar to what the civil govern
ment of a country requires of its citizens for maintenance
of peace and order, and a right to the profits of their
children’s labour (without which it would be often impos
sible for the poorer parents to clothe and maintain them) ;
but a right of far greater moment, namely, to control and
regulate, may I not say appropriate, their minds, so that, in
future years, these children shall not, except with great
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The Rights and Duties of Parents.
difficulty, and often after the most painful mental struggle,
emancipate themselves from this early training, this mental
bondage—break a chain, in fact, which all the subtle skill
of a priesthood has carefully welded, and which ecclesias
tical tyranny has been employed for centuries to rivet!
I have to consider, with you, the justice or injustice of this
assumed right. Whether or no the comparison between
slaves and children is a true one ? and that, having abolished
ordinary slavery, we are not bound to abolish one as great,
perhaps still greater, in our own homes ?
The subject has to be considered in relation, firstly, to
the joint right of the two parents; and, secondly, to the
separate right of each parent.
Now upon what are their claims founded ?
1st. Is the claim that the parents have, in a secondary
way, caused the child’s existence, a valid one ?
2nd. Is the claim that the parents have of necessity,
during longer years than in the case of the lower animals,
maintained and educated their child until it is able to gain
its own livelihood, a valid one ?
3rd. Is the claim based on the parents’ intense love and
unwearied devotion a valid one ?
4th. Finally, and especially, is the claim based on the
parents’ unfeigned belief that, in seeking to mould the
child’s opinions by their own, they are doing the one thing
necessary for that child’s perfect happiness—salvation as it
is called—in a life supposed to commence after this one has
terminated, and then to last for all eternity, is even this
claim a valid one ?
Firstly.—Can mere parentage, the exercise of functions
common to nearly the whole animal and vegetal creation,
can the mere fact of the parents being in a limited measure
the cause of a child’s existence give them such extraordinary
power over its future life as that which we are here con
sidering?
The child may surely maintain the same argument that
�The Rights and Duties of Parents.
9
many of us are disposed to use with reference to eternal
punishment. Even for this life, he might say, he has pos
sibly little to thank for; his chance of happiness being not
so much greater than his chance of misery. While, if the
doctrine of eternal punishment is believed in by the parent
and by the child as it grows up, would a sensible child do
otherwise than say, “ I do not want to speculate ! I am no
gambler! According to the marvellous tenets about God
which you have taught me when a helpless child, it is clear
my chance of a happy life hereafter, whatever it may be
here, is infinitely small in comparison with my chance of
hell torment for eternity I I would far sooner never have
been born ! What right had you, my parents, to connive
at bringing me into existence ? Talk of my owing you
gratitude and obedience! No I You have for your own
selfish gratification committed a gross wrong in probably
adding one more victim for the devil and his angels ! ”
I maintain that the child has not, from the one fact of
its being born, any duties towards its parents, and the
parents whatever their other duties may be, cannot have
gained an arbitrary right to take possession of a child’s mind
and mould it to their own narrow theological belief. A
child’s gratitude for mere birth is on a par with that which
the young of the lower animals owe to their parents.
Secondly.—The lower animals nurture their offspring
but for a very short time, and their duties in this respect
are soon over. The young of man require this care
for a longer period and in a higher degree. Still this
increase in quantity and quality cannot affect the relative
duties between parents and child ? It seems sufficient on
this head to say that the parents having brought the child
into the world are, in keeping it alive by proper food and
clothing, and by educating and putting it in the way of
gaining its own livelihood, or by otherwise providing for
its future sustenance and comfort, only continuing the
work they have voluntarily taken upon themselves and
which they have no right to abandon.
Thirdly.—It will be said, granted that the parents are
�io
The Rights and Duties of Parents.
not entitled to any right over their child’s mind by reason
of the ordinary care necessary for supporting a healthy
existence, they must be entitled to some in respect of
their intense love and their unwearied devotion and selfabnegation in the interest of their child.
On the other hand, there is often a long account of mis
management, foolish indulgence, ignorant departure from
Nature’s requirements and laws, gross neglect in teaching
the child even in a cursory way the mere rudiments of
those very laws on which its health, its happiness, its
existence depend—to say nothing of grosser faults on the
parents’ part. But passing this over, and assuming that
all these higher duties are performed to the full, it will at
most but give the parents a right to a return in kind.
And is not this—to the credit of humanity with few
exceptions—duly rendered and often rendered in abundance
and with interest ? Filial love and veneration, accom
panied by pecuniary support if necessary,—by the sacrifice,
particularly in the case of young women, of the best days
of their lives, their prospect of a home and family of
their own, and by the tender care bestowed on their
parents through years of failing health, peevishness, and
infirmity 1
Care such as this—willing suppression of self—these
are the returns constantly required and willingly rendered
for affection and tender care bestowed by the parents in
the years of infancy and youth ! But where do we find a
ground for saying that this previous care and devotion on
their part has given the parents the least right over the
child’s intellectual independence ? I fail to detect any,
and I cannot be far wrong in saying the burden of proof
lies on the parents, and that none can be shown.
Fourthly —We come to the claim, which, in the present
state of popular theology, requires special consideration;
—the duty which many parents assume to be most highly
incumbent upon them, of giving a peculiar theological
bias to the child’s mind, so that it may escape a frightful
damnation in a life to come.
�The Rights and Duties of Parents.
II
I must here make some observations as to the basis of all
religious beliefs. Let us be clear upon one point—Reli
gious Knowledge is a misnomer. There can be no such
thing. To prove this assertion, consider what real Know
ledge is, as distinguished from belief.
It will be sufficient if I here allude to two of the kinds
into which knowledge has been divided, demonstrative and
sensitive.
Mathematical truths of which the mind has taken in
the proofs afford instances of demonstrative knowledge.
Astronomers at the present day possess such knowledge
and prove it by forfeiting correctly the motions of planetary
bodies through space. They are true prophets. Thus
you will find stated in the ‘ Nautical Almanac ’ the exact
position of the Moon at a given time three years hence,
besides other information of the same kind.
When, through the agency of our senses, we obtain a
perception of the existence of external objects, our know
ledge is said to be sensitive. Here, however, the door soon
opens for belief instead of knowledge. Nothing but the
greatest nicety of observation, the most perfect memory,
the most disciplined habit of accurate thought, and a
sound judgment, will prevent errors arising in the search
after knowledge through the senses. How little is there
of this! What constant errors of perception do we meet
with ! Many believe in tables rising or levitating to the
ceiling, because their eyes have seen the occurrence. A
cautious observer, if a table thus seemed to him to move
upwards would not trust to his sense of sight alone. He
would go to where the table stood, and you may rely upon
it, the table, as he approached, would appear to descend
again, and by his sense of touch he would satisfy himself
of his illusion. But, even the use of two or more senses
by no means insures an accurate conclusion. The brain
and all the faculties must be in a normal, healthy state.
But time will not permit me to say more.
Now as to beliefs. Although on some matters our per
ceptions or the evidence furnished may lead to a strong
�12
The Rights and Duties of Parents.
conviction or belief, it is not accurate to speak of this as
‘ knowledge.’ A child will say he knows his own mother.
Not so ! A mother may know her own child, though not
always, as occasional histories of changelings will show.
A child’s actual knowledge is this : that from the earliest
time in his memory he has been nurtured by one who has
called him her child and whom every one around has called
his mother, while another has been called his father. He
has, moreover, learnt to distinguish truth from falsehood,
and has found (I wish it were universally so) that those called
his parents have, so far as he can judge, always spoken the
truth, that they have never wilfully misled him, and con
sequently he has every reason to believe he is their child.
Such is usually the goodness of the evidence that he is
almost entitled to say he knows the fact. Still, this is
belief, not knowledge.
You will see that there must be various degrees of
belief. These may be classified thus :—
Firstly.—Beliefs based on accurate observations, and on
proper deductions from those observations.
Secondly.—Beliefs on matters coming within the scope
of our human faculties, and supported by the direct and
unbiassed testimony of capable persons.
Thirdly.—Beliefs incapable of verification—traditions,
dreams, and wild fancies—opinions formed at random or
accepted simply because some one in the present day has
so said, or some one ages ago is reported to have so said or
written.
Under the first and second heads will be found much of
what is called scientific discovery and scientific truth.
Under the third head you will perceive that all the
religions of the world must come. And while giving to
the holders of these beliefs full credit for honesty and
singleness of purpose, for lives of admirable purity, for
devotion to what they believe the will of God, it is still
of the greatest importance to keep in mind the difference
here pointed out.
4 Is it not written ? ’ is the ultimate, may I not almost
�The Rights and Duties of Parents.
13
say the only, argument of the theologian. ‘ Is it not
written in the Book of Jasher ’ has made whole nations
believe in the most extraordinary of all the curious stories
to be found in the Books of Joshua and Judges. ‘Sun,
stand thou still upon Gibeon, and thou, Moon, in the valley
of Ajalon. And the sun stood still and the moon stayed
until the people had avenged themselves upon their
ptiArnies
Is it not written in the JBooh of lasher? So
the sun stood still in the midst of heaven and hasted not
to go down about a whole day. And there was no day
like that before or after it that the Lord hearkened unto
the voice of a man; for the Lord fought for Israel.’ ’
(Joshua x. 12-14.) [Note A.]
A ‘ Thus saith the Lord ’ (an expression, by the way,
which a man of science might now use in expounding any •
laws of the universe) has been sufficient to convince
millions upon millions of our fellow mortals that the
several varying editions of the ten commandments [compare ■
Ex. xx. with Deut. v.] as well as the other laws and rules
of conduct propounded in the Books of Exodus, Leviticus,
and Deuteronomy—the result of human thought and wisdom
__ (some of which we at the present day accept, others we
reject as incorrect), were all written by the very finger or
at the immediate instance of God !
What is true as to the child’s want of knowledge of
who are his parents applies with greater force as to his
grandparents and more remote ancestors. The child
believes four human beings are his grandparents. Why ?
Because he accepts his parents’ belief as his own ; but this
is not to him so good evidence as when they can tell him
of their own knowledge that he is their child. And the
evidence increases in weakness as we go back each,
generation.
How uncertain, then, must be the exact accuracy of
every fact and statement in history, even of times com
paratively recent; how far more those of remote ages I
All we can venture to say is, we think it possible or
probable such and such events may have happened
c
�14
The Rights and Duties of Parents.
thousands of years ago, when all we actually know is, that
there are certain books or parchments still in existence—
old MSS. often in a dead language—most of which there
is good reason to suppose are only copies of copies of writings,
and all of which (by whomsoever written and whether
originals or copies) were written very long ago. As to
actual authorship, why you would find it difficult to prove
this lecture I am reading to you is my own composition.
I tell you it is, and you may believe my statement, but this
is not knowledge on your part. Imagine, then, the futility
of an attempt to prove the actual authorship of a work
supposed to have been written ages ago. Now, I do not,
in saying this, wish to decry the work of a noble Bishop of
the Church of England, one whose name, here at least, has
only to be mentioned to be received with a fitting tribute
of respect—Dr. Oolenso, Bishop of Natal! Applause is
due to the Bishop, not for his particular views, but for his
honesty and manliness in expressing them in the face of
bitter fanatical abuse and calumny heaped upon him by
his brother clerics. His six stout volumes on the supposed
authorship of the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua
were necessitated by the immense hold that a superstitious
belief in the peculiar divine origin of these writings has
upon the Christian world, the infatuation of early-instilled
belief that every word in the Bible is of direct inspiration
from God! [Note B.]
This attempt by a Bishop of the National Church to
ascertain if the Pentateuch was written by its supposed
author, Moses, was hailed by such a torrent of abuse from
the Christian public—more particularly from his episcopal
brethren—as to be perfectlyastounding. Let me recall to you
some of the epithets applied to the Bishop of Natal. One
instance will suffice. In a single short letter of a brother
Bishop, forbidding him to minister in this particular
Bishop’s diocese, the following expressions occur, applied
either to him or to his work :—‘ unfounded,’ ‘ false,’
1 childish,’ ‘heretical,’ ‘blasphemous,’
‘abominable,’
‘unhappy,’ ‘blind,’ ‘daring,’ ‘ignorant self-sufficiency,’
�The Rights and Duties of Parents.
15
* instrument of Satan,’ ‘ poor Bishop Colenso ’ (Bishop
Colenso’s ‘Pentateuch,’ Part III., Preface, page 15).
We may hope for the day when even the hierarchy will
regret such language as this, but the time certainly is not
yet. And this reception of his work is to me one of the
strongest proofs of—worse than inutility—the immorality
of filling the minds of children with beliefs instead of
knowledge.
For every separate contribution to the Bible we have
belief founded upon most insufficient evidence as ground
for its date, or for attributing the authorship to one par
ticular man. We may have fair grounds for believing that
a man called Saul or Paul wrote certain of the letters
which are usually known as the Epistles of St. Paul. We
may have fair grounds for believing that another book
called the Gospel of St. John could not have been written
by any one contemporary with the writer of those epistles ;
but it is impossible to say we know who were the writers of
a single sentence in any of these works. All is bebief. To
us, however, the name of the author of any book, ancient
or modern, is quite of secondary importance. What is of
importance is, can we learn anything from the book ? If it
contains instruction that assists us in our course through life,
if it hands down to us any experiences in nature which we
can verify as true, calls attention or leads us on to the dis
covery of facts, to the comprehension of any phenomena
of this universe, or if we can merely gather from it the
thoughts and ways of life of the former inhabitants of
this earth, then we may feel thankful to the author of it,
whether we have his name correctly or not, and though
we fail even approximately to guess the date at which he
lived. What, for instance, does it signify to us who wrote
the book of Job ? That ancient work is still a most
interesting record of the clear thoughts of some man
who probably lived several thousand years ago.
When, however, ancient books tell us stories of other
worlds, and of supposed beings living out of this world,
in a firmament just over our heads; when they tell us
�16
The Rights and Duties of Parents.
that these extra-mundane beings visit us; talk to us,
advise and do battle for us with each other, or against our
enemies ; answer us in oracles or through inspection of the
entrails of sacrificed animals or the flight of birds; that
they come and eat meat and drink wine with us ; tempt
us to sacrifice or murder our children; wrestle with us in
the darkness and put our limbs out of joint; that some
have actually become the half-parents of human beings-;
and that men have been carried away alive from this earth
to dwell with these extra-mundane beings; and when,
moreover, we are told that these beings, some of them, at
least, are not only all-powerful, but, with one breath, that
they are all-wise, all-good and benevolent, and, with
another breath, that they are jealous, angry, and unfor
giving, and endowed with other bad human passions, we
have to place ourselves in the position of the Zulu of
whom we have all heard [Note C.J ; and, bewildered, ask
why are we to believe, still more why are we to force our
children to believe all this, because it has been written and
believed in in ancient times, times in which we have every
ground for considering the dwellers on this earth were
extremely ignorant; ignorant of very much that we now
know, and were perhaps in some respects more superstitious
than the average of the present race of human beings I
Still more may we pause, on finding, by comparing the
old writings of different peoples, that one nation has vied
with another nation in the marvellousness of their mytho
logies ; that one set of religious stories is quite inconsis
tent with another set, and that all that they agree in is,
in detailing events generally which our experience tells us
do not happen in our day, and which are indeed violations
of the established order of Nature, as science proves it to
have existed for ages.
A minor peculiarity to be observed with regard to these
ancient writings, is the anxiety with which one race strives
to compel another to give up its beliefs, and, in exchange,
to accept the beliefs derived from the ancient writings of
the former! Why should they ? The stories and myths
�The Rights and Duties of Parents.
17
of one race are just as marvellous, and are supported by
just the same kind of belief or faith as those of another,
and the records of one are possibly quite as ancient as
the records of the other, even if antiquity could be brought
forward as a proof of veracity 1
Let us now turn to the dogma of Eternal Punishment,
or as it may be more fittingly styled, Eternal Torment.
When this dogma is propounded in all its abhorrent
repulsiveness, it means that an all-good, an all-wise God
has brought us into this life without our consent, and has
decreed that for certain errors, and more particularly for
certain errors of intellect, we should, after a few years of a
possibly miserable existence here, suffer perpetual torment;
that he has doomed us to everlasting fire where there shall
be ‘ weeping and gnashing of teeth ’ without end.
It is to be remarked that the passages relied upon for
proving this dogma of eternal damnation are only to be
found in the New Testament; in the books that promul
gate the religion of Jesus of Nazareth, a religion, the pro
fessors of which delight in calling one of peace and good
will! On the contrary, this dogma, it would seem, has a
most demoralising effect on the believers in it, making
even otherwise good men gloat over an abomination, all
for the greater glory of their God. Pagans of old were
satisfied with bodily torment in their Hell. It remained
for the clergy of a Christian Church to invent the perfect
refinement of cruelty—mental, torture! The late Bishop
of Winchester (Dr. Samuel Wilberforce), when Bishop of
Oxford, preaching in the parish church of Banbury, on the
24th of February, 1850 (I quote from ‘Eternal Punish
ment,’ by Presbyter Anglicanus, a pamphlet in Mr. Thomas
Scott’s series, published in 1864), mark the fact, specially
to school children, dramatised the day of judgment. After
describing the death of the impenitent of all classes and
their coming up to the judgment seat, to be doomed to the
lake of fire for ever; ‘ What,’ asked the Bishop, ‘ will it
be for the scholar to hear this, the man of refined and
�18
The Rights and Duties of Parents.
elegant mind, who nauseates everything coarse, mean, and
vulgar, who has kept aloof from everything that may
annoy and vex him, and hated everything that was dis
tasteful. Now his lot is cast with all that is utterly
execrable. The most degraded wretch on earth has still
something human left about him ; but now he must dwell
for ever with beings on whose horrible passions no check
or restraint shall ever be placed.’ But more terrible still,
and as being addressed to children, coming home to the
subject we have now under discussion, was the picture of
a school girl cut off at the age of thirteen or fourteen. In
her short life on earth she had not seldom played truant
from school, had told some lies, had been obstinate and
disobedient. Now she had (for these paltry errors, crimes
if you will) to bid farewell to heaven, to hope, to her
parents, her brothers and sisters, and then followed her
parting words to each. What was her agony of grief that
she should never again look on their kind and gentle faces,
hear their well-known voices ! All their acts of love return
to her again ; all the old familiar scenes remembered with
a regret which no words can describe, with a gnawing
sorrow which no imagination can realise. She must leave
for ever that which she now knew so well how to value,
and be for ever without the love, for which she had now so
unutterable a yearning. She must dwell for ever amongst
beings on whom there is no check or restraint, and her
senses must be assailed with all that is utterly abominable.
The worst of men are there with every spark of human
feeling extinguished, without any law to moderate the fury
of their desperate rage ! 11
I pause in amazement at this language by a Christian
Bishop. An Almighty so foredooming the children of his
creation, would not be a god of goodness, but a fiend and
devil 1
Let one Bishop, however, reprove another. Let us hear
and apply the words which Bishop Watson, a century ago,
applied to the monstrous doctrine propounded by the Holy
Father Fulgentius, that children unbaptised (even those
�The Rights and Duties of Parents.
19
dying in their mother’s womb) would suffer the endless
torments of hell:—‘ Parent of universal good,’ says
Bishop Watson, 1 Merciful Father of the human race I
How hath the benignity of Thy nature been misrepresented
—how hath the gospel of thy Son been misinterpreted, by
the burning zeal of presumptuous man I ’ (Quoted from
Oolenso’s ‘Natal Sermons,’ Triibner and Co., 1867.)
[Note D.]
The Buddhist and the Roman Catholic have their Pur
gatory ; but the Puritan and the Protestant have discarded
even this slender hope, and now at this very moment a
Bishop of our National Church forbids to a mourning son
the small consolation of a humble epitaph, ‘ Bequiescat in
Pace,’ because it savours of prayer for a departed soul.
With this terrible dogma before him, we may well under
stand any believer in the efficacy of prayer, hoping perhaps
against hope, and in his agony praying for the dead.
[Note E.J
Can it be the absolute duty of parents, can it be their
right, while constantly neglecting to teach a child useful
knowledge for this world, to teach it with the utmost dili
gence and pertinacity, traditional beliefs, such as the
eternal damnation of sinners and the unbaptised,—and
the general scheme of Christian redemption and salvation
—the sacrifice, namely, of the innocent for the guilty ?
The existence of an immense variety of theological beliefs
gives one answer in the negative. How can anyone dare to
assert that his own view must be correct and all others
wrong, and consequently that he is bound to impress it on
the plastic mind of his child ? Admit a God of universal
power and beneficence, how can we couple such attributes
with his making the fate of each individual depend on the
sprinkling of a few drops of water on the baby, and the
pronouncing of a few cabalistic words over it in baptism by
a priest,—or on a correct understanding of a few Greek
texts,—-and with his leaving struggling humanity in such
confusion that no nation thinks as another nation does—
�20
The Rights and Duties of Parents.
that scarcely two individuals exactly agree in all the doc
trines of their faith; while few, with real understanding,
accept even its broader doctrines in the same sense that
their neighbours do,—and then, that for no belief or for
half a belief, or for a mistaken belief, he awards absolute
damnation for eternity I
I confess it is nearly hopeless to argue with those who
are fully possessed with the belief that hell fire awaits all
who, whether from want of knowledge of the so-called
glorious gospel of good tidings, or as we may be told, from
a perverse use of their reasoning faculties, do not accept
the scheme of redemption, through Jesus of Nazareth, laid
down for them by the holy Fathers and Divines of the
Catholic and Apostolic Church. When belief actually
strengthens itself on the ground that it is unreasonable or
beyond reason, then all argument ceases. It is useless to
point out to them:—God, as you represent him, must delight
in pain; for in his omnipotence he could either have pre
vented unbelievers being born, or could have so ‘ inclined
the heart ’ of every child as to have made unbelief impossible.
What shelves-full of patristic argument, what volumes of
casuistry and theological nonsense, what mis-spent energy
in needless prayer, might have been saved from the com
mencement of the Christian era! How well the world
might have got on without the whole army of martyrs,—
preachers and divines I [Note F.]
Again, these earnest over-confident believers, these
orthodox parents, might bear in mind that, if their doctrine
of hell torment is true, and some part of their belief as to
the nature of God false, they may be preparing for their
children the very damnation they hope to save them from,
by this early inculcation of beliefs. They might give some
heed to one modest axiom of the scientifie thinker,—allow,
as Mr. Moulton, in his lecture last year explained to us, a
small margin for ‘ Probable Error ’ on their, the parents,
part. But no ! They will go their way perfectly convinced
that they and they alone are in the right, that they have
had a call, that they know all about God and His ways,
�The Rights and Duties of Parents.
21
without the least possibility of error—erring, sinful mortals,
1 miserable offenders,’ as they will, in the Church Prayers,
declare themselves to be. Admitting, in the words of St.
Paul, that now they ‘see thro’ a glass darkly’ (1 Cor.
xii. 13), and actually praying that God will grant them
‘ in this world knowledge of His truth ’—a mere lip ser
vice—they will rise from their knees and be again ready to
declare the absolute truth of their doctrines—claiming thus
infallibility in their own persons !
Many, however, who do not believe in the dogma of
eternal torment, or who do not entirely believe in the gene
ral scheme of Christian redemption, are under the vague
impression that it is well to impose upon their children
some sort of theological, or, as they would call it, religious
faith. Why ?
The reason usually given by priests and clergy of all
denominations, and by other people, for trying to seize hold
of the minds of the young is this, ‘ If we do not train
their minds early to a belief in the true religion ’ (that is,
their own particular creed) ‘ they will grow up infidels,
atheists, &c. We shall lose them altogether.’ If this be
so, can a more conclusive argument against such special
teaching be found ? What a sickly kind of theology must
that be which cannot satisfy the doubts and criticisms of
an unsophisticated, well-developed intellect!
In no other case would a teacher venture to argue thus.
The man of science prefers pupils coming to him with
awakened faculties and with unprejudiced minds. The
Spiritualists, even, do not care to convert children to their
beliefs, nor to press into each private house—spiritualistic
manual in hand—and preach to parents the obligation
they are under to prepare their children for ‘Spirit Belief.’
They do not molest passengers in the street each Sunday,
pressing on them their leaflets or texts, their little tracts.
Yet they would have as much right as the theologian to
do so.
The theologians, in truth, stand alone in the world as
�22
The Rights and Duties of Parents.
desiring to prejudice the tender mind of a child before it
has gained fair power of judgment; though even they are
quite ready to parade the conversion of a grown-up person
—be he in the vigour of health, or on a death-bed—to the
true faith, and to lay more value upon one such than on
ninety-and-nine believers according to parental and priestly
injunction.
If the marvellous doctrines to which I refer are true,
it must be unnecessary to impress them upon children in
the nursery; and, if they are not true, what an abomina
tion must it be for parents to take a mean advantage of
their innocent, confiding children in forcing their doctrines
upon them. Nothing can more show the want of faith in
the power of truth, nay, in the goodness of the God they
profess to worship, than the assertion of these well-meaning
people that, by omission of the earliest training of the
young in theological beliefs, their souls will be imperilled
for eternity.
In considering the duty of parents, I must say a few
words on the wisdom of our ancestors as exemplified by an
old, but still only partially repealed, Act of Parliament. In
the ninth year of King William the Third, therefore nearly
two hundred years ago, our legislature thought fit to enact
that ‘ If any person or persons, having been educated, in
or at any time having made profession of the Christian
religion within this realm, shall by writing, printing, teach
ing, or advisedly speaking, [deny any one of the persons
of the Trinity to be God] ’ (this sentence was repealed
in 1813), ‘ or shall assert or maintain there are more
Gods than one, or shall deny the Christian religion to be
true, or the Holy Scripture of the Old and New Testament
to be of divine authority,’ and shall be lawfully convicted
on the oath of two or more witnesses, he shall, for the first
offence, ‘be adjudged incapable and disabled to have or
enjoy any office or employment ecclesiastical, civil, or mili
tary; ’ and, on a second conviction, ‘he shall be disabled
to sue, prosecute, or plead, in any action or information, in
any Court of Law or Equity, or be guardian of any child,
�The Rights and Duties of Parents.
23
or executor or administrator of any person, or capable of
any legacy or deed of gift, or to bear any office, civil or
military, or benefice ecclesiastical for ever within this
realm, and shall also suffer imprisonment for three years
without bail.’ This is outlawry in the sharpest terms!
This Act is not only not obsolete, but, by being included in
the revised statutes, has practically been re-enacted within
the last few years.
You will observe it applies to those who are 1 educated ’
in the Christian religion. Here, therefore, I find another
distinct ground for saying we ought not to educate our
children in the popular, any more than in any other, faith.
For what right can we have, on a mere belief of our own,
to expose them to outlawry, if in after-life they conscien
tiously give up their inherited religion, and find it in their
duty openly and advisedly to say so !
It is curious to note how little this Act affects modern
free-thought. No earnest free-thinker would for a moment
deny that there may be 1 one God ’ or that God may
be a compound of any number of persons, or assert that
there are two or more Gods. The most he would presume
to say is, ‘ I do not think it is given to human beings to
prove the existence of a God, let there be one or ever
so many.’ A crazy man might assert that an omnipotent
God or Devil lives in the planet Jupiter. A sensible man
would not deny this. He would say, ‘ You cannot prove
it; I decline to argue the matter with you.’
With regard to the existence of more Gods than one, it
would be interesting, but is unnecessary here, to consider
whether among orthodox believers in a God and a personal
Devil there are not many who do, in effect, assert that there
are two Gods. The belief in a Devil affords many of the
orthodox the greatest comfort, while the peculiar powers
attributed to him are little short of omnipotence, even if
they do not occasionally exalt him above their very God!
It was but the other day the Archbishop of Canterbury,
through the Judge of the Arches Court, declared that a Mr.
Jenkins, of Clifton, was rightly deprived of the privilege of
�24
The Rights and Duties of Parents.
partaking the Holy Communion—in other words, was
excommunicated—for not believing in the personality of
Satan. [See the Times newspaper of 17th July, 1875, for
report of Jenkins v. Bev. Flavel Cook],
Again, a cautious free-thinker would not deny the truth of
the Christian or any other religion. He might say, ‘ I do
not know, in the conflict of sects, what is and what is not
the Christian religion. There are many laws accepted by
Christians which I heartily accept; but there are also
dogmas, by some of you considered as essential, which I
think unimportant or absurd; but I hold them to be nearly
all beyond man’s power to decide upon, and, therefore, keep
my opinions in suspense.’
Further, the free-thinker may have no objection to the
term ‘ Holy ’ as applied to the books constituting the
canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, nor
may he care to dispute that they may be of divine autho
rity ; for the Act does not exclude his maintaining that
other ancient writings are holy. He looks upon every truth
as divine, and considers the writings of every reasoning
being in a certain measure inspired—produced through the
divine faculty of reason. The author of the Book of Job
may have been a finer, more inspired poet than our Milton;
the author of the Book of Proverbs may have been more
clear-sighted than our Locke, and may have written a book
more instructive, more inspired, than his on the ‘ Human
Understanding and the Song of Solomon may have been
finer than any that have been written by our Byron. Never
theless, there may be inspiration in all. The Church of
England, it is to be noted, does not require a belief, even by
the clergy, in the verbal inspiration of the Bible. [Note G.]
I will now consider the rights and duties of parents be
tween themselves.
If I am correct in stating that the parents are jointly
bound to abstain from taking advantage of their child’s
feebleness and mental inability to resist the imposition of
a creed (just as the poor little North American Indian
�The Rights and Duties of Parents.
2$
cannot resist having its skull flattened by its parents apply
ing constant pressure with boards), so still less ought it to be
permitted to one single parent to educate the child accord
ing to his or her individual tenets. The law of England
gives this absolute power to a father in preference to a
mother. This may be declaimed against as an injustice
towards the latter. But, admitting that we have a right
over our children’s creed, the law clearly can give that
right but to one parent; and, while sympathising with
women in their efforts to obtain a more equal social posi
tion, I incline to think the power in question, so long as
parents continue to exercise it at all, is better legally given
to the male parent. I would ask, however, all, and par
ticularly those who advocate women’s rights, to ascertain
where the injustice lies; whether it is not an injustice alto
gether towards the child, and consequently not one to the
mother.
I use this very difficulty between two parents as a strong
argument to show the impropriety of the present system.
If, as is not unfrequent, the parents differ between them
selves, the actual arrangement must be a compromise. But
the idea of a compromise on such a subject ought to be
odious to any serious, religious person. Where one parent
gives up the assumed right to the other, must there not be
a constant sense of a duty neglected in not impressing on
the child the faith of that parent in preference to the faith
of the other ? Still the claims of both are distinctly equal.
Law, or compromise, or the nurse, must settle the child’s
creed. Probably in most cases it is the latter individual
who fills the mind of the child with hobgoblin tales,—with
foolish superstitions of every kind, and leads the way to,
if she does not actually inculcate, that belief or supersti
tion which, under the vague term of his religion, even
tually takes possession of the child.
Let me quote the words of our poet Dryden :—
‘ By education most have been misled,
So they believe because they were so bred ;
The Priest continues what the Nurse began,
And so the child imposes on the man.’
�16
The Rights and Duties of Parents.
Now, even in mixed marriages, all will be clear sailing,
if both parents concur in and see to the strict carrying out
of the ‘ no creed ’ system of education, both in the nur
sery and elsewhere ; while all may be discomfort and irrita
tion, dispute and anger between the parents where they
differ, and both think it a duty to impress their own views
and convictions on the child. But why is even the
unanimity of the parents to give a right which they can
neither of them individually claim ? I fail to see it.
This consideration of mixed marriages—marriages of
parents of different faiths—is of sufficient importance in
my general argument for me to dwell upon it more fully.
Consider cases of the kind. The Boman Catholic priest
and Church interfere where they can. They require, when
a Catholic lady is about to marry any one of a different
religion, that the girls, at least, shall be educated in the
true faith, and they choose wisely, for they well know who
in.the household have the power of instilling into the infant
mind any amount of fear, fables, and narrow beliefs, and
that if they only get the girls of one generation educated
in the Catholic faith, they are preparing so many more
mothers of the next generation to carry on their system;
let alone the almost certainty that some of the boys will
be affected in the nursery or school-room by the peculiar
atmosphere that will hang about them.
When the bargain is between a Boman Catholic mother
and a High Churchman, it may be said, and with bitter
truth now-a-days, that there is no essential difference be
tween the Boman Catholic and the Protestant (a name
which by-the-way the High Churchman is quite right in
repudiating) ; but the father may be, for our argument, a
Unitarian, a Bationalist, a Mahomedan.
We may in any case have a family strangely divided.
The boys, if following their father’s creed, will have little
sympathy with the feelings and sentiments of their sisters,
even if they have the good manners not to indulge in
ridiculing them for their narrow-mindedness and bigotry.
�The Rights and Duties of Parents.
2?
The girls will be brought up to pray in Church that
God shall have mercy upon their brothers, the ‘ Turks,
infidels, and heretics ’ [Good Friday collect], and if they
are of the Church of England, on the thirteen occasions
when the Athanasian Creed is read, they will piously doom,
these very brothers to eternal torment for their want of a
correct belief; and further, by the 18th Article of that
Church, will declare a curse upon all who presume to
say, as I am glad many in the present day most heartily do,
‘ that every man shall be saved by the law or sect which
he professeth, so that he be diligent to frame his life
according to that law and the light of Nature.’
How, by the way, can a Church with the least con
sistency bear the name of a National Church when it
deals out so liberally curses and anathemas upon half the
nation ?
Nothing can be more baneful than this division of a
family. Think, too, what a mother's agony ought to be,
at every moment firmly convinced that her sons are
growing up with a belief that shall ensure for them
eternal damnation.
With the impossibility of any honest compromise, the
conviction stares us in the face that this is a case in which
neither parent can have any right of control.
To educate and train a child in the best way to fit him
as he grows in years to form his own judgment must surely
be the duty of a Protestant. If our forefathers were right
in breaking from the Roman Catholic Church, with a
declaration that every person is responsible for his own
opinions, how miserably did they, how miserably do the
present generation, fail to bring their principles into
action. How can any one judge freely for himself in
the matter of religious belief if, while still of tender years,
his whole mind, his thoughts by day and by night are
warped by those who profess to be his guardians, whose
sole object is (with praiseworthy motive, I admit) to fill
every corner of his existence with their own belief ? Look
�28
The Rights and Duties of Parents.
to the houses of any of these good people. Bound the
rooms pictures of holy saints or Bible subjects, texts of
Scripture over the very beds of the little innocents ; crosses
if not crucifixes, hung round the room and round their
bodies, crosses on their books ; prayer the first moment of
waking, the last moment before the night’s rest; the
volume containing a singularly miscellaneous collection of
writings (embracing, besides many wise and ennobling
thoughts, stories more marvellous [Note A.] than those
of Jack the Giant Killer or Aladdin’s Lamp, and a love
song, and erotic stories such as the Song of Solomon and
Susanna and the Elders), this volume in every room in the
house with such a halo of sanctity thrown around it! So
much for the week days, while for the Sunday additional
theological atmosphere is introduced, with attendance at
Church once, twice, or thrice. Not a game allowed, no
cheerful dance, not a song nor a note of music except such
as shall intensify the theological aspect of the day. The
child’s Sunday story-book (a modern invention to prevent
actual nursery rebellion), and the Noah’s Ark (a tradition
wholly inconsistent with our present knowledge) judiciously
brought forward to instil into the mind, as it were, at
every pore, the belief of one if not both of the parents.
What a farce to tell a child after this that he has been and
is free to choose his own religious belief.
Few consider what they are doing in teaching their chil
dren our Church Catechism. We were ourselves made to
learn it without understanding, and we hand down the
practice to the next generation without a thought. I will
here but refer to one point. Children of tender years are
asked if they do not think they are bound to believe all
‘the Articles of the Christian Faith,’ and are compelled
to answer, ‘ Yes, verily, and by God’s help so I will.’ A
pledge, therefore, a vow, of present and of future belief in
Christian dogmas and mysteries is thus exacted from them
at an age when the asking for any answer is, I maintain, a
mockery and irreverence I
�The Rights and Duties of Parents.
29
I am not sanguine of seeing the views here expressed
speedily accepted.
Still we do progress rather more
rapidly than formerly in shaking ourselves out of precon
ceived theological opinions. It has taken some centuries
[Note F.J to emancipate geology from the trammels of the
Mosaic Cosmogony and Deluge ; it has taken some centuries
to shake off a belief in the divine institution of slavery.
Four centuries ago, the action of the Pope with reference
to the Jewish child Mortara, stolen not long since from his
parents and educated as a Christian against their will,
would have been accepted by the Christian public as morally
right. Thousands still consider it so. Coming to our
times, it has taken half a century to convince the clergy
and the orthodox laity of the justice of a ‘ conscience
clause ’ in our schools of primary education. The crown
ing fact in this direction took place but five years ago, when
the Legislature enacted (33 Vic. cap. 75) that ‘no religious
catechism or religious formulary which is distinctive of any
particular denomination ’ should be taught in our new
parish schools. One venerable Archdeacon, at least, and
thousands of our Christian public, still look upon this as
most ungodly ! I am here only advocating the extension
of the same principle from the elementary school to the
family circle. There is no more ground for the exercise of
parental, than there was in the Mortara case for the exer
cise of Papal, authority. But more than one generation will
pass away before this will be generally accepted as a truism.
Reviewing the whole subject, there seem to be but two
consistent positions. Parents must either declare them
selves to be infallible Popes and claim an absolute right of
dictating to their children the sole belief they are to enter
tain ; or the children should be carefully guarded, from
the earliest period of their existance, against the tyranny
of any prejudiced belief, be it in a fairy tale, or ghosts, in
portents, or in any one of the numerous and complicated
theological propositions with which humanity is oppressed.
[Note H.]
�30
The Rights and Duties of Parents.
That this latter position is possible we have an example
in one whom we have but so recently lost, John Stuart
Mill! Though trained in no Greed,—no one, however
much opposed to him in politics and even on social
questions will deny him the tribute of a well-spent life,
a life of devotion to the cause of humanity, and it will
not be too much to prophecy that before long he will
be quoted (very awkwardly indeed) as a defender of
orthodoxy!
No barrier was placed in his way to accepting, when he
grew up, any one of the religions of the world. He was
free to study and did study these various religions from a
purely philosophical standpoint. He, among very few
indeed of our countrymen, had the good fortune to be in
this unfettered position ; but it is one that I unhesitatingly
claim for every human being.
Of what value is a religious belief that cannot be
accepted by a matured mind, educated wholly without
prejudice in favour of any particular form of belief or
worship ? Let us bear in mind, too, that not only may
creeds imposed upon the young be hurtful; forms and cere
monies, also, in religion are noxious. The forms and cere
monies of every church, their vestments, and other fantasies,
may be compared to the ivy which grows around the oak,
killing the young and enfeebling the mature. ‘You want
a form,’ says Lessing; ‘ but it so happens that a form
does not simply subsist alongside of the essential; it
enfeebles, tends to weaken and supersede the essential.’
While, therefore, ceasing to keep our children in
mental’ swaddling clothes, let us strive to educate them
in what I will call religious principles, or, adopting
Professor Clifford’s expression in his lecture (‘On Right
and Wrong ’) on Sunday last,—in ‘ Piety; ’ namely,
give them knowledge, not beliefs. With reference to
belief teach them to proportionate it to the evidence
they may find to support it ; and when they see (I quote
John Stuart Mill—Inaugural Address to the University
�The Rights and Duties of Parents.
3i
of St. Andrew’s), ‘that the specially instructed are so
divided that almost any opinion can boast of some high
authority and no opinion whatever can claim all—teach
them to keep their minds open and not on such momentous
matters to barter away their freedom of thought ; ’ train
their powers of observation and reasoning; teach them
from their earliest years to distinguish good from bad con
duct—right from wrong—teach them to speak openly
what is to them the truth, regardless of a mean considera
tion of consequences; teach them a noble selfishness or
self-love, that of seeking their own good in doing good to
others as well as themselves,—impress upon them for their
own sake and the sake of those near and dear to them as
also of every human being, that a strict obedience to the
unvarying laws of nature, those laws both physical and
moral which we study and gradually discover, leads more
and more to the happiness of the individual and the com
munity in general, while the contrary conduct leads to
discord, wretchedness, and misery. If we so teach them,
and further, if instead of pressing on them a compulsory
belief in one particular religion,—be it Christian or
Mormon, Jewish or Polytheistic, Mahomedan or Buddhist,
Confucian or Zoroastrian,—we make them study the lead
ing features—the moral elements—in all religions, we may
fairly say we have done our duty and not exceeded it!
�APPENDIX.
----- o----Note A.—Pages 13 and 28.
Curious Stories in the Old Testament.
A reference here may be convenient to some of the other mar
vellous stories to be found in the Pentateuch and Books of Joshua
and Judges, Samuel and Kings, which the clergy still expect, not
only children, but grown-up men and women to accept as absolute
inspired truths, because they happen to be found in ancient
records of a peculiar people.
The frequent narratives to be found in the earlier of these
books of appearances of God (‘and they saw the God of Israel,’
Exodus xxiv. 10, besides other passages) and of familiar personal
intercourse between God and Moses and Aaron, extending in one
case (Exodus xxxiii. 23) to God showing his back parts to Moses,
are in singular and significant contrast with the more philosophic
notions which must have prevailed in the later days of the writer
of St. John’s Gospel. ‘No man hath seen God at any time,’
John i. 18.
Exodus iv. 2-7.—‘And the Lord said unto him, What is that
in thine hand ? And he said a rod. And he said cast it on the
ground, and he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent;
and Moses fled before it. And the Lord said unto Moses, Put forth
thine hand and take it by the tail. And he put forth his hand
and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand : That they may
believe that the Lord God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of
Isaac, the God of Jacob, hath appeared unto thee ! ! '
And the Lord said further more unto him, Put now thine hand
into thy bosom. And he put his hand into his bosom; and when
he took it out, behold, his hand was leprous as snow. And he
said, Put thine hand into thy bosom again. And he put his hand
into his bosom again; and plucked it out of his bosom, and,
behold, it was turned again as his other flesh.
Exodus vii. 10-11.—The God of the Jews is again represented as
turning Moses’ rod into a serpent—a sort of Indian juggler’s trick,
which was immediately afterwards performed by the Egyptian
magicians, ‘ for they cast down every man his rod, and they
became serpents, but Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods’
Pharaoh, not very surprisingly, failed to be impressed by Moses’
and Aaron’s magic.
Exodus xvii. 6, and the similar passage from Numbers xx. 11.
—‘And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the
rock twice, and the water came out abundantly, and the congre-
�Appendix.
33
gation drank, and their beasts also. ’ A scene well fitted for an
Ammergau play or a pantomime. ‘ Harlequin with his wand
strikes the rock twice, and out rushes water. ’
Exodus xvii. 11. — ‘And it came to pass, when Moses held up
his hand, that Israel prevailed, and when he let down his hand,
Amalek prevailed. But Moses’ hands were heavy, and they took
a stone and put it under him, and he sat thereon, and Aaron and
Hur stayed up his hands, the one on the one side and the other
on the other side, and his hands were steady until the going down
of the sun. . . . And Joshua discomfited Amalek and his people
with the edge of the sword. And the Lord said unto Moses,
Write this fora memorial in a book.’ What a singular story!
Aaron and Hur assisting God to perform a miracle !
Numbers xvii. 5. — ‘ The man’s rod whom I (the Lord) shall
choose shall blossom. ’ v. 8, ‘ And behold the rod of Aaron for
the house of Levi was budded, and brought forth buds, and
bloomed blossoms, and yielded almonds. ’ Rapid forcing!
Numbers xxi. 8. — ‘ And the Lord said unto Moses, make thee
a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole ; and it shall come to pass
that every one that is bitten when he looketh upon it shall
live.’
Numbers xxii. 28. — ‘ And the Lord opened the mouth of the
ass, and she said unto Balaam, What have I done unto thee that
thou hast smitten me these three times ? ’
Joshua iii. 16.—The waters ‘ stood and rose up upon an heap ’
—to let priests bear the Ark with dry feet across the Jordan.
Joshua vi. 20.—The walls of Jericho fall down flat at the blow
ing of trumpets of ram’s horns by priests and shouting of the
people of Israel.
Judges i. 19.—‘And the Lord was with Judah; and he drave
out the inhabitants of the mountain ; but could not drive out the
inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.’ In
plain language, even God’s favour to Judah is here represented as
of no avail against the chariots of the valley I
Judges xiii. 20.—‘ When the flame went up toward heaven
from off the altar, the angel of the Lord ascended in the flame of
the altar. . . Then Manoah knew that he was an angel of the
Lord.’
Judges xv. 19.—Sampson having slain one thousand!.'! men
with the jaw-bone of an ass, was naturally ‘ sore athirst ’ after
such a feat. ‘ But God clave an hollow place that was in the jaw
and there came water thereout; and when he had drunk, his
spirit came again, and he revived.”
1 Samuel xxviii. 7.—‘ Behold there is a woman that hath a fami
liar spirit at Endor.’ v. 11. — ‘ Then said the woman, Whom shall
I bring up unto thee ? And he said, Bring me up Samuel.’ v. 12. —
‘And when the woman saw Samuel, she cried with a loud voice.’
�34
Appendix.
v. 15. — ‘ And Samuel said to Saul, Why hast thou disquieted
me to bring me up ? ’ Why, indeed ! No wonder believers in the
inspiration of the Bible easily become Spiritualists. Nay ! The
question rather is how they can help joining in the ranks of these
modern callers and bringers-up of spirits from the dead 1
2 Kings ii. 11.—‘ And Elijah went up by a whirlwind into
heaven. ’
2 Kings iv. 32.—‘ And when Elisha was come into the house,
behold, the child was dead and laid upon his bed.’ v. 34.—‘ And
he went up, and lay upon the child, and put his mouth upon his
mouth, and his eyes upon his eyes, and his hands upon his
hands, and he stretched himself upon the child ; and the flesh
of the child waxed warm.’ v. 35.—‘And the child sneezed
seven times, and the child opened his eyes.’
2 Kings vi. 5 and 6.—‘ But as one was felling a beam, the ax
head fell into the water. And he cried and said, alas, master!
for it was borrowed. And the man of God said, Where fell it ?
And he showed him the place, and he cut down a stick and cast
it thither ; and the iron did swim. ’
2 Kings xiii. 21. — ‘ And it came to pass, as they were burying a
man. . . they cast the man into the sepulchre of Elisha ; and
when the man was let down, and touched the bones of Elisha, he
revived, and stood up on his feet.’
2 Kings xx. 9-11.— ‘And Isaiah said, This sign shalt thou have
of the Lord, that the Lord will do the thing that he hath spoken;
shall the shadow [of the sun] go forward ten degrees or go
back ten degrees ? And Hezekiah answered, It is a light thing
for the shadow to go down ten degrees; nay, but let the shadow
return backward ten degrees. And Isaiah the Prophet cried
unto the Lord, and he brought the shadow ten degrees back
ward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz.’ A modem
astronomer, unlike Hezekiah, would have thought it not a ‘light
thing ’ for the sun to jump forward ten degrees any more than for
it to jump backward.
Note B.—Page 14.
Verbal Inspiration of the Bible.
The extent to which the claim is made in this very century
for verbal inspiration of every part of the books now bound up
in one volume as the Bible, will be shown by the following
quotations :—
The Rev. J. W. Burgon, Vicar of St. Mary’s, Oxford—
‘Inspiration and Interpretation’ (page 89.)—‘The Bible is none
other than the Voice of Him that sitteth on the Throne! Every
book of it, every chapter of it, every verse of it, every word
of it, every syllable of it, every letter of it, is the direct utterance
�Appendix,
35
of the Most High 1 The Bible is none other than the Word of
God—not some part of it more, some part of it less, but all
alike, the utterance of Him who sitteth upon the Throne—
absolute, faultless, unerring, and supreme.’
The Rev. Dr. J. T. Baylee, Principal of St. Aidan’s -College,
Birkenhead—‘ A Manual on Verbal Inspiration:’—
‘ The whole Bible, as a revelation, is a declaration of the Mind
of God towards His creatures on all the subjects of which the
Bible treats (page 6).
‘Modern science, with all its wonderful advances, has dis
covered not one single inaccurate (!!!) allusion to physical truth,,
in all the countless illustrations employed in the Bible (page 42).
‘ The Bible cannot be less than verbally inspired. Every word,
every syllable, every letter, is just what it would be, had God spoken
from heaven without any human intervention (page 48).
‘ Every scientific statement is infallibly accurate, all its history
and narrations of every kind are without any inaccuracy’
(page 62).
Dr. Longley, late Archbishop of Canterbury. His Primary
Charge, 1864 (page 42) :—
‘ All we would maintain under the title of plenary inspiration
is the universal authority of every portion of it, as written under
the Divine supervision, securing the writers from error and false
hood : the exact words being in some cases dictated as was the
case with the delivery of the Decalogue.’
As a contrast to the above extraordinary utterances see the
sensible and moderate language of the judgment of the Judicial
Commitee of the Privy Council [below. Note G.J a judgment,
by the way, in which Dr. Longley, as Archbishop, concurred !
Note C.—Page 16.
Bishop Colenso and the Intelligent Zulu.
In the preface to Part I., page 7, of the Bishop of Natal’s work
on the Pentateuch will be found the following
‘ Here, however,
amidst my work in this land [Natal], I have been brought face to
face with the very questions I then [when a parish clergyman in
England] put by. While translating the story of the Flood, I
have had a simple-minded but intelligent native, one with the
docility of a child, but the reasoning powers of mature age, look
up and ask. ‘ Is all that true ? Do you really believe that all
this happened thus—that all the beasts and birds and creeping
things upon the earth, large and small, from hot countries and
cold, came there by pairs and entered into the ark with Noah ?
And did Noah gather food for them all, for the beasts and birds
of prey, as well as the rest ? ’ My heart answered in the words
�Appendix.
36
of the Prophet, ‘ Shall a man speak lies in the name of the Lord ? ’
(Zech. xiii. 3.) I dared not do so. My knowledge of some
branches of science, of Geology in particular, had been much
increased since I left England; and now I knew for certain, on
geological grounds, a fact of which I had only had misgivings
before, viz., that a universal Deluge such as the Bible manifestly
speaks of could not possibly have taken place in the way described
in the book of Genesis. ’
The flippant way in which the Bishop of Natal’s earnest argu
ment and honest words, such as those quoted above were met, is
to some extent, illustrated by a passage written by the late Dr’
Longley, when Archbishop of Canterbury, who, speaking of Dr'
Colenso, said his objections ‘are for the most part puerile and
trite; so puerile that an intelligent youth who reads his Bible
with care could draw the fitting answers from the Bible itself; so
trite that they have been again and again refuted. ’
And yet the Archbishop himself having alleged, in his Primary
Charge (see Note B. above), that the plenary inspiration of the
Bible had secured ‘the writers from error and falsehood, the
exact words being in some cases dictated as was the case with the
delivery of the Decalogue,’ failed to answer Mr. Voysey’s plain
question, Which of the two versions (compare particularly the
extraordinary discrepancy between Exod. xx. 11 and Deut. v.
15) was referred to as having been written in the ‘exact words ’
dictated by God!! (Letter from the Rev. Chas. Voysey to the
Archbishop of Canterbury, dated November 15, 1864.)
Note D.—Page 19.
E
’ ternal Punishment of Enbaptised Infants.
Quoted from Bishop Colenso’s ‘ Natal Sermons ’ (Triibner, 1867).
Fulgentius lived a century after St. Augustine, who was the great
Father of the African Church, and is at the present day a great
authority with a certain party in the Church of England.
St. Augustine proclaimed in the following passages the damnation of unbaptised infants
‘I do not say that infants dyinowithout the baptism of Christ will be punished with so great pain
as that it were better for them not to have been born.’ Else
where he writes more fiercely :—‘ Our Lord will come to judge
the quick and the dead; and he will make two sides, the right
and the left. To those on the left hand he will say, Depart into
everlasting fire ; to those on the right, Come receive the Kingdom.
He calls one the Kingdom—the other, condemnation with the
Devil. There is no middle place left where you can
PUT INFANTS. ’
�Appendix.
37
And again:—‘Thus I have explained to you what is the
Kingdom, and what everlasting fire, so that when you confess the
infant will not be in the Kingdom, you must acknowledge he will
be in everlasting fire.’
Note E.—Page 19.
Prayer for the Pead.
The following paragraph is copied from the Times of the
23rd October, 1875 :—
‘ A letter has been received from the Bishop of Ripon (Dr.
Bickersteth) in reply to Mr. David Hoyle, of New York, U.S.A.,
who desired to have cut on the gravestone over the grave of his
father in the churchyard of Marsden, near Huddersfield, the
words Requiescat in Pace. The incumbent of Marsden, the Rev.
T. Whitney, refused to allow the inscription, and on an appeal to
the Bishop of Ripon, his Lordship has replied to Mr. Hoyle as
follows :— “I am truly sorry to find myself unable to comply
with your request. I cannot sanction on a tombstone Requiescat
in Pace. I need not remind you that this is, in fact, a prayer for
the dead. All true Protestants believe that the state of the
departed is fixed the moment after death. The souls of the
faithful are in joy and felicity, and do not need our prayers.
Lost souls cannot he benefitted by them. The inscription which
you refer to is constantly used by Roman Catholics, and is quite
in harmony with Roman Catholic doctrine. It may be found in
some Protestant churchyards, but this is rarely the case ; and
the fact that it is sometimes met with is no defence for adopting
an expression which is both misleading and erroneous. ” ’
Note F.—Page 20.
Theological Beliefs, the Hindrance to Science.
The obstruction caused by theological beliefs to the spread of
knowledge is well pointed out in the following passages, extracted
from the late Sir Charles Lyell’s ‘ Principles of Geology,’ Vol. I.,
pp. 37 and 57, 11th Edition :—
‘ The theologians who now (the latter half of the 17th cen
tury) entered the field in Italy, Germany, France, and England
were innumerable, and henceforward they who refused to sub
scribe to the position, that all marine organic remains were proofs
of the Mosaic deluge, were exposed to the imputation of disbe
lieving the whole of the sacred writings. Scarcely any step had
been made in approximating to sound theories since the time of
Fracastoro (about A.D. 1517), more than a hundred years having
�38
Appendix,
been lost in writing down the dogma that organised fossils were
mere sports of nature. An additional period of a century and
a-half was now destined to be consumed in exploding the hypo
thesis, that organised fossils had all been buried in the solid strata
by Noah’s flood. Never did a theoretical fallacy in any branch of
science interfere more seriously with accurate observation and the
systematic classification of facts. ... In short, a sketch of the
progress of Geology from the close of the 17th to the end of the
18th century is the history of a constant and violent struggle of
new opinions against doctrines sanctioned by the implicit faith of
many generations and supposed to rest on Scriptural authority. ’
The celebrated naturalist, Buffon (1751), was made by the Sor
bonne, or Faculty of Theology in Paris, to recant some opinions on
Geology. Sir Charles Lyell gives the words of his Declaration
which he was compelled to publish in the next edition of his
‘ Theory of the Earth ’:—
‘ I declare that I had no intention to contradict the text of
Scripture ; that I believe most firmly all therein related about the
Creation, both as to order of time and matter of fact; I abandon
everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth, and gene
rally all which may be contrary to the narration of Moses. ’
Note G.—Page 24.
The Judicial Privy Council on the Verbal Inspiration
of the Bible.
Under the decision (8th February, 1864) of Her Majesty’s
Privy Council, in the case of the Bishop of Salisbury v. Rev.
Rowland Williams (one of the Essayists and Reviewers), it is
not an ecclesiastical offence, even for the clergy ‘ to dispute the
dates and authorship of the several books of the Old and New
Testament’; ‘to deny the reality of any of the facts contained
in the Holy Scriptures’; ‘to reject parts of Scripture upon their
•own opinion that the narrative is inherently incredible’; ‘to
disregard precepts in Holy Writ because they think them evi
dently wrong,’ so long as they keep clear of contradicting any
doctrines laid down in the Articles or Formularies of the Church
■of England. This case is reported in the Jurist, Vol. 10, p. 406.
Note H.—Page 29.
Social and JSvery-day Superstitions and Presentiments.
How degrading are the minor superstitions and presentiments
still current even among well-educated persons ! It will be said
that it is absurd to object to fairy tales ! Yet, thanks to such
�Appendix.
39
and other nursery teaching, what may have been jokes and fan
cies originally become so interwoven into the child’s mind as to
constitute actual beliefs, or half beliefs nearly as bad in insen
sibly influencing conduct.
I would point to, among others, the passing under a ladder, the
spilling of salt, sneezing (on the Continent of Europe looked upon
as an omen of ill), the belief in lucky and unlucky days, and,
possibly the most strange and prevalent of all, the unlucky
number of thirteen at table, presaging the death of one within
the year. The two latter probably have a distinctly Christian
parentage. The belief in Friday as an unlucky day and Sunday
as a lucky day, especially prevalent among sailors, is to be traced
to the supposed days of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus ;
the ill-luck of the thirteenth at table must have arisen in connec
tion with Judas Iscariot, the thirteenth apostle.
It would be interesting in the next census to ascertain how
many people in England, numerous even among the better edu
cated, have a half-belief in gipsy fortune-telling, palmistry, second
sight, or ghosts !
Every person who for one moment is made to feel uncomfort
able by a superstition such as I here allude to is in a state of par
tial belief.
A most excellent Protestant lady is known to have seriously
told her child that the black mark in the rough shape of a cross,
which is seen on the backs of many donkeys, comes by descent
from the Donkey that carried Jesus in triumph, and who was
consequently thus honoured by a peculiar badge : ‘ See how the
very asses bear testimony to Jesus! ’ But the folly of so-called
Religious teaching is endless !
PRINTED BY C. W. REYNELL, LITTLE PULTENEY STREET, HAYMARKET.
�
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The rights and duties of parents in regard to their children's religious education and beliefs; a lecture delivered before the Sunday Lecture Society, on Sunday afternoon, 14th November, 1875
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Domville, William Henry
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Domville writes that children should be educated on the moral elements of religious principles without prejudice in favour of any particular form of belief or worship.
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Notes: One marginal annotation in pencil. Printed by C.W. Reynell, Little Pulteney Street, London.
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Thomas Scott
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1876
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Religious education
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Price One Penny.
NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
A Hundred Years
of Education
Controversy
JOSEPH
McCABE
AUTHOR OF “THE TRUTH ABOUT SECULAR EDUCATION,*’
ETC., ETC.
London:
WATTS & CO.,
17, JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.
1907
�ZTbe Secular Education ^League,
19, BUCKINGHAM STREET, STRAND, W.C.
Hon. Treasurer: H. S. Leon, Esq., J.P.. Bletchley Park, Bucks.
Secretary: H. Snell.
Bankers: London Joint Stock Bank, Limited.
The Secular Education League has been formed in order to bring
before the country and His Majesty’s Government what is regarded
by a rapidly-increasing number of people as the only permanent,
just, and satisfactory solution of the religious difficulty in national
education—viz., that all State-paid education should be confined to
secular subjects. It aims at binding together in one effective
organisation all who favour the “Secular Solution” of the Educa
tion problem, without reference to any other convictions—political,
social, or religious—that they may entertain.
In view of the Education Bill which is announced for next year,
the Executive Committee and General Council of the League
earnestly invite all who are persuaded of the justice and advisability
of Secular Education to enrol themselves upon its list of members.
The minimum subscription is One Shilling per annum, and it is
important that the League should have the support of all who
adhere to its principles.
The League has already nearly 1,000 members, including, in
addition to many Members of Parliament and well-known public
men, about 250 clergy and ministers of all denominations ; and it
appeals for help to enable it to carry on its work.
PUBLICATIONS DEALING WITH SECULAR EDUCATION.
THE TRUTH ABOUT SECULAR EDUCATION : its History
and Results. By Joseph McCabe. 6d., by post yd.
«
THE BIBLE IN SCHOOL: A Question of Ethics. With special
reference to the coming Education Bill. By J. Allanson Picton,
M.A. 6d., by post 8d.
NATIONAL EDUCATION AND THE SECULAR SOLUTION.
By A. M. Scott, id., by post i|d.
SECULAR SCHOOLS.
post 2^d.
By the Rev. S. D. Headlam.
THE CASE FOR SECULAR EDUCATION.
id., by post i|d.
THE INEVITABLE IN EDUCATION.
by post i|d.
2d., by
By H. Snell.
By R. Roberts,
Any of the above publications will be supplied by
Messrs. Watts & Co.
id.,
�2.
KI
A HUNDRED YEARS OF EDUCATION
CONTROVERSY
The lamentable conflict in regard to religious teaching in
our elementary schools is conceived by many to be an acute
crisis that wise and just statesmanship may presently
remove. Painful as it is to all citizens that the important
work of our schools should, even for a decade, be hampered
so grievously, there is a wide hope that some Minister of
Education will yet adjust the balance between the claims of
the religious bodies, or that their leaders will come to a
prudent compromise. Hence, though there is a growing
inclination to favour the secular solution, large numbers of
people still refuse to look on it as inevitable. Their memory
ranges back, at the most, as far as 1870, and they feel that the
time has not yet come to despair of finding a satisfactory
adjustment of religious claims.
History is the memory of nations. Citizens and states
men are as strictly bound to scan its records in the ordering
of great national issues as they are to consult their personal
experience in the conduct of private affairs. And the
moment one turns to the history of this education controversy
one feels that the hope of finding any stable compromise
sinks perilously close to zero. For one hundred years
the same controversy has raged in England. For one
hundred years the representatives of Anglicanism and
Nonconformity have sought in vain for a satisfactory
adjustment of their claims. For one hundred years educa
tionists and statesmen have been harassed and impeded in
their work by this interminable dispute about religious
education in the schools ; and we are to-day not one inch
nearer to a settlement of it than our grandfathers were in 1807.
This, surely, is a circumstance to be taken into serious
account in the actual controversy about the schools.
3
�4
A HUNDRED YEARS OF EDUCATION CONTROVERSY
Just one hundred years ago, in the year 1807, Mr.
Whitbread, member for Bedford, introduced an educational
measure into the House of Commons. Social writers like
Adam Smith (1776) had long urged that it was the
Government’s duty, and would be to the nation’s advantage,
to set up a national school-system. A prominent clergyman
(Malthus, in 1798) described the condition of things in this
country as “a national disgrace.” Another, Sydney Smithy
at the beginning of the century, declared that “ there was no
Protestant country in the world where the education of the
poor was so grossly and so infamously neglected as in
England.” Three centuries after the Reformation and the
invention of printing only one in twenty of the population
could read and write. There were, of course, schools in the
country. Thousands of grammar schools, poor schools,
dames’ schools, and Sunday schools were in existence; but
their work was ridiculously meagre and ineffective. Mr.
Whitbread’s Bill proposed, therefore, that local authorities
should have power to set up and maintain schools wherever
they were needed.
Into the details of the Bill we need not inquire, as it never
became law. It passed the Commons, but was rejected
contemptuously by the Lords. The Lord Chancellor (Eldon)
and the Archbishop of Canterbury denounced it as a peril to
their respective orders. It was, in fact, openly acknowledged
that the Bill was allowed to pass the Commons only on the
understanding that it would be demolished in the Lords.
It is important to realise that, though there were at that
time other formidable impediments to the education of the
people, the chances of the Bill were imperilled by just the
same controversy that we wage to-day. There was an
aristocratic objection to the education of the workers-—Sir S.
Romilly wrote in his diary that most of the Commoners even
“ thought it expedient that the people should be kept in
ignorance ”—but the chief difficulty was religious. It was
regarded as the thin end of the wedge of secular action, and
was mainly opposed on that account. The Archbishop of
Canterbury denounced it roundly as derogatory to the
authority of the Church.
The truth was that—many will learn with astonishment—
�A HUNDRED YEARS OF EDUCATION CONTROVERSY 5
the same three parties held the educational field in 1807 that
we find waging their endless war in it to-day. The most
powerful party, the Churchmen, claimed full denominational
teaching in the schools; the Nonconformists and many
neutral politicians thought—precisely as their grandchildren
think—that simple Bible lessons were the ideal ; and the
followers of Adam Smith (men like Robert Owen, a great
educationist) pleaded for purely secular instruction. It was
a golden age of educational reformers, though England was
in so backward a condition. Rousseau, Froebel, Pestalozzi,
and Herbart had stirred Europe with their ideas. In
Manchester a little group of social students, including
Coleridge and the great chemist Dalton, discussed them.
One of the group was the Quaker Joseph Lancaster, a man of
deep religious and philanthropic feeling. He founded a
system of elementary schools for the poor (known after 1814
as “The British and Foreign School Society”), and when,
says Mr. Holman, the wealthy found that “ children could be
taught next to nothing for next to nothing,” he secured
considerable support. Another of the Manchester group,
Robert Owen, set up in Scotland a large school on purely
secular principles, and it soon became one of the wonders of
Europe. Foreign Governments sent officials to study it.
The father of Queen Victoria was one of its greatest admirers.
Thus undenominationalists and secular educationists were
both in the field by 1804 ; and the third party quickly made
its appearance. A Mrs. Trimmer discovered—as so many
Mrs. Trimmers do in our day—that the Lancastrian schools
were heretical, and she induced an Anglican clergyman,
Dr. Bell, to take the field with a scheme of denominational
schools in 1805. Churchmen gathered at once under the
new banner, while the Nonconformists rallied round
Lancaster ; and the country, just one hundred years ago, was
ringing with what flippant writers called “ the conflict of Bel(l)
and the Dragon,” or what the historian must call the first
act in the drama (or tragedy) of our educational controversy.
Two generations have passed away, but the same battle rages
round our schools, the same war-cries resound, the same
plausible suggestions are thrust on us, and there is the same
utter lack of any means of compromise ; except that now we
�6
A HUNDRED YEARS OF EDUCATION CONTROVERSY
have the plain experience of a hundred years to teach us how
impossible all idea of compromise is.
The succeeding acts in the drama are in substance but a
repetition of the first. The scene changes marvellously as
the last traces of feudalism are swept away : the actors pass
behind the wings, and new ones come on. But the issue
remains the same, and the obstacles remain. The limits of
this essay would not suffice to set out the whole story in
detail, and I must be content to dwell on a few of the chief
stages of it. The struggle between the Denominationalists
and Undenominationalists was carried on vigorously and
unceasingly.
In 1811 Dr. Bell’s supporters founded the
“ National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor
in the Doctrines of the Established Church,” in opposition to
the “ Royal Lancastrian Institution ” (which became the
“British and Foreign Schools Society ” in 1814). In both
cases the instruction given was of the poorest conceivable
type. Dr. Bell recommended a barn as a good structure for a
school, and insisted that the children of the workers should
not be taught “ beyond their station.” In both sets of schools
the monitorial system (the teaching of children by children), a
pernicious system, was adopted. They fell incalculably short
of Owen’s splendid school at New Lanark, where one found
the finest methods then known and a curriculum of equal
breadth to that of the modern Council school. By the year
1818 there was still only one in seventeen of the population
of England in school, and the coarseness and viciousness of
the peasantry and factory-workers were terrible.
At this point Lord Brougham (then Mr. Brougham) and
other politicians took up the cause of national education once
more. There had been a State system of schools in Prussia
since 1794, in Holland since 1814, and in France since the
rule of Napoleon. In the American States education was far
advanced, and we had ourselves set up an excellent system
in Scotland in 1803, and voted £23,000 for the Protestant
schools in Ireland in the very year that Whitbread’s Bill was
rejected. The condition of the country was scandalous, and
men like Brougham pleaded that it was time wealthy
England did something to remove the gross illiteracy of its
people. In 1816 Brougham secured an inquiry into the
�A HUNDRED YEARS OF EDUCATION CONTROVERSY 7
educational state of London. In the comparatively small
London of that time it was found that 120,000 children had no
schooling- whatever. They played in the streets—streets and
courts of a foulness inconceivable to us to-day, for London
and Paris were, until fifty years ago, inferior to ancient Rome
or Babylon in sanitation—until their ninth year, and then
they entered the army of illiterate workers, with stunted
minds. Brougham then, in 1818, had a Select Committee
appointed to deal with educational charities. He had a
shrewd idea that, if these endowments were equitably and
economically managed, we could set up a system of schools
without calling on the national Exchequer.
How that scheme was defeated, and educational endow
ments are to this day diverted from that instruction of the
poor for which they were intended, it is not within the limits
of this essay to consider. But in 1820 Brougham introduced
a general educational measure into Parliament, and this was
wrecked on the rock of the religious difficulty. In view of
the imperfect municipal life of the time the proposals of the
Bill were not without merit. The magistrates and the local
clergy were to act in conjunction in building schools
wherever they were needed, and the funds were to come partly
from local, partly from national resources. It was a fair begin
ning of a national scheme. But Brougham soon found that one
yawning gulf lay across the line of progress, after all scruples
about national economy and the danger of educating the
workers had been removed. This was the now familiar
pitfail of compromise as to religious instruction. Brougham
met the Churchmen by giving the Anglican minister almost
absolute control over the schoolmaster. He could fix his
salary, arrange or modify his secular curriculum, and
examine the poor teacher when he willed. But Brougham
sought then to conciliate the Nonconformists by excluding all
denominational teaching from the curriculum. Simple Bible
lessons, the ever-ancient and ever-new device, were expected
to satisfy all the sects, and the Lord’s Prayer was the only
element of ritual to be admitted. For the sequel we have
only to recall our recent experience, and remember that
history repeats itself. Neither religious party was satisfied ;
neither would abate its claims to any practicable extent. The
�8
A HUNDRED YEARS OF EDUCATION CONTROVERSY
Bill had to be withdrawn, and for another thirteen years we
continued to bear what Malthus had called our “ national
disgrace ” because our clergy could not find a compromise in
regard to their conflicting claims.
I do not mean that the disgrace was removed in 1833, but
that year witnessed the first modest beginning of national
action in regard to the schools. It will be remembered that
1832 had seen the passing of the great Reform Bill. Enor
mous expectations had been aroused in the workers of the
country, and it was under pressure of a more or less serious
danger of civil war that Parliament was at length reformed
and the franchise extended. The whole hope of social
reform in the country now centred on the reformed House of
Commons, but the hope was quickly converted into disap
pointment as far as education was concerned. Under pressure
of Mr. Roebuck and others, Lord John Russell was induced
in 1833 to Pass an annual grant for educational purposes of
,£20,000. In that same year the small State of Prussia granted
.£600,000 for its schools. But the niggardliness of the grant
was not the worst feature. Dreading the religious feeling in
the country, the Government decided to hand over the money
each year to the two rival societies of voluntary schools. Not
only did the Journal of Education warmly protest at the time,
but experts are now agreed that this distribution utterly
prevented any increase of educational work and augmented
religious rivalry. As the grant was given on a basis of
funds already provided by the societies, the more wealthy
Church-society got the lion’s share. Of £600,000 granted in
the next seventeen years, the Church schools got £475,000.
A body of educational reformers had by this time formed
themselves into a Central Society of Education, and pressed
unceasingly for national action. But the Bishop of London
and other prelates denounced the Society, and for six years
more thwarted its action. By the year 1839 more than half
the children of the country were still utterly illiterate, and the
majority of the remainder received only a pretence of educa
tion. Dean Alford was moved to write in that year : “ There
is no record of any people on earth so highly civilised, so
abounding in arts and comforts, and so grossly and generally
ignorant, as the English.” There was, indeed, a minority of
�A HUNDRED YEARS OF EDUCATION CONTROVERSY 9
liberal and distinguished Anglican clergy who deplored the
situation—men like Whately, Hook, Stanley, and Kingsley;
but the overwhelming majority of the clergy of all sects
were obstinate in their respective claims. A few words on
the situation at this date (1839) from the two leading
historians of the subject will make it clear that I do not
exaggerate the injury done to education by the religious
controversy. Mr. Holman says, in his English National
Education (in the “Victorian Era Series”) : “This continued
impotence of Parliament to provide a national remedy for
what every single member of both Houses admitted to be a
national disgrace and danger is probably one of the most
striking features in the whole of its history. The only thing
that kept the Government from making the mass of the
people human was the determination of some to keep them
from being made anything less than divine.” And the only
other English writer of distinction on English education in
the nineteenth century, Mr. Adams, says: “The interdict
against a united and national system came from the moral
teachers of the people, and was pronounced necessary in
the interests of religion.” Even liberal Churchmen like
F. D. Maurice would admit no compromise. Any children,
he said, ought to be admitted to the Church schools (now
receiving ,£20,000 a year from national funds), but they must
submit to Church teaching.
Two observations on the situation at this period are not
without interest in view of our actual controversy. In the
first place, we must note that it is the very sincerity and
devotedness to their doctrines of the clergy that raised the
most formidable obstacle to the progress of education. How
ever much one may dissent from their doctrines and differ
from their estimate of the value to mankind of those doctrines,
one may respect their zeal in the interest of what they deem
to be of great importance. In the earlier years of the educa
tion controversy one can understand how they could lose
sight of the general civic interest under the stress of their
religious zeal. But it is surely time that their modern
successors realised the error of thus mixing up civic and
ecclesiastical ideals. We look back on a stretch of history in
which that mixture has wrought terrible mischief to the civic
�IO
A HUNDRED YEARS OF EDUCATION CONTROVERSY
ideal. The interminable wrangle has shown us that no
satisfactory adjustment of their conflicting claims is possible ;
and that the civic interest must be studied on a purely civic
basis, and the religious interest confined to religious teachers
in the religious atmosphere of the church or chapel.
The second observation I would make is that there has
been a remarkable change since those days in the character of
the instruction given in elementary schools. Some politi
cians still speak of the “ religious atmosphere ” in the
denominational school, and maintain that it is not a mere
question whether we shall transfer a few religious lessons
from the school to the church. The use of this phrase is very
largely an empty tradition of the earlier school. Up to the
middle of the century the whole curriculum was pervaded
with religious ideas. When we listen to-day to the claim
that the Anglican or Roman Catholic school has a general
permeation of religious feeling, we wonder how it is possible
to find this religious atmosphere in the long hours that are
filled with lessons on arithmetic, geography, grammar, and
such subjects. There is, of course, no religious element
whatever in these lessons to-day (and they form four-fifths of
the whole curriculum of the denominational school),1 but
there was fifty and more years ago. Manuals of arithmetic
and geography are still to be found that show a real
“ religious atmosphere,” and Mr. Holman gives many details
in his interesting history. Arithmetical problems were
founded largely on the Old Testament, and geography
centred on Palestine much as a medieval map would have
done. Now that these lessons have become purely secular,
and religious instruction is confined to a few prayers and
hymns and half-hour lessons, no very great change will be
involved in transferring them to the proper home of religious
cultivation.
However, let us return to the historical study. Statistics
showed that whereas in Prussia one in six of the population
attended school, in Switzerland one in seven, and in Holland
one in nine, in wealthy England the proportion was one in
1 The present writer was educated in a denominational school, was after
wards co-manager of a denominational school, and later rector of a denomina
tional college.
�A HUNDRED YEARS OF EDUCATION CONTROVERSY n
fourteen. Clearly the voluntary societies were not dis
charging-the function of educating the nation. Educationists
redoubled their pressure. They obtained an increase of the
annual grant from ,£20,000 to £"30,000—not a formidable
matter, Brougham pleasantly observed to the Lords, seeing
that they were that year voting £70,000 for the building of
royal stables—and they at last secured a beginning of
governmental action in the work of education. One of the
most pressing needs in the country was for the efficient
training of the teachers. Even in the Lancastrian body six
months’ training was thought amply sufficient for an
elementary-school teacher. Indeed, what was given in the
great bulk of the schools of the country would not be admitted
by any modern expert to be “ education ” at all in any real
sense. The teachers were miserably inefficient; and when
we learn that their average income was only about £22 a
year we can imagine what type of people they were. The
Government therefore proposed to set up a Normal School
(training college) at Kneller Hall.
They were at once
confronted by the religious difficulty, and their scheme
foundered once more on it. They proposed to pay only the
teachers of secular subjects in the training college, and leave
the students of each denomination free to bring in ministers
of their respective bodies for religious lessons. Once more
the conflicting interests of the Churches wrecked the scheme,
and it was years before there was any effective training of
teachers in the country.
But Lord John Russell triumphed over clerical opposition
in one important respect, and made a beginning of national
action. He formed a Committee of the Privy Council on
Education, and this slender institution was destined to grow
in time into our modern Education Department. But what
storms of religious opposition it had to face in its early
months I The Bishops of London and Chichester led the
vast majority of the clergy in a violent assault upon this
intrusion, as they called it, of the State on the Church’s
domain. There were Churchmen, like the Bishop of Durham,
who saw how gravely national interests were being thwarted,
and were willing to compromise. But the vast majority of
the clergy were vehemently opposed to State action.
�12 A HUNDRED
YEARS OF EDUCATION CONTROVERSY
Nonconformists proclaimed the new Committee to be “a
secular tyranny, ” while Churchmen denounced it as a menace
to the Establishment. The religious war of 1906 was tame
ness itself compared to the war on the new education
authority, slight as it was, in 1839. The bishops and the
lords temporal actually walked in procession from the House
to Buckingham Palace—a unique incident, I think, in the
annals of that dignified body—and begged Queen Victoria to
abolish the Committee. The young Queen answered them
with a truer dignity than their own. She told them that she
had sanctioned the Government’s proposals from a deep and
well-considered sense of duty to her people, and the Lords
went away disappointed.
The controversy went on for some time with great vigour,
and in fact it was only moderated by another of those fatal
concessions to the clergy that hindered the real progress of
education. By a more or less secret arrangement the
Anglican clergy were granted control over the inspectors of
schools who were appointed under the new authority. It was
an abdication of its functions that would be listened to with
amazement if it were proposed in our time, and it was an
unjust arrangement. The religious lessons given in the
(undenominational) schools of the British and Foreign
Society were controlled by Church inspectors, and the
irritation and rivalry were greatly increased. The new
Committee fell so far under the dictation of the archbishops
that in 1840 it passed a minute directing that “ their lordships
were of opinion that no plan of education ought to be
encouraged in which intellectual instruction was not subor
dinated to the regulation of the thoughts and habits of the
children by the doctrines and precepts of revealed religion.”
This unjust preponderance stirred the Nonconformists to
continuous action, while expert educationists tell us that
elementary education steadily deteriorated. The passing of
the Factory Acts was supposed to have secured some measure
of instruction for the children of the factory-workers. In
point of fact the Act was flagrantly scouted. Children of
tender years were still worked for twelve hours a day, and
the education provided for them was farcical. The lodge
keeper, or the stoker’s wife, would gather them in some dark
�A HUNDRED YEARS OF EDUCATION CONTROVERSY 13
shed—often in the coal-house—and laboriously teach them to
identify the letters of the alphabet. The country was over
run with poor widows, crippled workers, and all kinds of
impoverished people who earned a few shillings a week
by “teaching.” The Central Education Society fought
desperately for some improvement, and in 1843 two important
efforts were made. Both were wrecked on the perennial
religious difficulty. The first was a Bill for the effective
instruction of factory children. They were very largely of
Nonconformist parentage, yet the Bill unluckily gave higher
control to the Anglicans—who had wrecked every measure
that did not do so—and the Dissenters naturally resented it.
They had now become sufficiently powerful to oppose such
measures with effect, and they forced the withdrawal of the
Bill. This triumph brought home to them the fact that the
extension of the franchise had enormously increased their
political power, and this deepened the long political struggle
over the schools, and added the further complication of our civic
and political life with the conflicting and irreconcilable claims
of the clergy. The situation became worse than ever. Let
me express it impersonally in the estimate given by Mr.
Holman, the impartial historian of the subject.
The
Dissenters, he says, “ now fought for their own hand in the
same way as the Church party did, and combined with the
latter and others to resist the exercise of control by the State
authorities ; and thus they became real obstructionists to
national progress in education.” The Congregationalists
alone deserve a partial exemption from this heavy censure.
They at least refused to accept State aid, and enjoined their
members to support their own denominational schools. The
Roman Catholics were in the same logical position until a
few years ago.
The second effort of the reformers in 1843 was to introduce
a Bill, in the name of Mr. Joseph Hume, for purely secular
and moral education, but it was counted out. The reformers,
however, manfully continued their work, and gradually won
some of the great Dissenters to their view. In 1847 they
founded in Lancashire—always honourably placed in the
history of education—a league for the furtherance of their
aims. The famous Corn-law orators, Cobden and John
�i4
A HUNDRED YEARS OF EDUCATION CONTROVERSY
Bright, lent their support to it. The radicals of the south
joined forces with it, and it gradually attained considerable
power. From a “Lancashire Association” it became a
National Public Schools Association.” There seemed a
prospect at last of convincing the country of the impractica
bility of balancing religious claims in regard to the
elementary schools, and rescuing the instruction of the
people from this harassing association with theology.
In 1850 the League decided to test their strength. The
minister of South Place (London) Chapel, Mr. W. J. Fox, a
brilliant speaker on social reforms and member of Parliament
for Oldham, introduced a comprehensive measure into the
House. The inspectors were to report on the deficiency of
schools in particular districts, and an efficient provision for
universal education was to be made out of the local rates.
Denominational schools were not to be superseded, but would
in future only be paid for the secular instruction they
imparted. On the other hand, the new Government schools,
which were to give free education, should be controlled in
the matter of giving or omitting undenominational instruction
by a kind of local option. The Bill projected a vast advance
in the field of elementary education, but it was resented by
both religious parties, and was heavily defeated on the
second reading. The National Association—supported as it
was by Dissenters like Cobden, Fox, Milner Gibson, and
W. E. Forster—was fiercely attacked, and denounced as
irreligious. They had put before the country, members said
in the House, a choice between Heaven or Hell, God or the
Devil. So for the sixth time a fair and promising scheme of
national improvement was shattered on the rock of the
religious difficulty.
The various acts in the drama of our educational history
are, in fact, so similar in essence, so closely parallel to the
act we are taking part in to-day, that one moves rapidly on to
the end of the century. Education remained in a state of
partial paralysis. Mr. Fox had read to the House a manifesto
issued by a large body of London working men, in which
they complained pathetically of this paralysis. It concluded :
“ The controversy has waxed hotter and more furious; our little
ones have been forgotten in the fray, and their golden moments
�A HUNDRED YEARS OF EDUCATION CONTROVERSY 15
have been allowed to run irrevocably to waste.” It needs
little reflection to convince one that this was no exaggeration.
The member of schools in England at the time is no test
whatever of the educational work done. The vast majority
were ridiculously inefficient. Teachers were given an absurd
modicum of training, and inspectors were given no training
whatever until 1857. The greater part of the machinery was
rusty and antiquated, and the salaries were too slender to
attract competent men. Anyone who reads Mr. Kay’s
comparison of England with the continental countries in
1850 will be amazed at the appalling statements of this great
expert. As late as i860 it was stated in a Government
report that out of the two and a-half million children in the
country only one and a-half million were at school ; and of
these 800,000 were found in flagrantly inefficient schools,
under teachers who themselves reached no decent standard of
education. London was far below the level of any large
Roman town of fifteen centuries earlier. In fact, few children
of the Roman towns had been without elementary education.
Yet every measure for the betterment of the situation was
met with the same resistance. Mr. Forster’s Bill for the
education of the poor was rejected in 1867, and the storm
that raged about his great Bill of 1870, when the Board
schools were founded, is too well known to enlarge upon.
Forster found that two-fifths of our children between the
ages of six and ten, and one-third between the ages of ten
and twelve, had no education whatever ; that, in other words,
one and a-half million of our children were still untouched
by the influence of the teacher, such as it was. No wonder
that he wrote bitterly to Kingsley : “ I wish parsons, Church
and other, would all remember as much as you do that
children are growing into savages while they are trying to
prevent one another from helping.”
The rest of the story needs no telling. The familiar
device of giving “ simple Bible lessons ” was again dignified
with the position of a great political expedient, and thirty
seven years of hard experience have again proved its futility.
Surely it is time that we all, clergy and laity, recognised this
plain fact of its uselessness ? Mr. Birrell rightly disavowed
any claim to originality in bringing it forward in 1906. It
�16
A HUNDRED YEARS OF EDUCATION CONTROVERSY
goes back to the time of his grandfather. It was CowperTempleism in 1870. It was Russellism in 1850, and
Durhamism in 1840, and Broughamism in 1820, and
Lancasterism in 1807. If is discredited by as prolonged and
explicit a political experience as was ever given to a
suggested compromise. It is as bitterly and powerfully
assailed to-day as it was in 1807. As long as it is retained,
it holds out a prospect of fresh wrangling with every swing of
the political pendulum.
The object of this essay is to inform those who fancy
that the giving of “simple Bible lessons” is a new
and imperfectly-tried device how completely it has
proved its impotence. And no other compromise is even
proposed to us. Happily the lesson is being read more
candidly to-day. The modern Secular Education League
has the support of distinguished Roman Catholics and many
clergy of the Anglican and Dissenting Churches. They
believe that they can sufficiently tend their religious interests
in their chapels, and they plead that we no longer hamper
our highest civic ideals and embarrass our political issues with
religious differences. We cannot call back on to our planet
the millions who have passed through England in the
nineteenth century without ever having their finer powers
developed ; the millions who have gone down into the
darkness with stunted souls, after a life of heavy drudgery
and the coarsest surroundings. But we can unite in the
framing of a unified and thoroughly effective system for
training the body, mind, and character of the child, and
we may leave the clergy to give the training in their own
doctrines in their own institutions.
PRINTED BY WATTS AND CO., 17, JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C.
�
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A hundred years of education controversy
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McCabe, Joseph [1867-1955]
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Collation: 16 p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: Part of the NSS pamphlet collection. Advertisement for the Secular Education League and its publications (published by Watts), inside front cover, i.e. p.[2].
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Education
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Text
NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
THE BIBLE IN SCHOOL
A QUESTION OF ETHICS
NEW EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED, WITH SPECIAL
REFERENCE TO
THE COMING EDUCATION BILL
BY
J. ALLANSON PICTON, M.A.
(Formerly M.P. for Leicester and a Member of the first School Boardfor London)
[issued for the
rationalist press association, limited]
London:
WATTS & CO.,
17, JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.
��CONTENTS
-
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION
-
■
v
-
-
xv
THE BIBLE SPHINX............................................................... i
RELIGIOUS EQUALITY............................................................... 9
THE NEW CHURCH RATE
....
16
NEW RELIGIOUS DISABILITIES
...
23
MORAL EFFECT ON TEACHERS
-
-
-
34
THE EFFECT ON SCHOOL CHILDREN
-
-
43
THE WRONG TO THE NATION
...
56
CONCLUSION..........................................................................62
INDEX-
77
��PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
In the arena of education the most significant event since the first issue
of this Essay has been the production and withdrawal of TMr. Birrell’s
Bill. I do not mention the Act of 1902, because it has appeared to me
significant of little but the illimitable evils occasioned by passionate
blunders in patriotism. It was the inevitable effect of a “ khaki
election.” But the Bill of 1906 was an attempt to correct, so far as
education was concerned, that mistake—with what results we know.
If, however, our belief in the continuity of progress be sound, it is incon
ceivable that the reactionary law of 1902 can remain much longer in
force. Such a notion would be as simple as that of the child who fancies
that an exceptionally long receding ripple indicates the turn of the
advancing tide. But if a new Education Bill is introduced, as we are
assured it will be, all highest interests demand that it shall not be drawn
on lines which will ensure its delivery into the hands of its sectarian foes.
In other words, no loophole must be left for associating the public
authority, whether imperial or local, with the teaching of dogmas that
divide us.
A nation which sets to its Government an impossible task ought not
to be captious in criticism of failure. Now the task appointed by a
reputed majority of English people to successive Ministers of Education
has been the establishment of religious equality in the schools, together
with security for “ simple Bible teaching.” And this latter phrase
practically means, as is abundantly proved in the following pages, the
ordinary Scriptural instruction common to the Sunday-schools of the
great evangelical sects—Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and all
Wcsleyans. But this common belief of those influential sects is, after
all, not the belief of the whole nation. For the Church of England,
through the voices of her most •zealous and self-sacrificing clergy and
most devout laity, denounces that common belief as not only insufficient,
but misleading. The Roman Catholics, as a matter of course, protest.
It is matter of common fame, to which I shall refer again, that a rapidly
The Educa
tion Bill of
1906.
A failure,
and the
reason why.
�vi
The prefer
ence of undenominationalism
fatal to
religious
equality.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
increasing number of Nonconformists themselves have surrendered most
important elements of that once common belief. And outside of all
these is a dim, uncounted, but formidable host, who utterly deny all
miraculous revelation, and who insist, as they have always done, but
more loudly than ever now, that their rejection of revelation does not in
the least invalidate their claim to full citizenship, including religious
equality.
What the reputed majority demand, then, amounts to this: that in a
nation notoriously divided as to forms1 of religious belief a delusive
attempt must be made to establish as “undenominational” one particular
form of belief that happens to be shared by certain great and influential
sects. Such a position reminds us of what is said of the Emperor Julian
by Mr. T. R. Glover in his Life and Letters in the Fourth Century: “A
zealot whose principle is the equality of all sects and the preference of
one stands in slippery places.” In our times we have to do, not with
an individual zealot, but with a congregate or multi-personal zealot,
constituted by an alliance of the great evangelical denominations. The
principle enunciated by Mr. Glover is, however, quite as applicable in
the twentieth century as in the fourth. And the story of the Education
Bill of 1906 cruelly exposes the fate of the modern zealot “whose
principle is the equality of all sects and the preference of one.”
Perhaps I may fairly claim that this painful and wasteful episode in the
struggle for national education is a glaring illustration of the main thesis of
the following pages. For that thesis, in few words, is simply this: that to
teach in the schools of the nation, and by authority of the nation, a
transcendental subject on which the nation is for the present irrecon
cilably divided in opinion is worse than impracticable. It is not only a
waste of time and money: it is a perennial source of strife, a deadly
injury to citizen education, a cause of hypocrisy, falsehood, and all the
forms of immorality inevitably propagated by these vices. Yet hardly
once in the course of the Parliamentary debates on that misbegotten
Bill was this essential issue fairly faced. With certain happy exceptions,
especially among the Labour Members, the prevalent assumption was
that we are all agreed on “simple Bible teaching,” though not one
champion of a lost cause attempted an articulate explanation of what
1 I say forms because one of my deepest convictions is that the division is super
ficial only. But the actual realities feebly represented by those forms were earnestly
taught in a strictly “ secular” school which I attended for six years of my boyhood.
�PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
vii
that teaching is. And nearly all ignored the patent fact that this effete
assumption has been long drummed out of existence by the discordant
sectarian bands who drowned by their noise all the more practical
educational issues at School Board elections. Nor has the abolition of
School Boards cured the mischief. For it has simply transferred the
battle of the Bible to municipal elections, and especially to the choice
of “ co-opted members ” on Education Committees.
But other signs of the times have portentously risen on the horizon ; Theology?’
and perhaps most significant among them is what is called “the New
Theology.” With that I have nothing whatever to do except to insist
that, however incorrectly the epithet “ new ” may be otherwise applied,
the movement is a novel and, I might even add, a startling illustration
of the main positions maintained in this Essay. For, instead of the
supposed unanimity of a reputed majority of the nation about the “simple
Bible teaching ” of which samples are given in the following pages, we
find even among the evangelical Nonconformists themselves an outbreak
of the most discordant opinions touching the origin, nature, infallibility,
and authority of the very Book whose exclusion from the schools, they
tell us, would be sacrilege. Now I am perfectly aware that such dis
cordance of opinion would be no sufficient objection to the inclusion of
the Bible as a “ classic ” in the school curriculum, always provided that
it could be treated as schoolmasters treat any other classic, and that
every teacher could be really freed from theological bondage. But, as
an old School Board hand and present member of a county education
committee, I know that these premises are at present simply impossible.
For the Bible is in the schools, not as a “ classic,” but as “ the word of
God.” Yet now the advocates of the New Theology, from their dis
tinguished leader the Rev. R. J. Campbell downwards, have practically
repudiated every intelligible sense in which the Book could be honestly
called the word of God.
I must dwell for a moment on this point, because, unfortunately,
the theological habits slowly formed during two millenniums impose on
good and honest men, I will not say a slippery, but certainly a subtle,
use of words which pleases the eye or ear, but leaves the reason
befogged. It is therefore necessary here to particularise the new forms
which the old problem of the Bible in school has assumed. For when
we are told that there is nothing in the new views held by so many
Nonconformists at all inconsistent with their advocacy of the old use of
�viii
Contrast of
the new
views with
‘ * simple
Bible
teaching."
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
the Bible as a class-book, it is surely needful to get a clear idea of those
new views, and also to remind ourselves of what the old use of the
Bible in school was and is. I will dismiss the latter first, because it is
only necessary to refer readers to the later pages of this book,1 which,
after six years, remain substantially, and indeed for the most pait
exactly, true of present practice.
In sum, the ancient and present usage amounts to this : That the
Bible is presented to the children as the very word of God, as “ God’s
letter to mankind,” and bearing everywhere the stamp of divine
authority, which it is wicked to doubt. But, of course, the time spirit is
too strong for uniform insistence on the old rigid literal interpretation.
Thus there is often an attempt on the part of the more intelligent
teachers in municipal schools to evade the difficulties of the Creation
story, the Fall, and the Tower of Babel, or perhaps of the Almighty’s
visit to Abraham’s tent, by feeble suggestions of “ allegory,” always with
the reservation that all is the “ word of God.” In this view of contem
porary Bible-teaching I am generally confirmed by Mr. Nevinson’s
recent most interesting letters to the Westminster Gazette on visits
which he paid to various elementary schools during the hour of religious
instruction. His remarks on the evident anxiety of Council school
teachers to avoid any suspicion of heresy were suggestive and painful.
Now let us note the contrast between the established usage in
public elementary schools—even those called “ undenominational ”—
and the ideas so rapidly spreading among Nonconformist supporters of
the Bible in school.23 To the “ New Theology,” as expounded by its
leader, the Bible has just as much authority as each individual mind
feels impelled to assign to it. But its claim to be “ the word of God ”
is gone. The first books of the Bible—so constantly prescribed by
Council “ syllabuses ” for the religious inspiration of infant minds—are
a collection of myths mainly of Babylonian origin. “ The Fall theory is
not only impossible in face of the findings of modern science; it is a real
hindrance to religion.”
The Incarnation, as understood by all recognised
1 See pp. 29 and following.
2 It is.only just to the Rev. R. J. Campbell to note that he at least is consistent,
and has joined the Secular Education I.eague. It is only what I should expect
of a man with a single eye to veracity.
3 Rev. R. J. Campbell, in The New Theology, p. 64. The italics are my own.
But the words are well worth emphasising in view of the constancy with which this
old myth is taught to young children as the starting-point of genuine religious
history.
�PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
ix
doctors of theology, whether Catholic or Protestant, is explained away.
Not that the divinity of Christ is denied. But it is regarded only as a
resplendent illustration of the divinity partly expressed, partly latent, in
every other man.1 It is true that, with expansive tolerance, Mr.
Campbell thinks “ even the Athanasian Creed is a magnificent piece of
work, if only the Churches would consent to understand it in terms of
the oldest theology of all”! The date and authority of this “oldest
theology ” are not given ; and it is not my business to conjecture the
author’s meaning. For my sole purpose in alluding to the book at all
is to show how far it shatters the persistent assumption that there is
such a thing as “simple Bible teaching” on which the dominant sects
are agreed. And the book proves my point, because it is written by the
most popular Nonconformist preacher of the day, occupying a sort of
episcopal pre-eminence in the central temple of Evangelical Noncon
formity, and because the book has attained a circulation rarely accorded
even to works of fiction.
Take up any syllabus23of religious instruction approved by local
Education Authorities, and note how impossible its prescription must
be to an honest teacher holding the “new theology.” For the greater
number of such documents—in fact, almost all—prescribe the story
of the Fall for the edification of the youngest children, together
with the narrative of the Deluge and the adventures of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, of which the mythical characters are clearly involved,
though not expressly stated, in the New Theology. Further, the New
Testament does not remain intact. For though Mr. Campbell is quite
willing that his adherents should believe the story of the Virgin-Birth
if they can, he is himself of opinion that it was “ unknown to the
primitive Church that it is an unauthorised addition to the earliest
Gospels; and that the reference in Matthew i. 23 to the supposed
prophecy of such a portent in Isaiah vii. 14 is due to the Evangelist’s
ignorance of Hebrews Anyone who observes what a prominent place
the story of Bethlehem takes in municipal religion as taught in Council
schools can judge of the cruel position into which the New Theology
forces any of its adherents who happen to be undenominational school
1 The New Theology, chap. v.
2 The character of these syllabuses, in which th? Act of 1902 has caused no
change whatever, is indicated in Chapter IV»
3 New Theology, p. 98.
Syllabuses
of Bible
teaching.
�X
“Canye not
discern the
signs of this
time ?”
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
teachers. Are they to tell the children what they themselves in the
new light believe to be false, or are they to resign their places ?
I need not pursue the subject; or I might show that in regard to
such fundamental doctrines as the Trinity, the Atonement, Apostolic
authority, and the nature of the kingdom of God, followers of this new
and popular teaching must find it impossible without hypocrisy to work
up to the pattern set before them in the syllabuses adopted by the
various education authorities. What, then, is the hope of those who
still support such a system ? Do they really think in their heart of
hearts that the adherents of the New Theology are a few aberrant and
exceptional persons who are negligible in any great question of the
national conscience? But in the following pages evidence is given that
these ideas prevailed to a large extent among elementary teachers
before ever Mr. Campbell was heard of. Are their numbers likely to
be lessened now ? I will quote an authority for which I have a more
rational reverence than any have who think that religion can be served
by blindness to staring facts. For one feature of the character of
Jesus does, I think, shine clearly upon us through all the mists breathed
by imaginative affection; and that is his splendid veracity. It-was
shown, as all the Gospels tell us, in his treatment of the Sabbatarian
superstition in his day. It was shown in his exposure of Pharisaism at
the peril of his life. It was shown in his daring to cast aside the
asceticism of John the Baptist and to rejoice with the sons of men.
And it seems to me it was his sense of outraged veracity which gave a
tone of anger to his retort upon those who wanted a sign of what could
never come, while they were blind to the plain tokens of what was
coming. “ O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky. But
can ye not discern the signs of this time?”
It can scarcely be too often repeated that my argument does not
involve any judgment one way or the other on the theological points at
issue between the different schools of thought above noticed. My sole
object is to expose the hollowness of the pretence that the great
majority of the nation are substantially agreed about the Bible, and
that they all mean the same thing by “ simple Bible teaching.”
Whether the old theologians or the new are right is a question that
makes no difference to my argument. At any rate, they disagree.
They differ about the dates, authority, and historicity of Genesis,
Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, and most
�PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
xi
of the other Old Testament books.
They are at variance about the
Fall, the meaning of Jewish sacrifices, the Messianic prophecies, the
Atonement, the divinity of Christ, the extent of the inspiration of St.
Paul, the historical value of the Gospels, and especially of “St. John’s.”
But whatever may be the amount of truth attained by any of the
contending parties, it is only one party that has the advantage of having
its opinions established and endowed in the schools; and that is the
rapidly lessening section which holds to the old beliefs common to
Nonconformity and Low Church in the year 1871, and then stereotyped
once for all by the “ Compromise ” of the Right Hon. W. H. Smith.
Yet another sign of the times is the awakening of many earnest
Churchmen to the fact that the establishment and endowment of
religion, at least in the schools, involves humiliating conditions such as
cancel the value both of privilege and money. Thus it was interesting
to read in an editorial article of the Church Times on June 14th, 1907,
the following endorsement of the practical conclusion which the
ensuing pages were written to enforce : “ It is clear that under the
conditions of religious disunion prevailing in our country the appro
priation of public money in payment for religious teaching is a mistake.
It would not be impossible to make an equitable provision for all
religions alike; but the difficulties are great, and the fanaticism of a
small minority can make them insuperable. The only reasonable
alternative is to leave the provision of religious teaching entirely to
voluntary effort.” This practical conclusion is, of course, reached by a
very different course of thought from that of the following essay. And
for “ the fanaticism of a small minority ” I would substitute “ the
common sense of most.” But the value of the omen is its suggestion
that the possessors of a living faith, as distinguished from mere
formalists, are beginning to see that they dishonour their faith by
allying it with injustice and falsehood. If this sentiment spreads, the
wrong will cease.1
1 It is curious to contrast the above High Church frank acknowledgment of
obvious justice with the eloquent plea for privileged Puritanism uttered by one of
the ablest and most practical statesmen of the day. At Pontypridd, on July 20th,
1907, as reported in the Manchester Guardian, the Right Hon. D. Lloyd-George
rightly denounced the system which has given the Church of England millions of
public money “for the purpose of conducting little missionary schools throughout the
country.” But in eulogising with well-justified patriotism “a race whose intelligence
had been cultivated and strengthened and developed by a century of Puritan
theology,” he perhaps naturally overlooked the fact that church people have just as
good a right to object to a system which gives public money to pay for “ missionary
One variety
of opinion
alone estab
lished and
endowed.
The position
of Church
men.
�xii
New Regu
lations for
Training
Colleges.
Inconsis
tency of
M inisters of
the Crown.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
Yet another sign of the times is to be found in the new “ Regula
tions for the Training of Teachers,” issued while I write. These regula
tions provide that no candidate for admission to any training college
may under any circumstances be rejected on the ground of religious
faith, “or by reason of his refusal to undertake to attend or abstain
from attending any place of religious worship, or any religious obser
vance or instruction in religious subjects in the college or elsewhere."1
The last words, which I have italicised, are obviously incompatible with
the requirement of any religious belief whatever in candidates for
admission. They clearly leave it open to the intending student to
decline any Bible instruction or any lectures in “divinity.” But, of
course, the wise men of the Board of Education are quite aware of the
facility with which such a regulation may be evaded in already estab
lished training colleges. They therefore add another regulation, that
after August ist, 1907, no new sectarian training college shall be
recognised, nor any new hostel, unless connected with an unsectarian
institution. Moreover, to ensure compliance with these regulations, as
far as possible, the Board will prohibit the examination of candidates
by college authorities as a condition of admission. . Other means, of
course, will be taken to secure the necessary intellectual fitness of
candidates. But the colleges are to be left under no temptation to
favour their own theological persuasion. Now, surely, if such regula
tions are consistently carried out, they will of themselves, without any
new Education Bill, make the future use of the Bible in school impos
sible. For no student can be compelled to receive any instruction
therein either in his college “or elsewhere.” Now, if under such
circumstances any would desire still to have the Bible in school, they
neither love nor honour the book as I do.
Unfortunately, however, this does not appear to be admitted by the
Ministers of the Crown who are responsible for the new regulations.
And a brief note of the attitude they assumed towards an important
and influential deputation of Church dignitaries who, on July 20th,
schools” of that Puritan theology propagated under the form of “simple Bible
teaching.” . But even if the new Educational Bill should deny them the legal right,
the moral right will remain. I am well aware that Mr. Lloyd-George would repudiate
with honest indignation any idea of maintaining Puritan privilege. But to Church
men “ simple Bible teaching” is Puritanism. So it is to Catholics and to Unitarians
and Rationalists. And I think it is in the course of these pages proved to be
really so.
1 Regulations for the Training of Teachers, 8 (d).
�PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
xiii
1907, protested against those regulations, may well find a place among
the signs of this time. It is only due to the high ecclesiastics, headed
by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who represented Church opinion, to
acknowledge that they argued their case with moderation and with the
inevitability of conviction necessarily involved in their view of life. On
the other hand, the chief merit of the response made by the Prime
Minister and Mr. McKenna was their emphatic distinction between
the denominational and the national point of view. They did not
deny that if teachers were to give instruction in Anglican doctrine they
must receive Anglican training. But they did deny that this was a
purpose for which public money could be fairly ear-marked. So far as
statutes and prescription guaranteed for the present the existence of
training colleges with a “ denominational atmosphere,” they admitted
the legality of privilege. But so far as statutes and prescription left the
Board of Education a free hand in administering grants of public
money for individual students, they insisted that national and not
denominational interests must determine their action.
But one cannot help regretting that they gave their whole case
away by needless deprecation of “the secular solution.” For surely, if
a teacher requires Anglican training before he can give Anglican
instruction, he must also require Biblical training before he can give
“ simple Bible teaching ”—all the more, indeed, if he is to make it
really simple. But, so far as the regulations show, no student is obliged
to receive such training. The Government abjures all responsibility for
such things, but will not allow a student to be rejected by any college
on account of his refusal to “attend any place of religious worship, or
any religious observance, or instruction in religious subjects, in the
college or elsewhere.” Indeed, to put the matter plainly, the only
forces on which religious people can rely to get these young people
trained for simple Bible teaching are church or chapel opinion, under
hand preferences, spiritual espionage, and in the last issue the social
boycott.
Now, if by deprecating the “secular solution” our statesmen mean
only that they desire a cultivation of right feeling and pure emotion, of
reverence, brotherly love, and loyalty to the real order of the universe, I
imagine that everyone must agree with them. But there is usually
more than this connoted by language of that kind. For the idea seems
to be that something very simple and obvious to common humanity is
Ambiguity
of the
phrase
“ secular
solution.”
�xiv
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
offered instead of ecclesiastical mysteries. But surely, when we
remember that “simple Bible teaching” includes Creation, the Fall,
the Deluge, the conquest of Canaan, God’s delight in David the man of
blood, the Virgin-Birth, the Resurrection and the Ascension, we can
hardly help feeling that the concomitant rejection of the Church
Catechism is rather like “straining out the gnat and swallowing the
camel.”
Thus much by way of new Preface has been necessary to indicate
some signs of the times that have risen above the horizon since the first
edition was issued, and in view of which I have considerably altered
and enlarged the scope of the work. But for the sake of historical
continuity the Preface to the first edition is reprinted here, and the
story of the strange lapse of Nonconformity from its former consistency
is repeated, because it is at least of some importance to keep on
record the fact that objection to the “Compromise” of 1871 did not
originate with unbelievers in the Christian revelation, but with lovers of
the Bible. For a similar reason a considerable part of the earlier
chapters has been preserved in the original form, because it is of still
greater importance to remember that long before 1871 the first promoters
of “secular” schools were not “infidels,” but religious men.
J. A. P.
August, 1907.
�PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
Thirty years ago, in 1871, when the first School Board for London
accepted, with a close approach to unanimity, the well-known resolution
proposed by the Right Hon. W. H. Smith, M.P., in favour of Bible
teaching in the schools, there was a small minority of three who
recorded their votes against it. Not one of these three was insensible
of the value and importance of the Bible in the education of humanity.
On the contrary, they had a reverence for it which was certainly not
shared by some of those who voted for the motion. Indeed, two of
them had devoted their whole energies up to that date to the work of
religious instruction. The first of the three was the Rev. Benjamin
Waugh, whose name is now known and honoured throughout the world
for the salvation he has brought to tens of thousands of suffering
children. The second was the late Mr. Chatfeild Clarke, a sincerely
religious Unitarian. The third was the writer of the following pages.
Few, if any, would like to confess that they have passed through
thirty years of experience without changing an opinion; and I hope I
have changed many opinions for the better. But all that I have
observed in the course of many imperfect labours in the field of
education has only confirmed the conviction expressed by that vote;
the conviction that we should have better served the interests of
religion as well as of education if we had acted on the judgment of the
older Nonconformists, that the Bible is not a proper subject for State
patronage and control. In so doing we should only have followed the
example set us by those States of Greater Britain whose eyes discern
the future more surely than ours.
J. A. P.
October, 1901.
XV
�*** In the following pages I mean by “ State schools ” all schools
supported by rates and taxes and subject to the Board of Education.
By “ municipal schools ” I mean schools provided, managed, and
partly supported by County or Town Councils. By “transcendental"
religion or doctrines I mean religious beliefs or dogmas that transcend
or go beyond the sort of experience or evidence usually required for
justice or legislation, and which are also outside the practical necessities
of citizen life.
�THE BIBLE IN SCHOOL
I.
THE BIBLE SPHINX
The problem of the right use of the Bible in the nation’s schools is
a question of morality quite as much as of religion. Yes, say the
advocates of its indiscriminate use, it is a question of morality, because
you can have no morality without religion, and no religion without the
Bible. Without stopping now to argue either of the points thus raised,
I may remind the holders of such opinions that some noteworthy men
of their persuasion have made these very points a reason for objecting
to the indiscriminate use of the Bible in the schools; and by the
phrase “indiscriminate use” I mean placing it in the hands of every
teacher, whether Catholic, Evangelical, or Rationalist, to give to the
children of believers and unbelievers alike explanations and instruction
therefrom in the principles of the Christian religion and of morality.
The once-honoured name of Edward Miall represents now, I suppose,
an extinct species of Nonconformity. Yet, whatever may have been
the defects of adaptability which made the sectarian struggle for
existence fatal to it, that obsolete type of Nonconformity at least
commanded respect by its moral consistency. For when it proposed
“the Liberation of Religion from State Patronage and Control” it
meant all that it said; and was just as much averse to “State Patronage
and Control” in the school as in the Church. And therefore, from the
time of Sir James Graham’s Bill, which dates my earliest recollection of
the struggle for national education, the majority of English Noncon
formists stood out against any statutory system of State schools.1 This
attitude was for many years impersonated in Edward Miall, who held
that under such a system it would be impossible to exclude the Bible,
and that the Bible could not be properly taught by unspiritual, still less
by unsympathetic or unbelieving, persons. Thus, precisely because in
their view no morality was possible without religion, and religion meant
to them the Bible as a divine revelation, they insisted that the Book
was too sacred a thing for indiscriminate use in the sense defined above;
1 The weaker brethren supported the British and Foreign School Society, which
accepted Government grants. But they vainly thought that this did not commit them
to the principle of a statutory system of schools.
D
I
The
Miallites
�2
Devout
Secularists.
Speech of
Sir James A.
Picton in
1850.
THE BIBLE SPHINX
and, therefore, they dreaded the merging of their Voluntary schools in a
State system.
The next step in the development of Nonconformist opinion on the
question is, I fear, entirely forgotten by a younger generation, who think
of “ secularists ” in regard to national education as Secularists in belief.
Now, among the many historical mistakes for which ambiguity of
language, and especially of party epithets, is responsible, few are more
absurd than this perversion of recent fact. For just before and after
the middle of last century the prophetic eye that is sometimes a gift of
earnest religion began to discern not only the inevitability, but the
moral and intellectual necessity, of a statutory system of elementary
schools. And then some of the most earnestly religious among the
Nonconformists—such as the Rev. Edward Baynes and the late Dr.
Samuel Davidson—suggested that the difficulty might be evaded by
confining State or municipal schools to “ secular ” subjects, and leaving
to the Churches the responsibility for supplementing by religious
instruction this confessedly imperfect training.
I do not know that I can give a better illustration of the views then
held by many of the most devout Nonconformists than a quotation
from a speech delivered in 1850 by my father, the late Sir James A.
Picton, who was born and brought up among the Wesleyans, and was
thoroughly evangelical in his belief. At a meeting summoned by
several influential men in Liverpool, to petition Parliament in favour of
secular education, he moved the following resolution : “That, in order
that the rights of conscience may be effectually secured, it should be a
fundamental rule that nothing should be taught in any of the schools
which favours the peculiar tenets of any religious sect or denomination.”
But the speaker did not see in these words any suggestion of the future
“ compromise.” He believed that to avoid tenets peculiar to a part only
of the nation it would be necessary to confine instruction to secular
subjects. At the outset he referred to an article in the Nonconformist
newspaper, then conducted by Edward Miall, and strongly opposed to
any rate-aided system of schools. He then proceeded as follows :—
The gist of the argument is this : that because there are some things
in which it would be wrong for the community or State to interfere,
therefore the community should interfere in none, but should leave
everything to be effected by voluntary effort...... Is the illumination of
our streets to be considered all-important, and is the lighting-up of the
lamp of knowledge in the souls of darkened millions to be deemed
matter of no concern to the community as such?...... If it be right to
provide a library, it cannot be wrong to teach to read ; if it be just in
principle for the State to provide the means of intellectual gratification,
it cannot be unjust to afford the necessary preparation for its enjoyment.
...... The object to be attained is the communication of that knowledge
which shall fit a man to understand his social duties and duly to perform
his part in relation to this world. This is common ground on which all
�THE BIBLE SPHINX
3
can meet, and beyond this the community has no right to proceed.
Religious liberty should be absolute, or it is worthless. There cannot
justly exist any modification of it. The rights of conscience must be
held paramount to all mere human laws...... The practicability of the
system of education which we advocate has already been proved with
the most complete success in the New England States of America......
But this system is called irreligious, godless, and inimical to religion.
Could I bring my mind to this conclusion, I should regard the system
with the utmost abhorrence. I have been engaged as a Sunday-school
teacher for the last twenty-five years, in attempting to communicate
religious instruction to the young, and sooner would I consent to this
right arm being severed from my body than it should be upheld in the
support of any project adverse to religious truth. It is because I
consider this system most favourable to religious teaching that I give it
my warmest support. Let us look at the question fairly...... A news
paper is not of necessity irreligious unless it contain a theological
treatise or a sermon. The utmost that can fairly be said is that secular
teaching is incomplete ; but it is good as far as it goes. Now what
have religious teachers principally to contend with?...... Not so much, I
will take upon myself to say, the actual prevalence of vice in the young
as a degree of mental apathy or brutal ignorance, to remove which (in
Sunday-schools) often involves a most serious waste of time and labour.
...... A system, therefore, which should remove this obstacle, so far from
being unfriendly to religion, ought to be looked on as its most powerful
auxiliary. But, again, the communication of religious instruction1
requires a different mode of treatment from secular instruction. In the
latter some degree of coercion is absolutely necessary, and the attempt
to combine the two in simultaneous instruction is too often nominal
rather than real, a profession rather than a practice. The element of
religion should be love ; its teaching should be the voluntary effusion of
a devoted heart. The affections of the young should be called into
play, and everything should partake of the gentle and healing influences
of Him who “ spake as never man spake.” In thus enlightening the
minds of the young, and fitting them for the reception of religious truth,
I believe we are acting in accordance with the precepts of the divine
Redeemer, who instructed His disciples to “render unto Caesar the
things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”
No patriotic mind can look abroad on the heaving masses of life
around us increasing daily in consciousness of strength, without some
degree of apprehension arising, not from the character of our country
men’s hearts, but from the ignorance and darkness of their minds. The
heart of the Englishman still swells with the same generous and manly
emotions as it has ever done. The same hatred of oppression, the
same love of order, the same sense of justice and right, still form the
leading features of his character. But he is dark and longs for light.
1 What the speaker had in his mind was not the teaching of Jewish history, which
of course, if sincerity were allowed, might be communicated as easily as Greek or
Roman myths, but rather the conveyance of “grace and truth.” I am aware that
the distinction sounds antiquated now. And I cordially agree that, since character
and conduct are the highest educational end, every teacher, whether in so-called
“secular” schools or Sunday-schools, ought to be privileged to convey grace and
truth if he can. But in the nation’s schools the exercise of this high prerogative
must needs be subject to two essential conditions : (i) That he shall not wound the
religious susceptibilities of parents ; (2) that he shall never be faced with the dilemma
of hypocrisy or resignation if he should happen to differ from the religion of the
majority. And under resignation I include surrender of moral teaching.
�I
4
THE BIBLE SPHINX
Shall it not be given him ? He thirsts for knowledge. Shall not its
refreshing streams be poured into his soul? Justice, kindness, safety,
patriotism, all answer yes! “Wisdom and knowledge must be the
stability of our times ; then may we hope that the fear of the Lord will
be our treasure.”
Plausible but
fallacious
criticism of
the "secular
solution.”
Three
courses con
ceivable ;
but only one
possible.
Justice and patriotism may have answered “Yes,” but sectarianism
answered “No.” And in the sequel it was seen that the latter voice
was, unfortunately, more potent than was expected by such guileless
prophets as the speaker.
Of course, such a proposal as the above was open to obvious
criticism, on account of its suggested separation of things inseparable.
But many advocates of so-called “ secular ” schools were quite as well
aware as their critics that the distinction between things sacred and
secular is purely arbitrary. They knew that a religion of daily life—of
reverence, of devotion, of enthusiasm for good—was worth more than
all the rules of arithmetic, but that it might, and would, be taught, or
rather inspired, by a good man or good woman even in the process of
teaching those rules. They could not, however, quite see how it was
possible for such a religion of daily life to be naturally or effectively
taught in a course of Bible lessons wherein the good man or good
woman was forced to tell lies. And this they held must be the result
in a good many instances if teachers were accepted without any profes
sion of creed, but were expected to teach the average creed of the
nation, whether they believed it or not.
Now, this difficulty might be avoided in one of three ways—either
by allowing every teacher to use the Bible just as he would any other
book, and to say of it precisely what he felt, just as he would about the
Pilgrim's Progress or Paradise Lost; or, secondly, by allowing only
the use of an authorised selection of Bible extracts illustrating the
beauty of goodness; or, finally, as suggested by the so-called “ secu
larists,” by keeping the Bible out altogether. The first solution is, of
course, abstractly the right one, and in a hundred years will probably
be adopted. But, so long as any considerable section of the people
regard the Bible as miraculous and infallible, that solution is impos
sible. And this should be remembered by liberal thinkers, who talk
about the Bible as a “ classic,” which it would be vandalism to exclude
from the schools. Nor am I convinced by Dr. Frank Hayward’s
urgent and able plea that the Bible, treated on Herbartian principles,
leads the child through “historical culture-steps”1—is, in fact, savage
with the young barbarian, mythological with the boyish dreamer, while
it dramatises the evolution of despotic law and then of responsible
1 Reform of Moral and Biblical Education on the Lines of Herbartianism,
Critical Thought, and the Ethical Needs of the Present Day. (Swan Sonnenschein
and Co. ; 1902.)
�THE BIBLE SPHINX
5
freedom. For it seems to me that the writer gives up the whole case
when he admits that Jowett’s suggestion to “treat the Bible like any
other book ” is an impossible one. But the freedom of exposition
which Dr. Hayward himself advocates would be generally regarded as
compliance with Jowett’s suggestion, and would therefore be equally
impracticable. To say nothing of denominational State schools, which
are still very numerous, the local education committees, selected largely
for religious reasons, would not allow it. And if any teacher dared to
treat the stories of the Patriarchs, or Joseph, or David, or still more
the first chapters of St. Matthew and St. Luke, in accordance with the
modern criticism approved by Dr. Hayward, the debates of the local
authority would have a special value for the local Press. The second
solution, the selection of non-controversial passages, was advocated by
the late Professor Huxley. But when he realised his failure, and saw
what came of it, he was candid enough to own that the third solution
would have worked practically better than his.1 Those who advocate
this solution quite share the regret of liberal religionists that most of
our great colonies and the United States have found it necessary
generally to exclude or severely to limit in their primary schools the use
of so precious an inheritance from great times of old. They would
even agree that the expedient is a humiliating one. But, then, they do
not think that the humiliation attaches to those who would treat the
Bible like any other book. They rather think it falls on those who
persist in investing it with unreal attributes, such as forbid truth and
sincerity in using it.
The idea of a book absolutely without an error is now generally,
even by most of the religious sects, regarded as a figment of the ages of
ignorance. But, while the possibility of error is allowed, the admission
of its actual presence is guarded and limited by considerations which
have no relation whatever to evidence. It is, I believe, common now
for schoolmasters who know anything of geology to explain to their
pupils that in the Mosaic account of creation the word “ day ” does not
mean twenty-four hours, but an indefinite period of time. Yet those
teachers whose culture enables them to estimate the force of congruity
in determining the meaning of words, whether in literature or law,
must feel sure that the six-times repeated refrain, “The evening and
the morning were the ------ day,” determines beyond question the
intention of the writer to picture an ordinary day of twenty-four hours.
1 In a conversation with myself. The plan was never adopted, except in the
sense that, as even fanatics would not insist on having every word of the Bible read in
the schools, some selection was inevitable. But it was not made on Professor
Huxley’s lines. It kept always in view the dogmas common to the evangelical
denominations.
Prof.
Huxley's
proposal.
An inf lllible
book recog
nised no
where but in
school.
�6
The teacher
and Genesis.
The inquisi
torial rate
payer.
THE BIBLE SPHINX
Such teachers may know that various ancient commentators have felt
the need of a larger space of time for so majestic a work. But this
does not affect the impression made on their common sense that when
a man of Hebrew race wrote “ evening and morning ” he must certainly
have had in his mind the ordinary Jewish mode of reckoning from
sunset to sunset. If, therefore, he tells his young students of truth
that the sacred writer meant thousands of ages when he wrote “ days,”
this teacher knows in his heart of hearts that he is not speaking the
truth required at the moment.
It does not in the least matter whether the view here taken as to the
significance of “ evening and morning” be correct or not. The point is
that it is conscientiously held by a large number of educated teachers
who are required to teach the. Bible to children as “the word of God.”
And, of course, this special detail as to the meaning of the six days is
only fixed upon for distinctness of illustration. But let us leave that
detail, or suppose it obscured in a haze of generalities about the
undeniable dignity and occasional sublimity of the Bible story of
Creation. From the “ Broad Church ” point of view we are told that,
whatever may be the sacred writer’s errors in science, no ancient myth,
no poetic imagination of uninspired men, ever so nearly approximated
to the actual facts of the earth’s origin and development as recorded in
the rocks. Be it so—at least, for the purpose of our present argument.
Then let the teacher be free to tell this to his pupils; and, if he is a
man who happens to know where the narrative came from, let him be
free to tell his pupils further that it is a revised and improved edition of
a story found inscribed on clay tablets among the ruins of Babylon.
Certainly, if he were allowed to take this course, he would be saved
from much humiliating prevarication about the “ firmament in the
midst of the waters,” “ dividing the waters which were under the
firmament from the waters which were above the firmament,” and about
the grass and herbs and fruit-trees which brought forth seeds and fruit
before the sun was made, and about the creation of birds before the
“ creeping thing and beast of the earth.” He might most honestly tell
the children that, with all its mistakes, the first chapter of Genesis is a
most precious and touching record of some devout soul’s effort to find
the secret of the world in God. But the requirement that he shall set
it forth as a direct revelation from the Creator of what he did before
there was any man to see it is surely a sore strain on any morality in
which truth has its proper place.
The conservators of a decaying creed, however, demur to any such
freedom on the part of teachers. “ We pay our rates and taxes,” they
say, “ to have the Bible taught in its simplicity as the word of God. It
would be an outrage on our conscience if teachers were allowed to treat
�TIIE BIBLE SPHINX
7
it as a human book.” And the advocates of a rate-aided Gospel in
municipal schools would add that it is not sectarian religion they want
—not, for instance, the Independent theory of Church government, nor
Presbyterianism, nor Infant Baptism, nor any such high matters -but
only the simple truths of the Trinity and the Incarnation and the Atone
ment, and Immortality in heaven or hell, and Salvation by the blood
of Jesus. A good man whose notion of catholic comprehension is
embodied in the Union of the Evangelical Free Churches cannot
conceive that there is any touch of sectarianism in State-school religion
as thus defined. Perhaps he never meets with anyone who does not
hold the simple gospel composed of those doctrines. And if he hears
that such eccentric heretics really do exist, he waves them out of sight
with such phrases as “entirely exceptional” and “negligible minority.”
Whether that answer to the conscientious plea raised by these heretics
is in accordance with fact will be a question for our consideration later,
though I may remark, in passing, that the first years of the twentieth
century have already exposed the arrogance of any such assumption.
For the “ New Theology ” movement—already mentioned in the
Preface to the present edition of this Essay—has certainly not caused,
but only revealed, the widespread scepticism pervading the outwardly
orthodox majority.
Meantime, I would only observe that the “Nonconformist con- Change in^
science ” has not always been content to measure its own rights by the formist consize of the minority it represented. I am old enough to remember
times when the existence of even ten righteous men conscientiously
objecting to pay their parish church rates, though there might be five
hundred anxious to pay, was thought by good Nonconformists quite
a sufficient reason for resistance, even at the cost of distraint or
imprisonment.
While freely granting that in this preliminary statement of the issue
there are involved many incidental points on which I can have no hope
of sympathy from the majority, yet, if the substance of it be summarised,
I do not see how it can be denied without contradiction of patent facts
notorious to all. Who will dispute that on the relations of religion to
moral instruction, and of the Bible to religion, discordant and irrecon
cilable opinions are held with equal intensity of conviction by many of
the worthiest members of the commonwealth ? But those differences
are more than merely intellectual divergences. They touch on deepest
faiths and inspiring hopes and infinite fears. They are the clash of
mutually contradictory oracles held by opponents in the debate to be
the divinest utterance of their deepest and most real being. Indeed, the
differences are such that, if the opinions of any one group are adopted
as the law of the people’s schools, all other citizens must suffer painful
�8
The only
way.
TI1E TITLE SPHINX
and dishonourable disabilities. No matter what may be the selection
made, whether the opinions of Conformists or Nonconformists, of
Catholics or Protestants, of Rationalists or of “unsectarian” Evan
gelicals, all the rest must endure what they regard as the perversion
of the State’s authority and resources to mischievous and demoralising
uses. As ratepayers they must support out of their wages or wealth the
propagation into the new age of doctrines which they detest. As
teachers they must either play the hypocrite or take an inferior position.
As parents they must either acquiesce in the instillation into their
children’s tender minds of what to their parental affection seems
dangerous poison, or, by availing themselves of the “ Conscience
Clause,” they must inflict on their families the fate of little pariahs
during all their school hours. As citizens they must submit to have the
whole moral energy of the land they love devoted to immortalising
errors which, according to their point of view, may seem superstitious or
godless, loose and latitudinarian or promotive of priestcraft, but at any
rate offensive to some dearly cherished faith.
Under such circumstances I cannot see how the conclusion is to be
avoided, that the only way of treating the Bible honestly and reverently
in our educational system is to leave it to the voluntary action of
Churches, Sunday schools, and other religious organisations, to which
its popularity has been much more due than to State patronage and
control. In this conclusion I am supported by the invariable acknow
ledgment of reasonable religious people that such a course is the only
logical one, though persistent sentiment resists it. But there are some
cases in which English contempt for logic in legislation is obviously
mischievous and misplaced. And those are cases in which not merely
a rough adjustment to an average expediency is required, but an
acknowledgment of the sovereignty of some moral right. Of this
instances might be found in the history of religious toleration, the
slave trade, and slavery itself. Or if we come down to our own times, the
story of the opium trade with China—nay, also of Chinese labour in the
d ransvaal—proves abundantly that where the dictates of logic establish
moral claims the plea of expediency is always in the end overborne.
Some ingenious and plausible objections to the sovereignty of justice
in this case will be best treated later on. But if the Bible has to stand
like a mysterious and fatal Sphinx, with its unanswered questions and
its dire penalties at the gates of knowledge, that is not the fault of the
so-called secularists, but rather of the religionists, who refuse to
national school teachers unfettered freedom in the interpretation of
the Book.
�II.
RELIGIOUS EQUALITY
“ Religious equality ” has too often been interpreted to mean equality
of privilege for Christian sects. We have not yet entirely outgrown
the feeble tolerance of kindly Commonwealth Puritans who would
extend the protection of the law to Presbyterians, Independents,
Baptists, and even Quakers, but who would bore with a hot iron the tongue
of a man who should outrage their “ fundamental ” beliefs. Modern
sentiment, indeed, protects us from too close an imitation of seventeenth
century practice in this respect. But in the assumption that the claim
to religious equality before the law is morally invalid in the case of
Unitarians, Rationalists, Pantheists,1 and Agnostics, the germ of the
old cruelty still survives. Now that is just the assumption which has
underlain all nineteenth-century discussion by liberal Christians of the
rights of “ultra-Rationalists,” or disbelievers in any revelation made by
a personal God.
The “ Broad Churchman ” repudiates with honest indignation any
lingering desire to subject even the “ Infidel ” to secular pains and
penalties on account of his unbelief. But he retains an equally honest
conviction that the “ Infidel,” by his alleged voluntary alienation from
the spiritual life of the Commonwealth, has forfeited any claim to
equal consideration with Christians on any question affecting the
establishment, endowment, or other public expression of the national
religion. This description of the attitude of liberal Christians towards
ultra-Rationalists can hardly be accused of exaggeration. Indeed,
there are not a few among the former whose objection to the unrestricted
citizenship of the “Infidel” is much more distinct. They say that he
dishonours their God and Saviour, and that, though they hope his
invincible ignorance may be leniently considered by the Supreme
1 If I do not mention “Atheists,” it is because I do not recognise the term as
properly applicable to any actual form of belief or unbelief. I never met, nor do I
expect ever to meet, a man who would deny that being is eternal. All the self-styled
“Atheists” I have ever known have simply denied that my idea of God, or any
other idea of God, answers to their notion of eternal being. I am bound to respect
their negative attitude. But I should call it Agnosticism, not Atheism. When I
find a man who positively denies that there is anything eternal, or, in other words,
who thinks that at one moment—so to speak—in the infinite past there was nothing,
and at the next moment there was everything, or “the promise and potency” of
everything, I will allow him the name of Atheist. But I shall not feel bound to
respect his intellect.
9
Limited
notions of
religious
equality.
�IO
At least it
should in
volve the
abolition of
compulsory
or merce
nary sacri
lege.
Strain on
conscience
sometimes
involved in
“ simple
Bible teach
ing.”
RELIGIOUS EOUA LI T\
Judge, yet they cannot consent to involve the nation in moral peril by
extending to him a “religious equality” inapplicable to irreligion.
It may be readily acknowledged that from this point of view the
problem of religious equality raises issues far too vast to be adequately
treated in connection with the right use of the Bible in the nation’s
schools. But it will presently be seen that, though we cannot help
indicating those larger issues, we do not need to lose ourselves in them.
For even if we grant, what I, for one, absolutely decline to do, that for
the public expression or recognition of the nation’s religious life the
legal recognition of the Bible is desirable—as, for instance, in the
Coronation service, and in swearing witnesses—yet everyone must
surely acknowledge that if any particular public use of the Bible
involves hypocrisy and lying, that use becomes a sacrilege, because, in
theological language, it desecrates the vessels of the Temple by
devoting them to the service of Satan. Now, precisely this is actually
involved in the use of the Bible in schools according to the great
Smith “Compromise.” Such an objection can only be met by asserting
that the desecration is not inherent in the legal usage of the book, but
in the infidelity or extreme Rationalism of those who cannot use it
aright. And this necessarily involves the corollary that none who are
unable honestly to use the Bible in accordance with prevalent opinion
ought to accept any office in which such use is required. Now that
means practically the exclusion of all who cannot accept the residuum
of Biblical belief common to Anglicans, Presbyterians, Independents,
Baptists, and Methodists. The full justification of this assertion must
be reserved for a later stage of the argument, when we come to discuss
more particularly the position of teachers under the present order of
things. Meanwhile I only assume that, if this be so, it raises the
question of religious equality for Rationalists in a practical and limited
form, such as need not carry us very far into the vast issues suggested
above.
We need not, for instance, discuss the Broad Church idea that
individual alienation from the spiritual life of the Commonwealth may
justify the exclusion of that individual from entire religious equality.
For obviously we have to do here not with the spiritual life of the
nation, but with the Biblical theories which a national school teacher
is, as a matter of course, expected to hold and enforce. It is all very
well to say that “ theories ” are not expected, but practical teaching.
Yet if the practical point be the historical truth of the six days’
creation, or of the conversation of Eve and the Serpent, or of the
argument of Balaam’s ass with its master, or the three days’ lodging of
Jonah in the belly of a whale, or the Virgin Birth, or the feeding of
five thousand people with five loaves and two fishes, or the bodily
�RELIGIOUS EQUALITY
ii
resurrection of Jesus guarded by angels, it is difficult to see how the
conscience of the teacher can avoid the issue of fiction or fact.
Either the teacher holds that the accuracy of such narratives is
guaranteed by an authority independent of historical evidence, or he
does not. If he holds the former theory, he can, of course, honestly
teach these stories as narratives of fact. But if he does not hold it,
even the chance hints occasionally let fall in the secular history lectures
of a training college are enough to suggest to him that for such stories
historical evidence of the sort required for secular events is not
forthcoming. And unless he have a mind exceptionally impervious to
the echoes of criticism in the air, he feels in his inmost soul that,
however useful as parables or otherwise those old-world tales may be,
they have no claim to be treated as historically true.
We are not, however, at this point concerned with the special diffi
culties of intelligent teachers. I have referred to the effect of historical
lessons in training colleges only as suggestive of the far more pronounced
scepticism pervading the wider circles of moderately-educated people,
who are under less temptation to a biassed judgment. And if I use the
word “scepticism,” I take it in its proper and original sense of an inquiring
spirit. I do not say, and I do not believe, that more than one-fifth, if
so many, of English-speaking people reject entirely the idea of a divine
revelation given them in the Bible. But I do maintain, because the
tone of our current literature of social conversation proves it, that the
old matter-of-course assumption of the divinely-guaranteed historic
accuracy of the Hexateuch, and the books of Judges, Samuel, Kings,
and Chronicles, - has entirely disappeared from all circles of tolerably
well-educated society. No literary aspirant to the pages of our most
eminently respectable monthly magazines has now the slightest hesitation
in treating the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch as a figment of the
Great Sanhedrim, or of unsupported tradition. The popularity of the
late Professor Huxley’s controversial essays cannot be wholly explained
by their brightness and vigour. Admiring readers might not go all
lengths with him in his negative conclusions. But they were not
revolted by his claim to treat the Bible on the common-sense principles
that he applied to science; and even this extent of acquiescence
involved an immense shifting of the foundations on which their ideas
of cosmic and human origins, as well as of Judaism and Christianity,
had hitherto rested.
Reference to one recent publication alone may save us a good deal
of detail. Surely none but bigots can rejoice over the financial diffi
culties that prevented the completion of the “ Polychrome Bible.”
But if there should be any so unsusceptible to the real “powers of the
world to come ” as to imagine an interposition of a watchful Providence
Sceptical
attitude of
the ^eneraj
public.
The “Poly
chrome
Bible.”
�12
Religious
position of
its editors.
EELIGIO US EQUALITY
in this case, let them look at the volumes issued; let them note the
list of contributing scholars, nearly all belonging to churches reckoned as
orthodox; let them think of the amount of money sunk in a commer
cially unsuccessful, but magnificently prophetic, enterprise, and they will
be compelled to own that it indicates a flowing tide of new opinion about
the Bible. To describe it shortly, it is an incomplete edition of the
Hebrew Scriptures with a new translation, accompanied by brief
pregnant notes and a very few pictorial illustrations.
The feature from which the Polychrome Bible derived its name is
the variegated colouring of the pages designed to show at a glance the
various documents from which the Hebrew Scriptures, as we have them,
are believed by the editors to have been compiled. The treatment is
entirely and unreservedly free—as much so as if the subject were the
Vedas or the Zendavesta. It is at the same time profoundly reverential,
as is indeed most becoming whenever or wherever we study genuine
records of man’s struggle upwards from the passions of the brute to the
eternal life. The result, however, is a version subversive of many, or
indeed most, of our traditional ideas of the Bible. The translation, if it
is correct, which, so far as my knowledge goes, I believe it generally is,
would often make the evangelical interpretation of crucial passages
obviously impossible.1 The Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch is so
entirely rejected that the earliest documents therein of any length and
importance are attributed to the latter part of the ninth century B.c.,
while the narrative of creation in Genesis i. and Levitical regulations,
long defended as Mosaic, if nothing else was, are regarded as the work
of exiled Jews in Babylon about 500 b.c. The Prophecies of Isaiah are
assigned to a number of sacred bards, among whom the Isaiah of former
evangelical divines occupies a limited though luminous space. The
Psalms are “ the hymn-book of the second Temple.” We are
told that “it is not a question whether there be any post-Exilic Psalms,
but rather whether the Psalms contain any poems written before the
Exile.”
My point, however, is not the amount of importance to be attributed
to the scholarly judgment of the learned men responsible for this great
work, but rather their representative position in the world of religious
thought. Had they been condemned heretics, “ aliens from the
Commonwealth of Israel,” it might be said that their views are excep
tional and eccentric, at any rate of no value as evidence of the trend of
opinion. But so far is this from being a correct description that the
editors are all of them men of high position and some of distinguished
fame in English, American, or German Universities, and in communion
1 E.g., Isaiah vii. 14, where for “virgin” we read “young woman.”
�RELIGIOUS EQUALITY
i3
with national churches or other great and respected Christian denomi
nations. The chief editor was Dr. Paul Haupt, Professor of Hebrew
and the cognate languages in the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore,
and until 1889 Professor Extraordinarius of Assyriology in the University
of Gottingen, Hanover. Isaiah has been edited by Dr. T. K. Cheyne,
Canon of Rochester, and Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Holy
Scripture at Oxford. Exodus has been treated by Dr. Herbert E. Ryle,
Hulsean Professor of Divinity and President of King’s College,
Cambridge; the Book of Numbers by Dr. J. A. Paterson, Professor
at the Theological Seminary, Edinburgh ; and Deuteronomy by Dr.
George A. Smith, Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis at
the Free Church College, Glasgow. There is no need to give the rest
of the thirty-eight names. With the exception of one Unitarian gentle
man and two Jewish scholars, the three editors of two minor books, all
of them would be recognised as official representatives of moderate
orthodoxy in religion.
Another proof of the revolution in opinion about the Bible is the
Encyclopedia Biblica, of which only one volume had appeared when the
first edition of the present Essay was published. This great and
scholarly work, though involving large expenditure, could hardly demand
the vast sum which would have been needed to carry out the original
idea of the Polychrome Bible with its Hebrew text, and English trans
lation, laboriously assigned to various older documents distinguished by
different colours. But in any case it must have been a costly work, and
the very fact of its completion in four large volumes suggests a popular
demand which could not have been found in Great Britain or America
fifty years ago. Not that there was less interest then in the Bible. But
the demand was almost exclusively for works which would prove the
Bible true. Now this is neither the motive nor the burden of the Encyclo
pedia Biblica. The one purpose is to ascertain the real facts and state
them. Nor does such a purpose in the least involve a negative or
iconoclastic zeal. For if the Bible were not a valuable inheritance of
mankind, such a work as this would not, morally or intellectually,
have repaid the enormous labour involved. And, like the parts of the
Polychrome Bible, it owes its existence, not to hesitant sceptics, still less
to “ blatant infidels,” but to clergymen and others, who are, many of
them, shining lights in reputedly orthodox churches.
Of the conclusions affirmed it may be said, generally, that while the
various writers differ considerably, there is scarcely one of them who can
be conceived as endorsing the idea of the Bible implied in the syllabuses
of scriptural instruction for public elementary schools.
The elaborate and searching article on the Gospels, running to 198
columns, is by two well-known authors—the Rev. Dr. Abbott, late Head
Similar case
of the En
cyclopedia
Biblica,
�T4
Thus
** simple
Bible teach
ing ” be
comes a
theological
test.
Limitations
of the
argument.
RELIGIOUS EQUALITY
Master of the City of London School, and Professor P. W. Schmiedel,
holding the Chair of New Testament Exegesis at Zurich. They are not
agreed, and the latter is much more “radical ” than the former. It must
not be assumed that I agree with him. For, if I point to the fact that
he allows only nine brief passages in the Gospels to be “absolutely
credible,”1 it is by no means for the purpose of endorsing any such
conclusion, but only to emphasise my main point here, that the dif
ferences of opinion among religious people are enormously great. From
which it follows that no education authority has a moral right to expect
all young teachers, fresh from the higher instruction now open to them,
to give, as a matter of course, such “ simple Bible teaching” as assumes
the historicity of the Gospels. And to exclude the increasing number
of those who cannot conscientiously do so would be a gross violation of
religious equality.
The inference I draw from such signs of the times as I have mentioned
is not an extravagant one. It is not that the majority of the people in
England or America have been converted to pure Rationalism, but only that
it is unjust and absurd to say that the rejectors of the historical accuracy
of the Bible are a negligible quantity, eccentric heretics, aliens from the
spiritual life of their race, and therefore rightly subjected to religious
disabilities where questions of national education are concerned.
Probably many of my liberal religious readers will think that I have
taken a great deal of unnecessary trouble to arrive at an obvious con
clusion. Of course that is so, they will say; but where are the religious
disabilities ? My answer is that those disabilities are twofold—first,
denial of the just rights of conscience ; secondly, exclusion from honest
and self-respecting service of the nation as teachers in its public schools.
I grant that, if disbelievers in Bible history can consent to a colourable
hypocrisy, they are not excluded ; but if anyone holds that eligibility to
appointment under such a condition constitutes religious equality, with
him I will not argue. I was brought up in a different school, and I
think it is a loss to the passing generation that the principles of that
school are, for the moment, out of fashion.
The argument of this chapter necessarily presupposes, as a condition
of its practical application, the stage of religious evolution reached by
England in our own age. But it would have been manifestly inap
plicable in any practical way of statesmanship to Wycliffe’s England or
even to Oliver Cromwell’s, as that great ruler was obliged sadly to
acknowledge.
Further, if there are now nations whose prevalent
religious feeling is mediaeval rather than modern, the argument would
be practically inapplicable also to them. But it does not in the least
1 Encyclopedia Blblica, s.v. “Gospels,” paragraphs 139-40.
�RELIGIOUS EQUALITY
15
follow that there is no such thing as eternal right. For, as I have said
elsewhere, the only intelligible sense in which moral truth can be called
eternal is this : “That whenever and wherever the same conditions occur
the same moral truth holds good.” 1 Thus, where the right of private
judgment on things religious has been popularly and authoritatively
affirmed, justice requires that each man should allow to all others the
same unreserved freedom of conscience which he claims for himself.
But where the right of private judgment is both popularly and authori
tatively denied, as it was in the Middle Ages, each man may feel bound
to be almost as watchful over his neighbour’s obedience to Church
authority as he is over his own. And when the alternative was ever
lasting hell-fire or heaven I can well conceive that the golden rule of
doing unto others as you would they should do unto you might well
suggest denunciation of the heretic for the salvation of his soul, or at
any rate for the prevention of the spread of his damnable errors.
The rule was the same; but the prevalence of superstition made the
conditions different, and therefore the practical application was different
from what seems right to us. But, at any rate, under mediaeval con
ditions compulsory uniformity of belief, so far as it could be practically
enforced, was perfectly defensible. There is nothing in this acknow
ledgment to detract in the least from our admiration of the martyrs for
individual conviction. Indeed, there is much to enhance our admira
tion. For they had to contend, not only against brute force, but against
the universal convention which confounded ecclesiastical obedience with
moral duty—just as, at the present day, acquiescence in “ simple
Bible teaching ” is regarded by many as a dictate of the moral law. Yet
surely England as a whole, England apart from Scotland or Ireland,
England of two or three hundred sects, England of a free Press and free
speech and “ liberty of prophesying,” England which has boldly inaugu
rated of late new programmes of free thought and of free religious
organisation, belongs to the twentieth century, not to the fourteenth,
and cannot, with any decency, longer maintain that religious equality
in the schools should be confined to Low Church and Nonconformist
sects.
1 Spinoza: A Handbook to the Ethics, p. 156 «•
�III.
THE NEW CHURCH RATE
b°fmit3th
Before the year 1870 the Nonconformists held that it is wrong, unjust,
Compromise and even cruel, to make a man pay for the maintenance and spread of
and after.
N
conformist
theones of
functions.
what he holds tQ be religioUS error.
j
old.fashioned enough fo be
of the same opinion still, unless we happen to live in a community that
still belongs to the Middle Ages. The sentimental generalities of
“ Broad Churchmen,” which appear singularly attractive to Noncon
formist “ perverts’’—like the late Right Hon. W. E. Forster1—have on
this subject blurred the boundary lines of right and wrong in the minds
of many influential men of Puritan traditions. With much plausibility
they say that men like the late Edward Miall were wrong in assuming
that there is a clear and straight-cut dividing-line between things
sacied and “secular.” They were wrong, also, in assuming that a
national or municipal government ought of right to confine itself to a
policy of gas and water, of sewage and sanitation. They were wrong,
agaill; in conceiving of government as a corporate policeman, whose
only duty is to keep individual citizens from wronging each other. If
the life of a man should be treated as a whole, and not as a mosaic of
religion, morality, business, and politics, so ought the life of a nation to
be treated as a whole. From that point ot view the business of a
Government is to foster and co-ordinate all healthy forms of the national
energy, w’hether ticketed as religious or secular, social or commercial,
aesthetic or practical, individual or collective. Nor is this reaction
against administrative nihilism ” confined to Broad Churchmen and
Nonconformists. It has generally the support of the Ethical Societies
and their organs, among whose aims the substitution of non-theological
ethics for religious instruction in the nation’s schools is prominent. I
do not understand, however, that the supporters of the Ethical Move
ment desire to make the denial of revelation a part of our school
teaching, still less to extort rates from the pockets of devout evangelicals
for the support of such teaching.
. ’ Though of limited outlook, Mr. Forster was a very shrewd man. The saying
attributed to him, that he “ would get over the religious difficulty in a canter,” at least
suggests his knowledge of Nonconformity in his day. He knew that if the sturdy
opponents of State patronage and control ” were allowed to have the “ simple Bible
teaching of their Sunday-schools patronised and endowed, their consciences would be
satisfied ; and they would not be able to conceive any reasonable objection on grounds
ot conscience by anyone else.
b
16
�THE NEW CHURCH RATE
17
It is at this point that I find a limit to the generous theories of the
State’s function, which have so largely superseded that of the corporate
policeman. There are, I believe, other limits; for many methods of
social action derive all their charm and effectiveness from voluntary
impulse, and are practically paralysed if this be superseded by law. But
we are concerned at present only with the particular limit that comes
into view when religion is touched. It was from this point of view only
that the Nonconformist opponents of church rates could be justified.
In extorting from them by force the support of transcendental1 doctrines
that they condemned, an indefensible wrong was done to their con
scientious convictions. This has now been conceded to them. But
most of the survivors of that struggle appear strangely blind to the
bearing of their own arguments on the education rate, so far as it is
spent on the present Bible teaching.
I am one of a school till lately “everywhere spoken against,” who,
just because we prize the Bible highly, regret very much to see the
venerable Book misused as it is in our schools. Its value to us consists,
not in any revelation or any otherwise inaccessible information supposed
to be found in its pages, but in the unrivalled power of spiritual and
moral inspiration inherent in its noblest utterances. Through all our
changes of opinion, surviving all denials forced on us by evidence and
honesty, rising triumphantly from the scientific grave to which a dead
creed has been committed, that power seems to us indestructible,
immortal. We do not think of the Bible less ; we think far more of it
than when we believed in Eve’s apple and Balaam’s ass. For then it
represented to us a series of violent dislocations of the order of nature.
But now the Bible is to us an age-long vision of truth disentangling
itself from error, of right slowly conquering wrong, of the emergence
through the illusions and lies and sufferings and struggles and passions
and aspirations of mankind of that more perfect state which, if the earth
last long enough, must bless some future generation, and which, by its
consummation of past, present, and future in one consciousness, may
well be called the eternal life, or even “ the fullness of the godhead
bodily.”
We think such a Book degraded to low uses when it is enthroned as
a fetish, before which judgment and reason grovel in the dust of super
stition. And we protest against being made to pay for such sacrilege.
Indeed, the wrong done to conscience in our case is much more offen
sive than anything that could be alleged by our predecessors under
church rates. For, after all, our evangelical fathers and grandfathers
1 As explained in a preliminary note, I use this epithet to describe doctrines going
beyond the sort of evidence usually required for justice or legislation, and also outside
the practical necessities of citizen life.
Limits to
such
theories.
Real value
of the Bible.
Degrada
tion of the
Bible.
�i8
Possible
limits to the
rights of
conscience.
Where its
claims are
indefeasible.
THE NEW CHURCH RATE
agreed almost entirely with the religious and moral teaching of the
Established Church. Their points of difference touched only eccle
siastical order and sacraments, which, however important in their view,
could hardly be said to affect fundamental morality. But we, in these
times, are forced to support a system which we not only suspect, but
know by experience, to be utterly inconsistent with a cultivation of that
“ truth in the inward parts ” which in the Bible itself the Eternal is said
to require.
I am not so foolish as to hold that legal compulsion is necessarily
barred the moment any plea of individual conscience is raised. I fully
acknowledge also the difficulty of drawing a clear line between legitimate
and illegitimate pleas of conscience. Nor is it essential to attempt it
here. I confine myself to one class of cases in which it seems unjust
and cruel to reject the plea. But I will offer one or two suggestions on
the general question.
In matters on which public opinion is much divided by differences
depending on sentiment rather than on evidence it is always dangerous
for authority to be intolerant of conscience in recusants. Further, if
the differences concern transcendental questions, with no immediate
or obvious bearing on the practical life of the commonwealth, such
intolerance is more than dangerous; it is wrong. For one need not be
a fanatical “individualist” to hold that some inner sources of individual
character and will are of priceless worth to the community, and should
be held sacred in every man. Among these we may surely count the
individual feeling of solitary responsibility to eternal Power for personal
loyalty to its rule. Without this, indeed, we have no true common
wealth at all. For any group of creatures who fulfil only by instinct,
and unconsciously, separate functions of convergent advantage to the
whole of that group, are more on the level of a hive than of a common
wealth. To this latter some intelligent consciousness of subordination
to a common end is necessary, and this cannot be permanently secured
without individual loyalty to a control higher than institutions and
more comprehensive than the State. It was an inarticulate feeling of
this truth which led the ancients to insist so much on religion as the
sanction of patriotism. This also was what St. Paul had in mind when
he said, perhaps too indiscriminately: “Let every soul be subject unto
the higher powers. For there is no power but of God : the powers
that be are ordained of God....... Wherefore ye must needs be subject,
not only for wrath, but for conscience’ sake.” But when the loyalties
clashed St. Paul resolutely obeyed the higher. It has taken the rulers
of this world a long time to find out that it is precisely such men who,
if only their conscience be respected, make the best citizens. In fact,
records of our own time—such as some of the proceedings under the
�THE NEW CHURCH RATE
i9
so-called Blasphemy Laws, and also under the Church Discipline Acts
—show that the lesson has not even yet been perfectly learned. But
we have surely got so far that, if any wrong done to conscience is clearly
made out, public opinion will insist on finding a remedy, lest so
precious an inspiration as that of individual loyalty to truth and right
should suffer sacrilege. My plea is that such a wrong is done by the
present system of Bible instruction in public schools, because it forces
every citizen, whatever his belief or unbelief, to pay for the propaga
tion of transcendental doctrines having no necessary bearing whatever
upon citizenship; and even though he may conscientiously think some
of those doctrines not only false, but immoral, still he must pay.
Before leaving this part of the subject, however, let me try to show
how such reasonable claims of the religious conscience as are here
raised may be distinguished from perverse individual revolts against
salutary State regulations. I will take the case of the self-styled
“Peculiar People,” a case by no means easy to deal with, but one
which an advocate of conscience-rights ought not to shirk. If I under
stand the position of these people rightly, it is their conscientious
conviction that the Bible requires them in cases of sickness to depend
on direct divine healing, without the intervention of a human physician.
I am not competent to discuss the legal difficulties which thus arise.
How far any man, whether a “ Peculiar ” brother or not, can be com
pelled to ask and act on medical advice for his child, just as he is
compelled to obtain “ efficient instruction ” for that child, I am not
lawyer enough to say. He is not compelled to go to the schoolmaster
for his child’s instruction if he can ensure it in some other manner. It
might be plausibly asked : Why, then, should he be compelled to go to
the physician for medical aid if he can obtain it in«some other manner?
But “ there is much virtue in an ‘ if.’ ” The legal view, or, at any rate,
the common-sense view—which lawyers tell me is the same thing—is
that the “if” here does in many cases introduce an impossible, and
therefore unreal, alternative. What the law requires is that the parent
shall do all within his power to prevent unnecessary suffering to his
child, and still more to save its life. Whether he be rich or poor, it is
within his power to obtain medical aid, and there are cases in which
legal evidence can prove that medical aid, so far as human judgment
can discern, would make all the difference between life and death. In
such cases “conscientious” objection to medical aid does not come
under the conditions laid down above as defining the rights of con
science.1 It may be, indeed, a case of false sentiment, but it is still
more a stolid refusal of evidence. Transcendental doctrine may,
1 See p. 18.
Spurious
claims. The
“ Peculiar
People."
�20
Difference
of the case
of the objec
tor to
vaccination.
THE NE W CHURCH RA TE
perhaps, be involved, and on that the parent may keep his own opinion.
But sickness and healing are matters of physiology rather than of
mysticism. They have a palpable and immediate bearing on the
practical life of the commonwealth. Where this is the case, and where
the requirement of medical aid is based upon an overwhelming con
sensus of experience and opinion, the community is abundantly justified
in telling the recalcitrant parent to keep his scruples for the kingdom of
heaven, and to render his due obedience to the kingdom of this world.
The conscientious objector to vaccination may claim to be in a
different and stronger position, not because his conscience is more
sacred than that of the “ Peculiar ” person, but simply because there is
not the same overwhelming consensus of experience and opinion to
support compulsory vaccination as there is to support compulsory
recourse to medical aid for serious illness. If experience had con
firmed Jenner’s assertion that one good vaccination would make the
patient insusceptible to small-pox for the remainder of his life, the
probability is that the question of compulsion would never have arisen.
The popularity at one time of the system of inoculation shows how
anxious people were to protect themselves. It is improbable that, if no
cases of small-pox after vaccination had been known, such a marvellous
preventive would have needed enforcement by fine or imprisonment.
But if, contrary to probability, resistance had been encountered similar
in its eccentricity to the attitude of the “ Peculiar People,” a claim
to exemption on conscientious grounds would have had small chance of
sympathy in the face of such overwhelming proof of a palpable and
obvious benefit to the practical life of the community. Even to the
plea that a man might well be allowed to leave his own children
unvaccinated, seeing that all others could, if they chose, be guaranteed
by this infallible antidote against danger from his neglect, it might perhaps
have been justly replied that he would be exposing his own children to
unnecessary danger and suffering, contrary to the spirit of modern law.
But all such arguments are annulled by the now notorious fact that the
vaccinated sufferers from small-pox outnumber the unvaccinated in
about the same proportion as the vaccinated bear to the unvaccinated
in the whole population.1 If a man draws from this fact the conclusion
that the alleged preventive makes no difference, but practically leaves
things just as they would be were vaccination entirely abolished, I do
not say that he would be unanswerable ; but I do say that it is unjust
to treat him as an obstinate fanatic or a traitor to society. This, in
1 See Report of the Dissentient Commissioners, annexed to that of the Royal
Commission on Vaccination, 1901. The “ Conscience Clause ” unanimously recom
mended on the motion of the late Lord Herschell would never have been suggested if
vaccination had accomplished what Jenner declared it would.
�THE NEW CHURCH RATE
21
fact, is just what the recent law has recognised by excusing from
compulsion all who, in proper form, make a declaration of conscientious
objection. In other words, the case is authoritatively pronounced to be
one in which the plea of conscience cannot justly be ignored.
Quakers and
I will take yet another case to elucidate the principle suggested war taxes.
above as a test of the rights of conscience. The other day I observed
in the newspapers the report of a sale by legal order of certain goods
belonging to a worthy Quaker who had refused to pay his taxes because
of the South African War. He would not voluntarily support bloodshed,
and therefore took joyfully the spoiling of his goods. But, with all
respect for one who is clearly a man of high character and strong
individuality, I hold his plea to be entirely illegitimate. The main
tenance of peace and the making of war both belong to the practical,
material life of the commonwealth. In such matters, if it is to act at
all, it must act as a whole. There may be, and there nearly always is,
division of opinion. But the majority determines the action, and it is
carried out as the action of the whole. On no other conceivable plan
could a commonwealth exist at all. This action as a whole, however, is
only secured by the subordination of the wills and opinions of the
minority to those of the majority. After doing all they can to secure
that right counsels should prevail, the minority are no longer responsible
in foro conscientice. To refuse at least passive obedience to the general
voice in a matter strictly within the functions of a commonwealth would
be to invalidate social order.
Of course, social custom or law may sometimes be so bad that it
ought to be resisted. And in that case chaos must be endured for a
while that a better order may succeed. But such extreme crises are
very exceptional, and perhaps they never arise unless the common
wealth, or those who usurp its powers, have exceeded its functions of
organising the practical, earthly (or, if we may use the word, secular)
life. This happened in the seventeenth century in England, and it is
the chronic state of things in Russia. But to say that the act of the
community in making external war can justify those who object to it in
refusing to pay taxes would be to declare any commonwealth impossible,
and to assert the principle of anarchism.
The conscientious objection felt by an increasing number of English Strength of
the case
people to be made to pay for the present Bible-teaching in the nation’s against the
Bible rate.
schools is not open to any such condemnation. Such teaching cannot
fairly be described as one of those public functions in which the
commonwealth, if it act at all, must act as a whole. Indeed, so far
as public elementary schools are concerned, such an assumption has
been solemnly repudiated by Parliament in the Act of 1870. That
Act does, indeed, forbid any “ creed or formulary distinctive of any
�22
THE NEW CHURCH RATE
particular denomination ”—a prohibition found perfectly consistent with
strongly dogmatic teaching. But it does not require that there shall be
any religious teaching at all. It throws the odium of persecution on
the local authority. Even in the elementary schools of the “ National
Society ” the State now declines any responsibility for religion except so
far as concerns the maintenance of the “ Conscience Clause.” It does
not examine in religion, and it does not “inspect” religious instruction.
It is clear, therefore, that in modern statecraft the support of religious
teaching is not placed on a par with the maintenance of war, or with the
provision of secular instruction as the duty of the whole commonwealth
acting together. Further, it cannot reasonably be said in defence of
municipal school practice that the infallibility of the Bible or its historic
accuracy, or the transcendental doctrines taught from it, have a palpable
or necessary bearing on the practical life of the nation. If, therefore,
any Rationalist were moved by his conscience to refuse to pay his
school rate on the ground that it is applied to propagate “free church ”
dogmas, his conduct would certainly not be open to the same criticism
as that of the conscientious Quaker mentioned above. And if the
evangelical Nonconformists were right, as I presume they still think
they were, in objecting to pay church rates, they ought to realise the
gross inconsistency of which they are guilty in compelling rejectors
of their creed to pay for teaching it. This is in flagrant contradiction
to the doctrine of religious equality which, with stammering tongues,
they still assert.
Survivors, if there are any, of the noble army of “church-rate
martyrs ” might ask why Rationalist nonconformity does not prove its
sincerity by a similar martyrdom. It is a question of proportion.
Unbelievers in supernatural religion have often gone to prison, or
suffered odious wrong in law courts, rather than play the hypocrite
But the devotion of part of a rate to a purpose they disapprove, while
they heartily applaud the use of the greater part of it, hardly seems to
them to justify martyrdom. The church rate was devoted wholly to
church uses. It would be scarcely becoming in the advocates of
religious equality as the right of a free-born Englishman to urge that
a man must have his goods distrained before he can fairly claim that
right.
�IV.
NEW RELIGIOUS DISABILITIES
Religious equality is also outraged by the exclusion of non-Evangelical ^ouki^
Nonconformists from honest and self-respecting service of the nation in belief ex...
l-i
r
i
r t
elude from
its public schools. This is a wrong which cannot, ot course, be felt so the nation’s
widely as the last, because, naturally, those born with an imperious service
vocation to teaching are a small minority. But where this particular
form of injustice strikes it is felt with a special bitterness. And the
number whom it affects is rapidly increasing. I do not mean merely
that the number of silent protestants against the doctrinal residuum
constituting “undenominational religion” is increasing, but that the
number among them who find either open or tacit hypocrisy intolerable
is rapidly growing. In proportion as the impossibility of retaining the
old beliefs becomes more widely felt, the demand for relief from any
pretence of believing them becomes more urgent. There was a great
change in the theology of the middle classes during the later years of
the nineteenth century.
Even so recently as the School Board era of 1870, the sharpness of ^j^ons
the issue between the creed of the Evangelical Alliance and actual fact question is
.
.
0
. .
more urgent
was not generally realised with anything like the same distinctness as now than in
now. The significance of Assyrian and Egyptian records had not been
grasped except by a very few profound scholars. The Tell-el-Amarna
Tablets, with their revelation of the condition of Palestine about the
time assigned to the Mosaic exodus, had not been discovered. The
Polychrome Bible had not presented its rainbow spectre of Bible
origins. The Encyclopedia Biblica had not appeared. Even the
“ Moabite Stone,” though discovered in 1868, was not generally
known, nor for years afterwards fully appreciated. The inscription of
Menephthah, recording a victory over certain “ Israhili ” in North
Palestine, about the date when he was supposed to have been drowned
in a mad pursuit of Israel through the Red Sea, was as yet unknown.
The enormous antiquity of the human race, and even of civilisation and
organised religion, was as yet entirely under-estimated, but has since
been enlarged beyond the dreams of old-fashioned anthropologists by
recent excavations in Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, and Crete. So far as the
spade had then recovered the past of sacred lands, it was believed that
the correspondence of Egyptian, Assyrian, and Chaldean ceremonies
and forms of worship with Biblical references confirmed the Scripture
23
�24
Suspense
judgment
then more
possible
than now.
Acknow
ledgments
of a Free
Church
Council.
NEW RELIGIOUS DISABILITIES
record; while the actual occurrence in inscriptions of names mentioned
m the Old Testament was thought to have finally settled the question
of its historical veracity. It is true that the epoch-making book of
Darwin had been published eleven years before. But even among
scientific men there was considerable hesitation in applying the theory
of natural selection to man. And religious liberals who toyed with
edged tools dwelt fondly on the absence of the “ missing link.”
While such was the state of popular knowledge and opinion, it was
not difficult for conscientious teachers of the young to find relief in
suspense of judgment. Members of a profession largely under clerical
influence, and charged quite as much with the moral as with the
intellectual training of their pupils, were naturally predisposed to
believe that it was their duty in the meantime to go on teaching
“divinity” as it had been taught to them. Comfort was found in the
reflection that God’s voice in nature and God’s word in the Bible could
not possibly contradict each other; and the meaning given to both
terms remained so very vague that there was ample scope for temporary
accommodation. Even in cases where inconveniently definite questions
were asked, it was always possible for instruction to disappear in a haze
of reverence. “Do you think, sir, that we must take this literally?”
asked a boy in a class studying the ass’s argument with Balaam.
“Such an occurrence,” replied the master, “is so very remarkable,
and, indeed, unparalleled, that in the present state of our knowledge I
would rather not give an opinion. Perhaps there is some explanation
of which we are not at present aware.” So long as this kind of mental
attitude remained possible the disabilities of doubt were not acutely
felt. The supposed foundations of morality could be accepted as they
stood, with an acknowledgment that their relation to the foundations of
knowledge was an unsolved question.
But the state of things is very different now. The surrender of the
historic accuracy of a large part of the Old Testament is so general
that a very considerable number of teachers are conscious of a clear
contradiction between what they are expected to teach and what they
themselves believe. It is difficult to understand how an honest man
can accept a position like that. In March, 1901, the “National
Council of the Evangelical Free Churches,” in its meetings at Cardiff,
heard some plain speaking on this point from the Rev. Dr. Monro
Gibson. It is true that his subject was that of Sunday-school teaching.
But the principles he laid down are plainly applicable to all national
schools in which the Bible is taught as a divine revelation.1 And,
1 The analogy between undenominational State schools and Nonconformist
Sunday-schools, so far as concerns religious instruction, is far closer than is commonly
supposed. The effect of Mr. W. H. Smith’s resolution of 1871 was practically to
�REIV RELIGIO US DISA BILITIES
25
although no Board-school teacher is called upon to sign a creed or to
make any profession of faith, he would not be allowed to give religious
instruction if he did not assume this view of the Bible in all his lessons.1
So far as the Bible is concerned, then, the words of Dr. Gibson have a
clear bearing upon the position of municipal school teachers. He fully
admitted that “ within recent years difficulties had arisen on account of
the change of view brought about in the minds of many Christians by
the results, or supposed results, of recent investigations.” He was quite
willing to allow to Sunday-school teachers a latitude which experience
shows to be impossible in State elementary schools. The sectarian
equilibrium in the management of the latter is so exceedingly delicate
that it can only be preserved by excluding from the lessons everything
but what is held in common by the most conservative and orthodox
sections of each evangelical denomination represented. On the other
hand, liberal clergymen, like Dr. Gibson, can often secure a great deal
of freedom to the teachers within their own communion. This must be
remembered in applying the following observations to the case of
municipal schools, and accordingly the warnings must be interpreted
more stringently. The italics are my own :—
They were confronted (said Dr. Gibson) with the difficult and delicate
question as to what must be the attitude of our Sunday-schools towards
this burning question of the day. It should be laid down as an axiom
to start with that only those who firmly believed in the divine authority of
both Testaments had the right to be Sunday-school teachers at all.
(Cheers.) A man who had no message of God to declare, but only doubts
of his own to ventilate, was quite out of place in the pulpit or in the chair
of a teacher. Those who were themselves wandering in mist and dark
ness were no proper guides for others—least of all for the children.
Most intelligent people, indeed, had doubts and difficulties in minor
matters, so they could not expect their teachers to be all-round
introduce into nearly all the Board schools under Mr. Forster’s Act precisely the
evangelical teaching given in common by very low Churchmen, Wesleyans, Presby
terians, Independents, and Baptists. So far was this carried that for some time the
Catechism approved by representatives of the Evangelical Free Churches was actually
used by the School Board for Liverpool in its schools.
1 The experience of Mr. F. J. Gould, the author of an excellent manual of
Ethical teaching, and formerly an assistant master under the London Board, is
decisive on this point. Being exceptionally conscientious, he could not reconcile it
with his sense of right to teach a “syllabus” implying doctrines which he no longer
believed. True, he was generously relieved of the duty while still retained on the
staff. But he became a marked man, and the promotion deserved by his uncommon
abilities was barred. He naturally left the profession. But he has since written
handbooks of moral instruction valued even by the orthodox clergy, and is prominent
as a leader in the beneficent movement for the reform of moral teaching in our
schools. This is the sort of man whom our “tests” involved in “simple Bible
teaching” banish to the ranks of aggressive secularism. He is at this present time of
writing the honoured “minister”—if I may use the title—of the Leicester Secularist
Society. If anyone supposes that Mr. Gould’s case is peculiar, except in regard to
his unusual punctiliousness of conscience—well, such an one does not know as much
us I do of the working of ‘ ‘ simple Bible teaching. ”
Testimony
Gibson,
�26
NEW RELIGIOUS DISABILITIES
dogmatists, though even in the minor matters they should be careful not
to parade their doubts. But if their doubts touched the great question
whether God had really spoken to man and given himself for our salva
tion, then must the doubter be silent; or, if he must speak, let it be
under the banner of infidelity, not under the flag of Christ. (Hear, hear.)
The teacher must be honest. If a teacher believed that the Pentateuch
was a composite production, he must not teach his scholars that Moses
wrote it all as his own original composition. He took this as a simple
illustration, which was none the worse in that it suggested the remark
that a good Sunday-school teacher was likely to find something much
better to do than to occupy his time with a matter which was of no
spiritual value when there were so many urgent themes pressing for
attention. (Cheers.) A man must either teach what he believed or not
teach at all. (Hear, hear.) In the great majority of the lessons in the
Old Testament, as well as the New, there need be no occasion whatever
for raising any of these questions. One of the greatest dangers of our
time was making far too much of the letter of Scripture and far too little
of the spirit. What of those cases where a difficult question was sprung
upon them ? In that case he should consider it to be the teacher’s duty
to state what he considered to be the truth on the matter, but at the same
time to intimate that this was a subject on which good Christians differed,
and therefore it was a matter which was not essential, on which a person
might think either this way or that without serious harm. It should, in
fact, be treated as an open question. It was the dogmatism that did the
mischief on both sides. Suppose he had the story of Eden to deal with,
and had reached the record of the Fall, and a smart boy popped the
question, “Was that a real serpent, teacher ?” Now he maintained that,
in the present state of opinion among good critics, it would be a grave
fault to say either “yes ” or “ no.” He should answer : “ Some say yes,
others say no ; but it does not matter in the smallest degree to our great
lesson of to-day which of them is right.” But some might ask: “ If you
leave stick questions open, do you not unsettle the mind of the scholar ? ”
His answer was that their minds ought to be unsettled on questions which
were unsettled. (Hear, hear.) The settling of the mind on a question
which was unsettled was most mischievous and in the highest degree
dangerous for the future. Who could tell, for example, what dire mischief
was done in the childhood of Professor Huxley by those who succeeded
in settling in his mind that the Bible must teach science with the
rigorous position of the nineteenth century or be utterly discredited ?
Noone could read intelligently Huxley’s anti-Christian writings without
seeing that his fierce antagonism to Christianity was determined by the
fact that he was taught in his youth to regard as settled questions those
which all intelligent Christians now treated as open or as settled in the
opposite way. What had been rubbed into him from his earliest days
was the mischievous dogma that, if there was a solitary inaccuracy in
any reference which touched the domain of science in any of the books
which made up the Bible, it was impossible to accept the Scripture as
from God. If only the minds of men like Huxley and Tyndall had been
unsettled on the question of the relation between science and inspiration,
how different might the history of Christian thought have been in the
last fifty years. He did not say they would have become Christians ;
that was not the result of an intellectual process, but the work of the
Spirit. But they certainly would not have spent their strength in sowing
broadcast the seeds of unbelief, and if they had not accepted Christ
themselves they would, at all events, have looked with favour, and not
with deadly hostility, on the truth. In guiding the steps of the young
they should see to it first that they were leading them up, and not down,
�NEW RELIGIOUS DISABILITIES
27
and next that the steps were made easy to them, so that they might not
stumble as they climbed.1
It must be a very prejudiced mind which would fail to recognise and
respect the moral and intellectual courage shown in these words from
the occupant of an orthodox pulpit. But the conclusion of the report
from which the above is an extract is even more instructive:—
Professor Rendel Harris (University lecturer in Palaeography at
Cambridge) opened the discussion. He said he thought that Dr. Gibson
was a little in danger of sailing down the channel of “ no meaning ”
between “yes” and “no.” As to the serpent mentioned in the Eden
story, if he were asked he should at once say that it was mythical, and
should be treated as such. (Oh.) When they were dealing with the
educated sense of mankind they should not hesitate to speak out bravely
and face the question, and say : “ Man is older than we thought him to
be at one time.” He asked them to appeal from the smaller Bible to the
larger Bible of nature. They learnt from Genesis that Adam sewed
together fig leaves. Well, the only fact they got there was that primitive
man could sew. (Laughter.) If, however, they went into Kent’s Cavern
at Torquay, they would find the actual needle used by primitive man.
That was much more convincing than any story, and he pressed upon
them the importance of studying the Bible by the light of nature and not
nature by the light of the Bible.
During Professor Harris’s speech many present dissented from his
views. Having exhausted his time-limit, a vote was taken as to whether
he should continue his speech. Several delegates voted against the
motion, and Professor Harris said he had no intention to break the time
rule. (Laughter.)
The Rev. P. Williams (Derby) thought that Dr. Gibson ought to have
dwelt longer on some of the important points, and not have passed over
them by using catch phrases. They would like to have had a definition
of the “Divine Authority of Scripture” and the “human element in the
Bible.” They knew both were there, but still they wanted the matter
defined so that other people might know they were there. (Cheers.)
Dr. Gibson, in reply, said he was bound by a time-limit, and could not,
of course, deal with all questions in a single paper.
The six years elapsed since that Free Church Council was held have
not lessened, but, so far, have rather increased, the moral difficulties so
frankly acknowledged. Now, if in a conference of “ Free Churches,”
with no fear of ratepayers before their eyes, and no sacred “compromise”
to maintain, it is so difficult to obtain a sanction for honesty in teaching
the Bible, how much harder, indeed how impossible, must it be to secure
it for teachers in rate-supported schools whose directors represent a
carefully-schemed balance of sectarian jealousies ! The only possible
expedient for maintaining an unreal appearance of agreement is to
adhere strictly to such explanations as are not likely to be challenged by
any section of evangelical believers. A paradoxical state of things thus
arises. For, while the liberty of teaching is necessarily much narrower
1 Manchester Guardian, March 14th, 1901.
Professor
Rendel
Harris.
Aggrava
tion of the
difficulty in
Public Ele
mentary
Schools.
�28
NEW RELIGIOUS DISABILITIES
in rate-supported schools than in Sunday-schools under the liberal
influence of clergymen like Dr. Monro Gibson, the area from which the
teachers are, or may be, drawn is much wider in the former schools than
in the latter, and nominally there is no imposition of any creed whatever.
The moral
Is this anomaly favourable to the honesty so earnestly insisted upon
in the above extract? Honest and self-respecting service in Board
schools under the present system is obviously made impossible to
consistent Rationalists—nay, more, it is impossible to young men
trained under liberal Christian influences and encouraged to accept the
results of modern research, so far as these may appear consistent with
the retention of belief in revelation. Suppose a young teacher entering
school life with the teaching of Professor Rendel Harris fresh in his
mind, and impressed with Dr. Gibson’s manly exhortation not to teach
what he does not believe. There is handed to him a “ syllabus ” of
religious instruction in which “ The Life of Abraham ” is mentioned
as a subject. To the younger children he may teach it as a story
without saying whether he thinks it historical or not. Yet he
cannot but be aware that his little pupils receive it as actual fact.
That it would be possible to teach it otherwise is known to him by his
ofoidTes- exPerience of the effect produced when he indulges them with a fairy
tament
tale such as Little Snowdrop or The Kins: of the Golden River. The
stones as
...
mythology children are as much interested in these stories as though he had
assured them they were actual facts. Yet they know quite well that it
is not so. The stories belong to that wonderland where historic
criticism never intrudes. But when he relates to them “The Life of
Abraham,” including the divine demand for a human sacrifice, he is
aware that they receive it as a statement of solemn fact, while at the
same time he does not believe that it is so.
With the higher standards, containing children from twelve to fifteen
years of age, the difficulty is much more serious. Encouraged by the
liberty allowed him by clergymen such as Dr. Monro Gibson, he has
yielded to arguments which convince him that the records of Abraham’s
life in Genesis are a composite production, showing an unsuccessful
attempt to piece together a consistent whole out of discordant materials.
Warned against dishonesty in teaching, he cannot tell his pupils that the
narrative is guaranteed by the authorship of Moses. If among his
bTty of’
scholars a prize-winner in the examinations of the Sunday School Union
answering should ask how it is that a precisely similar incident, arising out of a falsequestions. hood about a wife, is related twice of Abraham and once of Isaac, the same
king being concerned at a considerable interval of time in two of the
stories, what shall this honest follower of Dr. Monro Gibson say ? If
he says what in his own conviction is the truth, that the confusion arises
through the unskilful patching of different materials, all of which are
�NEW RELIGIOUS DISABILITIES
29
largely, if not wholly, mythical, there will be a disturbance at the local
Education Committee, and the teacher’s career will be at an end. If
he prevaricates, and says that it really does not matter, that in any case
the moral lesson is the same, it is very doubtful whether even this would
satisfy the weak brethren of the Education Authority; but it would
certainly be fatal to the teacher’s own self-respect.
These observations are not in the least invalidated by the suggestion
that the opinions adopted by the teacher are possibly incorrect. From
the point of view of religious equality in the nation’s schools, such a
suggestion is entirely inept. The consideration of importance is that
even Christian opinion, as represented by men like Dr. Monro Gibson,
has now got the length of encouraging young people not to feel guilty of
mortal sin if their reading convinces them of the composite and imperfect
nature of “ The Life of Abraham.” And yet if they act on the declara
tion above quoted, that “ a man must either teach what he believes or
cruel
not teach at all,” the second alternative alone is open to them. Even The form of
lest
religious
though they should have the genius of a Pestalozzi or a Froebel, they inequality.
are excluded from the nation’s schools, except on condition of open or
tacit hypocrisy. If this is not religious inequality, and inequality of a
shameful and odious kind, I do not know what can deserve the
name.
Readers who keep pace with the times in matters of opinion, but are
unfamiliar with the working of the elementary school system, may
pehaps be incredulous as to the existence of such a state of things as is
here described. Is not the teaching “unsectarian”? they ask. The
reply is that it is only so in the sense of teaching all that the
“Evangelical Free Churches” hold in common. “Is not Bible
teaching confined to necessary explanations in grammar, geography,
and archaeology?” No, it is not, as.is clearly proved by the adoption,
for a time, of the Free Church catechism by the Liverpool School
Board.1 By the Shrewsbury School Board the teaching of the Apostles,
Creed was ordered, and, by the courtesy of the Town Clerk, I am
informed it is to this day continued by the local Education Committee
under the Act of 1902.
But as this point of the amount of disputed dogma possible under
the Cowper-Temple clause is very important, and is also the subject of
very general misunderstanding, I will give more detailed evidence.
And as most of this was previously given in the former edition, I shall
first show cause why it cannot be considered out of date. Indeed, it
will never be out of date as long as the creed common to certain
1 It is no answer to say that the answers on sacraments and Church order were
omitted. Of course they were. But to Nonconformists they are unimportant, com
pared with the body of divinity contained in the other answers.
�3°
The Presi
dent of the
Board of
Education
on the
“ CowperTemple
Clause."
NEW RELIGIOUS DISABILITIES
influential sects and rejected by all the rest of the nation continues to be
legally treated as “ undenominational.”
The Times of June 26th, 1907, gave a brief but significant report
of the reception on the previous day by Mr. McKenna, President of the
Board of Education, of a joint deputation of educational and Non
conformist bodies on the question of the enforcement of the CowperTemple clause.1 The deputation, which included the Rev. Dr.
Clifford and the Rev. J. Hirst Hollowell, complained that the clause
was being interpreted in such an elastic manner that it practically gave
no protection to the evangelical Nonconformist conscience. I quote
the report of part of Mr. McKenna’s reply :—
He distinguished very considerably between what was the view of the
Board as to the law on this question and what its view was as to policv.
He had to deal with Acts of Parliament as they were. He did not
approve them, and he did not defend them. As regards the construction
which had been put upon the Cowper-Temple clause as to its value, he
was heartily in sympathy with everyone who had spoken. But when he
was asked whether they were to-day where they used to be between the
period 1879 and 1902, he was bound to answer that they were not. The
Act of 1902 made a very serious difference in the law. He had no
longer the power finally to determine whether or not the Cowper-Temple
clause was being contravened. He had been told that section 16 of the
Act of 1902 did not give him power to determine whether there had
been a breach of the clause, but, if there had been a breach, it gave him
power to enforce the law. There, again, it was a question of law ; it
was not a question for the layman. It was a question of the strict
construction of section 16 of the Act of 1902. Section 16 of the Act of
1902 enabled the Board of Education to compel an authority to fulfil
their duty by proceeding in the Courts of Law on an action of mandamus.
A local authority was under no obligation to compile a syllabus of
religious instruction at all, and was under no obligation to give religious
instruction in schools. Therefore, if a local authority did not compile a
syllabus or did not give religious instruction at all, they had not failed
to fulfil a duty. (Hear, hear.) He had no power under the Acts of
Parliament alone to enforce the Cowper-Temple clause by withholding
the grant. He could only deal with the Code at this moment as it
existed.
The rest of the reply dealt partly with a hypothetical future Bill,
and partly with the wrongs of religious Nonconformists in Preston, who,
it appears, suffer specially in that town the form of injustice which
Nonconformists themselves are quite ready to inflict on those who
believe less than they do. But what I have quoted is sufficient to
prove that, in the opinion of a Minister of Education with all sources
of official information at his command, the interpretation of the
Cowper-Temple clause, so far from being more just and rigorous, is
x I.e., Clause 14 of the Act of 1870 prohibiting in Board schools the use of any
“ religious catechism or religious formulary which is distinctive of any particular
denomination.”
�NEW RELIGIOUS DISABILITIES
3»
more favourable to sectarian dogma than when this essay first appeared.
I am perfectly justified, therefore, in once more calling attention to
the report of the Royal Commission on Education issued in 1888.
And I may say that not one fact adduced by me in 1901 has been
disputed.
Among a great variety of interesting information the Report
included an account of the religious instruction given in the elementary
schools. I learn from this Report that Pulliblank’s Teachers' Handbook
io the Bible and Mr. M. F. Lloyd’s Abridged Bible Catechism were
being used in Board schools with the apparent approval of the
Education Department. This fact shows what is meant by “unsec
tarian ” teaching. Of Mr. Pulliblank’s book I desire to say no more
than that it assumes throughout the literal historical accuracy of the
Old Testament, even of the early chapters of Genesis. Mr. Lloyd’s
Catechism, on the other hand, is an ingenious scheme to set forth the
whole evangelical doctrine of the plan of salvation by contriving to
furnish in the exact words of the Bible the answers to a number of
leading questions. Thus, to the question, “ What promise of a
Saviour was made to our first parents?” the answer is: “I will put
enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her
seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” It is
unnecessary to quote further. The assumption that the serpent-myth
is actual history, that the serpent was Satan and the seed Christ,
sufficiently shows how the plea of the Bible, and the Bible alone, may
be made to support the teaching under the name of unsectarian
religion, of beliefs abandoned by educated people and condemned by the
spirit of the age. This should be borne in mind when we note the
selections of Scripture made by School Boards and their successors for
the teaching of children.
It appears that at the date of the Report—and I can find no
evidence of any change—the Bible narratives of the Creation, of the
Fall, of the Flood, and of Noah’s exploits were considered to be
specially suitable for the moral instruction of infants. 'They were
prescribed for this purpose by the School Boards for Bolton, Manchester,
Rochdale, Newport, with St. Moollos, and many others. In Liverpool
the Book of Genesis was taken for the first year’s course; but whether
that included babies docs not clearly appear. The School Board for
London does not seem to have regarded those narratives as milk for
babes, and its selections were much above the ordinary level. But in
its prescription of the “lives” of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as
subjects for study, it certainly intended that they should be treated as
historical, and this all teachers understand. The same remark may be
made wherever a particular book or section of Scripture is prescribed
Illustration
of “ simple
Bible teach
ing' ” under
the C.-T.
Clause.
�32
Lessons in
Massacre.
Divine im
morality.
The case of
the New
Testament.
NEW RELIGIOUS DISABILITIES
by this or any other Board. Thus, under the Wanstead Board, the
higher standards were set to study Joshua and Judges. It would be
difficult to find in all literature two books more full of bloodshed,
murder, massacre, and savagery. I can appreciate as well as anyone
the gleams of a higher life that flash from their pages here and there.
And even the most shocking pictures they give of the ancient alliance
between superstition and cruelty might conceivably be used by a
teacher entrusted with perfect “ liberty of prophesying ” to illustrate
the depths out of which the evolution of reason and morality has
raised us. But that is not allowed to municipal school teachers any
more than to “sectarian” teachers. Indeed, the former are more
tightly bound by the “ Compromise.” The Book says that God over
threw the walls of Jericho by a miracle, and that by his express and
particular command the Israelites “utterly destroyed all that was in
the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and
ass, with the edge of the sword.” Now, if any teacher were to tell his
pupils that the massacre might be historical, but that the allegation of
a divine command was clearly false, there would undoubtedly be trouble
at the next Education Committee meeting, and probably at many others
to follow.
The same may be said of the slaughter of Achan and his family, of
the murder of the five kings at Makkedah, of the assassination of
Eglon, of the treachery to Sisera, and a dozen other sanguinary deeds
which, in reading Joshua and Judges, children are taught to regard as
excepted by divine command from ordinary rules of morality. How
can any educated man or woman read these sanguinary legends with
their innocent pupils without hastening to assure the children that these
are no words of God ? It is not a case in which silence can appease
the conscience. The absence of explanation or denial confirms the
misbelief in young hearts that are forming their faith for life. If the
truth cannot be told, at least let such horrible narratives be banished
from the schools.1
In dealing with the New Testament it might be thought that the
course is clearer. When we find selections from the life of Christ, or
the story of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, ordered to be taught,
or the Acts, or St. Paul’s Epistles, it might be thought that here at least
the plan of “ unsectarian ” instruction can meet with no difficulty. I
am not so sure of that. It is notorious that what is called “the Higher
1 I do not speak without experience. I taught Bible classes for many years. I
don’t think I ever took the Book of Joshua. But I did try to make Hebrew folklore
interesting. I remember I was specially pleased with the written reproduction, by a
boy of twelve, of my story of the Deluge. He concluded thus : “ All this sounds very
terrible ; but it would be still more terrible if it were true.”
�NEW RELIGIOUS DISABILITIES
33
Criticism” has no more spared the New Testament than the Old.
Moreover, the acceptance of the results of that criticism is not confined
to “Secularist” lecturers, nor even to Unitarians. We have only to
glance at the list of contributors to the new Encyclopedia Biblica, and
at the opinions they support, to see that many scholarly Churchmen
have entirely abandoned the literal truth of New Testament history,
together with the authenticity of several epistles.
I do not urge their ecclesiastical authority as conclusive against the
Bible-instruction rate. But at least it helps to refute the arrogant
assumption of Nonconformist perverts and others that School-board
religion represents the views of all but an eccentric and negligible
group of ratepayers. The rational desire to treat the New as well as
the Old Testament like any other book is now supported by clergymen
of the Church of England who repudiate even a literal belief in the
physical resurrection of Christ. No one with an eye for the signs of
this time can doubt that these clergymen represent the theology of the
future. Nevertheless, any teacher who is now of that opinion can only
gain employment in a public elementary school on condition of playing
the hypocrite. Let it be clearly understood that what I am urging is
not the permission to teach such opinions in the schools, but only the
exclusion of a subject of instruction which, in the present chaotic
condition of belief, imposes on many of the best candidates for the
office of teacher the cruel alternative of insincerity or proscription.
If it be asked how such a paradoxical state of things as above
described can have been established in the entire absence of any
authoritative “ creed or formulary,” the explanation lies, as previously
explained,1 in the great renunciation of principle by Nonconformists in
1870. In consequence of that and the great Smith compromise the
creed of School Boards and of the later committees came to be, like the
creed of the Free Churches, the consensus, undefined in words, but
very rigid in substance, of the supposed opinions of the majority. “ And
why not?” cry some. “Surely true democracy consists in the rule of
the majority.” Well, in our time the democracy stands for Caesar.
And Nonconformists before 1870 used to be very eloquent on a certain
text in the Gospels reserving “the things of God” from Caesar’s control.
They, too, perhaps, are touched by the rationalism of the age, and now
explain that text away. But they cannot explain away facts; and it is
surely a shameful fact that, however clearly a young man is marked out
as a born teacher, his adhesion to the views of Robertson Smith,
Driver, and Cheyne on the Old Testament, and of Dr. Abbott or
Professor Schmiedel on the Gospels, excludes him from the freedom of
the profession except on one condition—that he shall speak or act a lie.
1 Tp. 16, 17, ante.
D
�V.
MORAL EFFECT ON TEACHERS
On July 15th, 1907, there appeared in the Times an interesting and
impressive letter from Dr. T. J. Macnamara, M.P. This letter was
evoked by Mr. A. J. Balfour’s attack' on the new regulations governing
the admission of students to residential training colleges—an attack
supported by many fierce articles in the ecclesiastical press. To the
regulations themselves I have already referred in the Preface to this
edition. But the letter made special reference to the demoralising
effect of theological tests, and certain words which I shall quote from it
may very appropriately open the argument of this chapter. Thus, after
explaining how a “ King’s Scholarship ” gives the successful candidate
“a considerable Government grant in aid of a course of college training,”
Dr. Macnamara proceeded :—
Roughly, about 5,000 young people win this training “scholarship”
year by year ; but, when they seek to utilise it at a residential training
college, they find that about 4,300 of the 5,000 residential places open to
them are strictly reserved for students who are willing—over and above
their success in the Government examination—to subscribe to a pretty
rigid denominational test. As a matter of fact, the majority of these
4,300 residential places are open only to members of the Established
Church. What is the result ? If the student be a Nonconformist, he
must take a very high place indeed in the Government examination if
he is to secure admission to one of the very few undenominational
residential colleges. Because not only are the places open to him very
few, but they are open also to members of the Church of England.
Failing to secure entrance to an undenominational college, he telegraphs
right and left to the other training colleges, and is promptly told that he
will be admitted with pleasure if he is a member of the Church of
England. A number of young people, to my certain knowledge, succumb
to the temptation, and are admitted to the Church solely for the purpose
of utilising their dearly won Government "'scholarship.” Others very
properly decline to conform, and go on as ex-pupil teachers, and, having
been at this critical stage thrown off the track, never afterwards succeed
in completing the course for the teachers’ certificate. The grievous
hardship of all this is the fact that the Church colleges take in year after
year students who are far less meritorious and able than many of those
who are shut out. This is not only unfair to the apprentice ; it devotes
the State grant to the training of inferior material.
The italics are, of course, my own, and are intended to mark the
moral considerations with which I am about to deal. For, notwith
standing the idiosyncrasies of exceptional latitudinarians, ordinary
people, I believe, still regard a profession of faith as a moral or an
34
�MORAL EFFECT ON TEACHERS
35
immoral act according as it is made truly or falsely. Now, I suppose,
evangelical Nonconformists, almost without exception, have heartily
approved the above letter. For very many of them have known cases
of bright boys and girls, devoted Sunday scholars and welcome additions
to Church membership, who have been subjected to precisely the
temptation described in the letter. News of their passing the King’s
Scholarship examination was eagerly welcomed by the chapel circle,
and a happy career was predicted for them in which “simple Bible
teaching,” unpolluted by catechism or formulary, was to be a con
spicuous feature.
Then came the check, the change, the fall.
For, though they had done very well in the examination, their success
was not so exceptional as to enable them to command one of the very
small number of places available in Nonconformist or undenomina
tional colleges. But their success had been quite sufficient to make
them desirable candidates elsewhere. And as the vast majority of
available places were elsewhere, the painful alternative arose of taking
a permanently inferior standing as teachers or of changing their profes
sion of faith. Dr. Macnamara deals very gently with the occasional or
perhaps frequent result. But, he says, “a number of young people, to
my certain knowledge, succumb to the temptation.” He seems to be
paraphrasing a very old account of the same transition : “ They give up
all religion and go to church.” That is not my judgment. Heaven
forbid! But if we talk of “ succumbing to temptation,” it is implied
that there is something morally wrong. And so, no doubt, thought the
pastors and the deacons and the Sunday-school superintendents of the
various chapels to which these perverts had belonged.
But I can imagine—nay, I have known—strictly analogous cases
which the same religious people would not see at all in the same light.
For in these days of “New Theology” and “re-statements” of doctrine
there is an ever-increasing number of young people with the teacher’s
gift and enthusiasm who do not, and cannot if they are to be true to
themselves, pretend to accept that view of the Bible which is implied or
presupposed in what is called “ simple Bible teaching.” That is, there
are very few narratives of either the Old or the New Testament which
they can conscientiously teach as historic fact; and very much of the
morality they think to be interesting rather as a record of ethical evolu
tion than as “ revelation.” Now, the crisis in the moral and spiritual
development of such young people may not occur so early as the time
of the King’s scholarship examination. Up to that period they have
accepted, almost as a matter of course, the Bible as “the word of God,”
and as an infallible revelation. But either towards the close of their
- college career or afterwards the rational spirit, which at the present day
A Moral
dilemma.
�36
Are the
rights of
conscience a
monopoly of
the advo
cates of
“ simple
Bible
teaching” ?
MORAL EFFECT ON TEACHERS
is more or less immanent in all forms of literature and learning, stirs in
them a questioning mood. They read Mr. R. J. Campbell’s New
Theology, and, their appetite for hitherto forbidden knowledge being
quickened, they look up the Encyclopedia Biblica in a public library,
and next are led to translations of Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe; and
then, with a hunger for more spiritual food, they apply to the public
library again for the works of the various Anglican and Presbyterian
divines who have re-stated in once startling, but now familiar, forms the
theory of revelation.
The end of it is that at a period when they are expecting to become
head teachers they find that their views of both the Old and the New
Testament have so fundamentally changed that they can no longer give
“ simple Bible teaching ” with sincerity. They cannot, without doing
violence to their convictions, teach as fact “ the life of Abraham ” or
of Jacob as set down in the syllabus. They cannot sincerely teach the
Ten Commandments as laws written by the finger of God, because they
are now quite sure that they are nothing of the kind. Even the Gospels
they now regard as, to a large extent, legendary; and they are as certain
as they can be of anything that the Fourth Gospel was not written by
Zebedee’s son. What are they to do ? If they frankly avow their
position, they will probably be treated with courtesy, and something will
be said in praise of their honesty. But they will soon experience the
bitter truth uttered by Juvenal: “Probitas laudatur et alget.” For they
will be relieved of giving Scripture instruction, and their prospects of
promotion permanently barred.
It would be trifling with common sense and notorious facts to
pretend ignorance that there are large numbers of young teachers, both
men and women, in that very position at the present time. Here, then,
is a moral dilemma precisely analogous to that sympathetically described
in Dr. Macnamara’s letter to the Times. For these young men and
women must either prematurely blight their prospects of promotion or
they must set their teeth and put a strain on conscience such as will be
a life-long burden. But where now is the Nonconformist sympathy so
eagerly extended to the young chapel-folk whom Dr. Macnamara
described as “ succumbing to the temptation ” to go over to the
Church ? I am afraid it is sadly lacking. But why ? Surely the two
cases are on all fours in principle. Unless, indeed, Nonconformists
would draw the line at their own “ simple Bible ” views, and maintain
that, while it is perfectly right to doubt or deny any other religion, it is
wicked to doubt or deny theirs. One almost despairs of getting even
good and kindly and otherwise fair-minded people to see straight where
the Bible is concerned.
But sometimes, when the plainest proof of injustice fails of access to
�MORAL EFFECT ON TEACHERS
37
the conscience through the ear, the ugly consequences of the wrong
may become so repulsive as to enforce conviction. And if I can only
show what the consequences are in this case both to teachers and
children, I do not despair of success. Indeed, I venture to think that,
if Dr. Macnamara could only realise how the moral difficulty he has
pointed out is necessarily involved in the retention of the Bible in
school, he would refuse to endorse any new Education Bill that should
transgress beyond secular lines.
The last words of the preceding chapter may by some be thought
too strong. But I shall establish their literal truth. It will be remem
bered that, in introducing the subject of the religious disabilities set up
by School Boards, and continued by local Education Authorities under
the Act of 1892, I have carefully refrained from asserting that the
barriers are absolutely impassable. All I allege is that the tests implied,
though not avowed, exclude Rationalists, whether Christian or non
Christian, from “ honest and self-respecting service as teachers in the
nation’s schools.” But they are, of course, not excluded from service
of a different kind. As an illustration of the sort of service which
latitudinarians or heretics are allowed to give, take the following extract
from a letter printed in Democracy^ of February 23rd, 1901. The
occasion of it was a previous letter from a Board-school teacher, com
plaining of the odious task of teaching what he did not believe.
Whereupon “Another Board-School Teacher” addressed the editor
thus :—
Sir,—The state of feeling disclosed by the remark of the “ Board-school
Licensed
hypocrisy.
Teacher” anent the pressure put upon him to teach “ Scripture” against
his wish is, 1 am afraid, common to many others of that class of the
community. One docs lose a certain amount of self-respect in standing
before a class and teaching for truth what one believes to be false. But
under somewhat similar circumstances I ask myself: Why be honest ?
Why trouble at all about the matter ? The Scripture lessons occupy
little time, after all, and the harm done cannot amount to much. In
view of the facts that all the work done in school may be described as
an attempt to enable the children to conform to the canons of Christian
or commercial morality (sic), and that no degree of conformity to those
of either cult will abate the ills or conduce to the welfare of humanity,
I feel that more harm is done in the ordinary school work than in the
time set apart for religious instruction. But one must get a living
somehow ; so I, personally, comply with the terms of my agreement
with my employers, and let conscience go hang.
I will not do any body of teachers the injustice of accepting this
gentleman as a fair representative of their moral tone. But my own
experience, and a fairly extensive intercourse with them during many
years, assures me that the first sentence in the above extract is
substantially correct. The discontent, however, is caused not by “ the
1 Since become The Ethical World.
Significance
of the above
letter.
�38
A dangerous position.
MORAL EFFECT ON TEACHERS
pressure put upon them to teach ‘Scripture,’” but by the necessity
imposed upon them to teach it in a fashion inconsistent with their own
convictions. I will undertake to say that, if permission to teach
honestly what they believe about the Bible were given to school
teachers, three-fourths of them, at the very least, would tell the children
that the greater part of the Hexateuch must be regarded in the same
light as a series of fairy tales ; that the story of Jonah is a moral fable,
very impressive in its way, but probably destitute of even a basis of
fact; that the Book of Daniel is a romance, and that of Esther a
political apologue. I believe, also, that, if they dared, the same propor
tion of teachers would treat all the miracles of the Old Testament as
originating in the imagination of Jewish patriots and poets, rather than
in actual fact. Even if I put the proportion numerically too high, the
most sanguine believer in the evangelical fervour inspired by our
training colleges must surely feel that the letter above quoted is
indicative of considerable mental unrest. Let the extent of Rationalism
among teachers be minimised to the utmost possible degree consistent
with notorious facts, still it will remain true that a large number are
forced into teaching what they do not believe.
Now, this is a sort of fact of which the moral import is not dependent
on statistics. If only twenty per cent, of the men and women who stand
before their classes with the life of Abraham, or the account of the
Deluge, or the story of the Virgin Birth, or of the Resurrection, m their
hands as the basis of moral instruction, hold these parts of the Bible to
be unhistorical, while they are obliged to treat them as solemn facts, it
seems too like taking “ a lie in their right hand ” for the inculcation of
truth. The misdirected satire of Jean Ingelow in ridiculing a theory of
spiritual evolution which she did not understand would be much more
applicable to the case of these teachers :—
Gracious deceivers who have lifted us
Out of the slough where passed our unknown youth ;
Beneficent liars who have gifted us
With sacred love of truth.
Human nature is too complex and unfathomable to allow of any
sweeping affirmation of demoralising consequences in such a case. I
was once asked by one of the best men I ever knew, himself an
Anglican clergyman, why I did not seek orders in the Established
Church. I replied that “ for one reason I had never, up to that
moment, seen any creed that I could sign.” “ Indeed !” he responded ;
“never seen the creed you could sign, hav’n’t you ? Well, now, / have
never seen the creed I couldn’t sign.” Making all allowance for my
friend’s love of paradox, I yet could not but feel that between his notion
of responsibility for assenting to a creed and mine there was an
�MORAL EFFECT ON TEACHERS
39
impassable difference. Yet I knew him to be in all other relations a
man of unimpeachable honour and courageously truthful.1 I should be
very loth, therefore, to deny the possibility that analogous instances, of
personal paradox may be found among teachers who believe one thing
and teach another. But the letter I have quoted above is sufficient
proof that the position is a dangerous one.
Let it be granted that the moral degeneracy exhibited in that letter ofthe
is an extreme and exceptional instance of the working of the system. teachers,
Let it further be conceded that at the other end of the scale there are
a number of sincere and devout Evangelical teachers whose Biblical
creed is an inspiration to them. There will remain the large majority
who belong neither to one class nor to the other. Pledged to no creed,
possessed of culture enough to appreciate the revolution in educated
opinion on the origins and authority of the Bible, they yet feel no
special impulse to any independent study of such questions, and
ordinary prudence warns them against any precipitancy in adopting
ideas which would create a daily consciousness of discord between duty
and conviction. The result is an attitude of conventional acquiescence
which guards their mental comfort, but empties their Scriptural teaching
of all reality. Some of the more studious among them, while shy of
reading distinctly Rationalistic books, find much edification in the
works of a contemporary school which suggest that after all there is
nothing exactly true, and it does not much matter. Mr. A. J. Balfour’s
elegant disquisition on the duty of believing with the majority, Professor
Percy Gardner’s charming explanation in his Exploratio Evangeltca of
the possibility that a creed may be both true and false at the same
time, have great attractions for honest men in such circumstances.
Pretending to their own consciences to adopt, though without legitimate
authority or open avowal, a freedom which I have above suggested as
their due if they are to teach the Bible at all, they tell the stories of the
Old Testament without any pretence of discriminating fact from fiction
even in their own minds. What does it matter ? they ask. If they
were telling the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, they would not feel
it necessary to warn their infant hearers that beans do not, as a rule,
produce stalks reaching up to heaven. The attitude of the child’s mind
towards such a narrative is, they well know, neither that of belief nor
that of unbelief. It is simply that of interest and wonder at an unfold
ing vision. Why should the case be different with the story of Eve and
the Serpent ?
1 There can be no harm now in stating that the clergyman was the late Rev. John
Rodgers, Vicar of St. Thomas Charterhouse—not “hang theology Rogers,” but his
successor in that cure—and for some time Vice-Chairman of the School Board for
London. Of his courage various education campaigns in London afforded ample
proof.
�40
The moral
difficulty is
that Bible
History is
tacitly
accepted in
school as
divine and
infallible.
MORA L EFFECT ON TEA CIIERS
It is not for me to answer that question. The point of my whole
argument is that, if Hebrew myth or legend is to be treated at all in
State schools, they should be treated precisely in that manner. What
I complain of is that they are not so treated, but rather as parts of a
divine and infallible history. And the position is such that they cannot
be otherwise treated, unless the children under instruction are expressly
told so. This would be quite possible in Sunday-schools, even of
orthodox churches, if liberal influences like those of Dr. Monro Gibson
or Professor Rendel Harris happened to prevail there. But in no
Board school is it at all possible, because the attempt would lead to
theological discussion on the Board, and revive the religious difficulty
in its most obnoxious form. The result is that teachers have to treat
as solemn fact every Hebrew legend or impossible miracle read as a
Scripture lesson. Those whom I have described above as receptive of
modern dissolving views, wherein historic falsehood shades off into
spiritual truth, may flatter themselves that they are only giving a moral
lesson through a parable. But the illusion is dissipated the moment
that any intelligent pupil asks such critical questions as occur to
precocious children. “ Mother,” asked a four-year-old enfant terrible
whom I once knew, “ what does God sit down on when he’s tired ? ”
“ O, my dear,” said the mother, “ God is never tired.” “ But,” retorted
the child, “you said he rested on the seventh day.”
Now, critical questions of children are of no disadvantage whatever,
if suggested by the inconsistencies of an avowed parable or fable. But
any question of the kind may rudely dispel the rationalising teacher’s
notion that he can use Hebrew myths as he uses JEsop’s Fables with
out letting his pupils know it. If it be said that as a matter of fact such
questions are rarely or never asked in school, so much the worse for the
system. For the absence of any such sign of intelligent interest shows
that the whole lesson is regarded as a ceremonial observance having no
relation to realities. Besides, there are many cases in which an intel
ligent and rational teacher, who was really free, would anticipate such
questions for the sake of the spiritual impression he is seeking to make.
If, for instance, he is using the infatuated Pharaoh of the Exodus as a
type of earthly power, scornful of spiritual verities, and eventually
crushed by a might that it cannot understand, he must needs deny the
literal truth of the assertion that “ God hardened Pharaoh’s heart ” ; or,
otherwise, all modern analogies fail. To explain the arrogant contempt
of George III. and his court for the new-born American patriotism, by
asserting that God hardened that monarch’s heart, would not be
tolerated even by literal believers of what is said about Pharaoh. It
is, therefore, impossible for the teacher to make any obviously fair
application of the ancient example to the modern instance.
�MORAL EFFECT ON TEACHERS
41
Records
Take, again, the alleged command given by Jahweh to Moses, early of
Hebrew
Joshua, and Israel at large to smite the nations of old Palestine, and savagery.
“utterly to destroy them,” to “ make no covenant with them, nor show
mercy unto them.” Either this command is accepted as historical or it
is not. In the former case the teacher has an unenviable task in
“justifying the ways of God to men.” In the latter case a conscientious
teacher would almost give all his hopes of preferment to be allowed to
say that the statement was a false and blasphemous pretence of the
Israelites. But even here the recipients of dissolving views may find an
issue. It may not be true that any personal Deity gave such a
command. Yet the doctrine of the gradual selection of higher races
through the survival of the fittest in each generation’s struggle for life
is, in one form or another, generally accepted; and, probably, the
application of such a doctrine to the resettlement of ancient Palestine
would not stir up “ the religious difficulty ” even on School Boards.
But such an interpretation is estopped by the conditions under which
the lesson is given. The “ compromise ” involves a tacit undertaking
to assume, if not the infallibility, at least the historical accuracy, of the
Bible, especially where it narrates the successive steps in the progress
of the alleged revelation to which all the compromising sects are at least
officially committed. One of those steps is the establishment of the
chosen people in Palestine, and the suppression of the earlier inhabitants
by order of a personal divine ruler in order to make room for the former.
This divine ruler speaks with human speech, expresses emotions of anger
and jealousy indistinguishable from human feeling. He issues orders
like an earthly sovereign who has a policy of conquest to carry out. It
is not Fate, or the Unknowable, who is here acting and speaking. It
is an intensely personal Being, whose mercy elsewhere is said to endure
for ever, and whose “ compassions fail not.” How is it possible for any
honest Christian, with the words of Jesus murmuring in his heart, to tell
children that such a Being ordered these massacres? Yet no Elemen
tary schoolmaster would be supported by his Committee in treating as
fictitious the terrible command above-mentioned.1
What reality can there be in the teaching of the Bible under such In such a
case
limitations by any man or woman touched by the spirit of the age ? “ simple
Bible
The possibility of simplicity and straightforwardness is confined to that teaching ”
needs
small minority of teachers who still hold the whole Bible to be literally devout
true. Unconscious of any incongruity between modern thought and simpletons
as teachers.
the “ plan of salvation ” taught to them in their childhood, they are also
1 Of course, this general assertion, based on nearly forty years’ experience, must be
taken for what it is worth. But it is to be remembered that even school managers,
who themselves disbelieve any such divine command, would fear the “talk” of the
neighbourhood and possible offence to religious ministers.
�42
The intoler
able strain
on enlight
ened
teachers.
MORAL EFFECT ON TEACHERS
untroubled by any inconsistency between Old Testament fables and the
spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. They tell, with such fervour as a
cooling faith allows, of man’s first disobedience, of the curse thereby
entailed on all posterity, and of the elaborate process of miracle and
prophecy, of type and sacrifice, of commandments and law and ceremony,
by which a divine Being laboriously prepared the coming of the sacred
victim whose death and resurrection open the Kingdom of Heaven to
all believers. Such a course of instruction amid all the array of theo
logical dreams it unfolds has, undoubtedly, lucid intervals in which
moving appeals may be made to the heart. The loss of Eden, the
passion of Cain, the aspirations of Enoch, the faith of Abraham, the
story of Joseph, David’s heart-broken sorrow for Absalom—all, even
when taken literally, give the opportunity of contrasting the meanness of
self-will with loyalty of soul to a divine ideal. But the possibility of this
does'not in the least palliate the wrong spoken of in previous pages, the
injustice done to dissenting ratepayers and less orthodox teachers who
object to do evil that good may come. They protest against being made
aiders and abettors in the perpetuation of what they think falsehood,
even though some moral truths may occasionally glimmer through it.
But, outside the minority who can with their whole hearts “teach the
Bible ” in the sense intended by “ the compromise,” teachers are exposed
to degrees of strain varying from the abject surrender to hypocrisy
quoted above, to casuistical ingenuities and non-natural interpretation
of obvious duty. “ Obvious duty ” because neither by authority of
ratepayers, nor by orders of a School Board, nor even at the request-of
parents, is any man justified in teaching to his pupils as truth what he
himself believes to be a lie. “ Parable,” “ allegory,” “ fable,” and such
like, are not the words to describe the method of one who himself accepts
a Bible story in one sense and takes care that the children shall under
stand him in another. To talk about a dispensation of “ illusion ” is right
enough when we are groping after an increasing purpose running through
the ages of faith. In those times everyone believed the illusion, and
there was no dishonesty. But when a man tells of a universal deluge or
of the overthrow of Jericho’s walls by sound of trumpet, or of Joshua’s
arrest of the sun, in such a manner as to make the impression that he
believes them as facts when he does not believe them, this is not an
economy of illusion ; it is a lie—or at least if would be so to any
unsophisticated conscience,
�VI.
THE EFFECT ON SCHOOL CHILDREN
At the risk of needless reiteration, I must again disclaim any inclination
to deny the educational value of the Bible, if properly used. The ques
tion here raised is, What has actually been the ethical value of the Bible
as taught under the conditions already described ? After thirty-seven
years of daily text-grinding in the people’s schools, or rather after a
hundred years of it if we take into consideration the previous work of
voluntary associations, the question of Browning’s Pope seems very
pertinent:—
“Well, is the thing we see salvation ?”
Is the language in our streets much purer or less profane and coarse
than it was in 1870 ?
More than one local Council, in grief at the coarse, foul, and
disgusting words constantly used in its streets, has desired the law to be
strengthened. We have had practically universal and professedly com
pulsory education for nearly six generations of school children1—and
yet we have to ask the magistrates to supplement the moral work of the
schoolmaster in a matter like this. The following paragraph from the
Westminster Gazette, of September 6th, 1901, is very suggestive, and
unfortunately is not yet irrelevant to present manners. The italics are
my own :—
We would gladly see the resolution passed by the East Ham Council
to stop offensive language on tram-cars adopted by other local autho
rities. The use of language of this sort is disagreeable enough to many,
wherever heard ; it is particularly so on public conveyances where other
passengers are compelled to listen to it. The strange thing is that those
who indulge in it are, as a rule, quite unconscious of giving any cause of
offence. They are so accustomed among their fellows to express them
selves in such a way that they go on doing so wherever they may be.
It will, no doubt, be possible to curb the nuisance by measures of the
kind referred to ; but, as the use of objectionable language anywhere is
an offence at law, it might be well, perhaps, if the law were put in
motion more frequently than it is. Persons passing along the streets
often have their ears assailed with foul expressions, which a few prosecu
tions might make less common.
Is it not a scandal that elementary schools should be so powerless to
mould the manners of children who have attended them for six, eight,
1 For the greater part of the period compulsory attendance has begun at five years
of age and ended after thirteen.
43
The voca
bulary of
the streets.
�44
I ack of
moral inspi
ration in
the schools.
THE EFFECT ON SCHOOL CHILDREN
or ten years?1 All these foul-mouthed people, who “are so accus
tomed among their fellows to express themselves in such a way,” have
passed through some elementary school in which the Bible, or even the
Catechism, has been taught, and “ explanations have been given there
from in the principles of the Christian religion and morality.” And yet
they have not been saved from coarseness, profanity, and indecency in
speech.
Is the effect of cheap literature quite what we hoped and expected ?
When opening our first Board schools, did we forebode that in the
twentieth century the cry of “All the winners ” would sell more papers
than the most thrilling announcements of scientific or archaeological
discovery, or even of the most exciting political events ? If the English
translation of the Bible is, as some incongruously say, a “ British
classic,” should not its incessant reading have raised the intellectual
tone of the people above the level where it remains ? In our incessant
whining for clumsy methods of force to put down betting, bribery, and
impurity, is there not a manifest despair of moral remedies? Yet I
should not be at all surprised to find that the hysterical people who
continually write letters to the Press urging methods of barbarism, such
as the “ cat,” as infallible moral restoratives, have no less fervently
throughout their lives insisted on Bible drill. And when this con
spicuously fails, the natural conclusion, that there must have been some
lack of moral inspiration in the method, does not seem to occur to
them. The fine old Christian saying that “ force is not God’s way ”2
loses its significance when the Bible becomes a fetish; and “ Bible and
beer ” has to be supplemented by Bible and birch.
The good humour of an English mob is proverbial, and was a
character acquired long before “ simple Bible teaching,” under the
Cowper-Temple clause, was invented. But such good humour does
not prevent outbreaks of rudeness, coarseness, and disregard for the
rights of others which here and there make Bank Holidays odious.
Now, if moral training in public Elementary schools is good for any
thing, it ought surely to secure compliance with the precept, “ All things
whatsoever ye would that men should do to you do ye even so to them.”
But the constant recurrence of cases in which private parks, by courtesy
1 Take, for instance, the objectionable and even dangerous habit of promiscuous
and continual spitting. Of late public authorities have been obliged, on hygienic
grounds, to interfere. But until doctors decided that disease may be spread thereby,
mere decency had no chance of consideration. I did my humble best as Board
School manager in London from 1871 onwards to secure attention to the subject, but
in vain. Yet if morals include “ manners,” as surely they ought, the doctors should
have been anticipated by the teachers.
2 “ Bia yap ou irphaevri r<p Gecp.” It occurs in the anonymous Epistle to Diognetus
of uncertain but very early date (cap. vii.), and also in Irenaeus (contra Hcereses, lib.
iv., cap. xxxvii. 1).
�THE EFFECT ON SCHOOL CHILDREN
45
opened to the public, have had to be closed because of the abuse of
such courtesy, proves that the lesson has not been successfully
impressed.1
I gladly acknowledge that juvenile crime, in the sense of offences
punished by sentence of magistrates or judges, has largely diminished.
But this has been brought about by improvements in the law rather
than in juvenile manners. Children who would, in a more barbarous
though recent age, have been sent to prison are now sent to Industrial
schools or Reformatories. That, however, is quite consistent with a
persistently low standard of juvenile morality, and of this there is too
much evidence.
Of such evidence I will give a specimen forced upon my attention An illustra
tive case.
on the very day when these lines are penned. Its value must, of course,
depend on the extent to which it corresponds with the experience of my
readers. But I scarcely think that many will say that it is an unusual
case. This morning, then (July, 1907), I was one of a bench of magis
trates before whom eight boys, of ages varying from twelve to seventeen,
were accused, some of them of stealing, and others of malicious damage,
involving, as was proved, serious danger to human life. The little
robbers had made a raid on certain “penny-in-the-slot” machines, by
means of tin discs, which, as it turned out, worked quite as well as the
penny with His Majesty’s image and superscription. Some of us
thought—and many may share our opinion—that machines making
theft so easy constitute an unfair temptation to our child citizens under
our present feeble and futile systems of moral training. But perhaps I
was alone in thinking that it was the moral training quite as much as this
imperfect “ penny-in-the-slot ” system that was to blame. For, what
ever may be the attractions of illicit chocolates and cigarettes, boys
from twelve to seventeen years old ought to have—and would have
under efficient moral training—sufficient feeling of the meanness of theft
and of its disastrous consequences to social order to enable them to
resist.
There were also three accusations of malicious damage, one of the
accused youngsters being a defendant also in the previous case. In a
neighbouring mountain quarry the stones are run down tramways having
an incline steeper than a high-pitched roof. Now, on a Saturday half
holiday, when there was no one about, these adventurous boys, finding
1 In the former edition I gave certain then recent and notorious instances of the
kind, in one of which two Sunday-school teachers in charge of a children’s excursion
were concerned. I have no reason to believe that the evil is much abated since then.
And I have had special opportunities during these years of not'.ng how vain are the
efforts of the, Selboine Society to preserve picturesque places of resort from desecration.
Picnickers seem to imagine that it is not of the least consequence in what state of
filthy untidiness they leave nature’s beauties.
�46
THE EFFECT ON SCHOOL CHILDREN
a waggon securely “scotched” at the top of one of these steep
The moral
instruction
of such
juveniles,
tramways, removed the “ scotch ” and started the waggon off. It was
good fun, no doubt; but, as several deaths have occurred through
incautious trespassing on these tramways, it was highly perilous fun,
and the boys were quite old enough to know it. Compared with this
danger to life, it seemed to me that the smashing of the company’s
waggon was trivial. In old times these peccant children would have
been sent to swell the number of juvenile criminals. But, of course, no
such consequence followed in this case; and as the same just and
rational leniency is now exercised in thousands of similar cases, this
amply accounts for the apparently satisfactory change in the statistics of
juvenile crime. Yet is it so satisfactory when we learn the real reason
of the change? These latter frolicking boys, though accused of
“ malicious damage,” were, I believe, not capable of malignity. No;
but neither they nor the pilferers had such sense as they ought to have
had at their age of their duty to their neighbour, or of their moral
relations to the community which assures their safety and their prospects
in life. Now, if anyone thinks this is too much to expect from boys of
twelve to seventeen, let him watch them at their games of “ marbles,”
or follow them to the cricket-field and the football-ground. There he
will find that cheating is held in contempt, that any youth who tries to
“ sneak ” an advantage from his fellows is not only pummelled, but
“ boycotted.” Why should it be different when the “ game ” to be
played is that of society ?
But it happened that an official visit which I paid to an “ undenomi
national” school1 at an hour earlier than the petty sessions suggested an
explanation. For there I found the “religious instruction ” going on.
The school was divided for this purpose into two classes, senior and
junior. The elder were studying the beginning of the romance of
Joseph in Genesis xxxvii. The points on which questions were asked
were the reasons for Jacob’s partiality to Joseph, the delights of a “coat
of many colours,” the filial obedience of Joseph—which, according to
the chapter before the children, seems very questionable—the signifi
cance of Joseph’s dreams, and the unreasonableness of his brethren and
father in objecting to them. The junior children were being instructed
in Matthew ii., especially the “ massacre of the innocents.” The lady
teacher was particularly anxious that the children should appreciate the
inferiority of Herod’s claim to be King of the Jews as compared with
that of Jesus. She was also careful to explain the wiles by which that
1 Lest it should be supposed that “denominational” schools would have done
better, I may as well mention that all the accused youths attended, or had attended,
a Church school.
�THE EFFECT ON SCHOOL CHILDREN
47
child-slayer would have cheated the innocent Magi had it not been
for the intervention of the deity. And this was moral instruction !
Let it not be said that these instances are unfair because excep
tionally inept. The contrary is the case. I have myself known
teachers who realise that the practical problem is to awaken an effective
moral sense, and who try to bend “simple Bible-teaching” to its
solution. But it is they that are exceptional, not the type I have
described. And those exceptional teachers are usually earnest in
pleading for more freedom in treating the Bible and in extending the
scope of moral instruction beyond it. Nor let it be supposed that I am
here assuming the possibility of eliminating by any means whatever the
dangers attendant on exuberance of animal life in youth. But I do say
that the only way of minimising them is to develop as early as possible
a sense of comradeship, fellowship, responsibility to and for society,
which shall inspire the child to be as faithful to the surrounding
community as he is now to the narrower circle of his playfellows in
games. And I maintain that to look for any such results from a
talk about Joseph’s dreams and destinies, or about the rival regal
claims of Herod and Jesus, is to expect grapes from thorns and figs
from thistles.1
It may be said that our failure to improve morals as fast as we
increase knowledge condemns the churches as well as the schools.
That is so. But in regard to the possibilities of amendment in the
two cases there is this difference. The churches are much more free
than the schools are to adapt their moral teaching to the needs of the
time. Theological Articles scheduled in an Act of Parliament, and
even Trust Deeds deposited in a denominational Muniment Room, are
no more effective than the handcuffs and bonds imposed on professors
of the “box-trick,” where there is the will to get rid of them. But the
watchful jealousy of a majority on an Educational Committee elected
for the purpose of guarding the sacred compromise is not to be eluded.
As a matter of fact, it is notorious that the Churches are, to a very
considerable extent, changing their methods of teaching. I have
already given illustrations of the freer spirit which is gradually inspiring
even Evangelical Sunday-schools. We may well hope, therefore, that,
in accordance with historic precedent, the Churches will insensibly shift
the standard of orthodoxy. And, meanwhile, there is little temptation
to insincerity. Whatever may be the case with ministers—among
whom there is a great deal more moral heroism than is commonly
supposed—Sunday-school teachers, at any rate, have no temptation to
1 Anyone who supposes such an argument to imply materialism is quite mistaken.
It points to a universal religion, which involves, absorbs, and transforms all the
sectarian religions that have ever been conceived.
Schools
more stereo
typed than
churches.
�THE EFFECT ON SCHOOL CHILDREN
continue their work of Bible teaching for a single day after they find
out that they cannot do so honestly. Besides, Sunday-schools do not
compel us to pay rates for their support. They have no national or
municipal authority at their back. They do not involve us as citizens
in responsibility for their teaching or moral influence. Whatever may
be said about the lingering fiction of a “ national ” Church, its Sundayschools are entirely voluntary and unofficial.
The case of public elementary day schools is very different.
Attendance at one or other of them is compulsory on some eighty-four
per cent, of our children. We are forced to pay for their support
Every
through taxes and rates. It is by the national or municipal authority,
spon^Mefor or both, that every lesson in them is given. We are, therefore, responineffiXncy sible for them; and if they are allowed to demoralise the commonschools.
wealth of the future, it is our fault. Or, if they are maintained on a
system proved to be inefficient in attaining the highest ends of educa
tion, every citizen is to blame. Further, the position of the elementary
teacher is a much more difficult one than that of the Sunday-school
teacher. To the former his work is also his livelihood. He cannot
abandon it with a light heart the moment he is required to offend his
conscience. Nor is there the slightest prospect at present of obtaining
for him an honourable “liberty of prophesying.” This would imperil
that sacred ark of the covenant, “ the compromise.”
The result is that the Bible teaching in public elementary, and
especially in municipal schools, is inevitably more demoralising than
that of Sunday-schools. In the latter the worst evil to be feared is
that of ignorance, or, perhaps, honest bigotry. But in the former the
tendency of the system is to make dishonesty a necessity of life. Or
if dishonesty be, considering all things, too hard a word to use, the
least evil that is possible is the prevalence of a lifeless formalism in
i
precisely that part of school teaching which most of all requires the
energy of an eternal spirit. Now, by this last phrase I mean the moral
fervour which persists from age to age only on condition that it shall
continually change its modes of expression into accordance with the
new actualities of the times.
Only use and wont can account for the indifference with which
the majority of electors look on while the springs of morality are
poisoned before their eyes. What does it matter? ask some. If the
teaching is false, it means as little to the children as the drone of a
beetle, and meantime the religious difficulty is avoided. It seems
never to occur to such people that they are thus consenting parties to
the waste of nearly one-fifth of a child’s school time. How can such
a system be anything but demoralising ? Even the children from
decent and respectable homes want waking up on moral subjects. Let
�THE EFFECT ON SCHOOL CHILDREN
49
it be granted that such children hear nothing but good at home. They
hear it, however, in the form of kindly platitudes about “behaving”
and doing as they are told, and “honesty as the best policy”—which
platitudes are neither stimulative nor impressive. They require to be
made to feel that the matter of conduct is interesting, and they will
never be made to feel that by a teacher who explains the grammar and
geography and archaeology of a Bible story which he does not himself
believe. The fate of those children—alas, too many—who have no
decent homes to echo the platitudes of morality is far worse. It is
simply shocking to hear little victims of society’s crimes rattling off
pious phrases and shrieking saintly hymns to which they obviously
attach no meaning whatever. And if their teacher is compelled by his
engagements to add to the falsehoods and unrealities of their young
lives a lesson on a supernatural revelation which he does not himself
believe, he becomes, like the parent, to Christ inconceivable, who,
instead of a fish, "would give to his child a serpent.
Perhaps one reason for persistence in the present system is that its
most devout supporters do not regard morality as teachable, but expect
it rather to be inspired by a miracle of divine grace. The instrument
for the accomplishment of this opus operatum is the word of God, and
the word of God is identified wuth the Bible. A magic charm is thought
to lie in the syllables of the sacred text, like the influence once attri
buted to written spells—a charm altogether apart from any significance
of the "words.
Or if that be thought too strong an expression, I will try to defend
it. There are scattered through Shakespeare’s works very many gems
of moral truth quite clear and limpid enough to appeal to children in
the upper standards of elementary schools. Thus Portia’s exquisite
description of “ the quality of mercy” does not depend much upon the
context for its appeal to the heart. And detached sayings, such as
“Truth hath a quiet breast,” “Love’s best habit is a soothing tongue,”
“ Never anything can be amiss when simpleness and duty tender it,”
easily stick in the memory, and under free moral instruction would
become pregnant with connotations which would return whenever
the saying was remembered. But then no one attributes to such
words any supernatural authority, and they are, therefore, not recog
nised as “the word of God,” though in a clear sense they are so,
as being the inevitable outcome of human experience, which is a
partial expression of God. But the absence of a supernatural sanction
is thought to unfit such words for the purposes of religious instruction;
whereas when similar lessons are read from the Bible the supernatural
sanction is assumed, and therein lies their value. In other words, it is
not the moral contents, not self-evident truth, that counts, but only the
E
The Bible
as magic.
Not the
truth but
the sanction
valued.
�5o
How far
morality is
teachable.
Grace, its
meaning.
Communi
cated
through
human in
tercourse.
THE EFFECT ON SCHOOL CHILDREN
supernatural sanction. And this is what I meant above by saying that
the Bible is valued for some supposed magic charm, akin to that of
written spells.
The same fond delusion which induces some well-meaning people to
hang up texts in railway waiting-rooms, or to employ sandwich-men to
carry texts on their backs, is also at the root of much zeal for text
grinding in schools. If the Genesis story of the Fall of Man, or of the
Flood, had been first given to the modern world by some learned
excavator of cuneiform records, we should certainly have considered it
extremely interesting, and in many ways suggestive of the attitude of
early ages towards the mystery of life. As fables they might even have
been recognised as useful for combining entertainment with instruction
in the teaching of children. But no one would have dreamed of making
them a formal basis of moral lessons. What is it, then, which gives
such narratives their sacred and even awful importance ? It is the
feeling that they are parts of a divine “plan of salvation” which must
stand or fall as a whole, and of which every separate part is essential to
the miraculous power of the whole. The moral significance is not the
point of importance, but rather the impact of a divine word.
Now there is certainly a grain of truth in the religious assumption
that morality is not teachable in the same way as, for instance, arith
metic is teachable. When, in the latter case, the main relations of the
digit numbers are fixed in the memory, the rest is mere matter of com
bination, requiring only attention. But no amount of memory work or
of combination of maxims will give morality. Here the working of the
sympathies and the will are absolutely essential. How is this to be
ensured ? The Evangelical people, who are the lifeguard of the system,
hold that it depends on a miracle of grace, and a miraculous Bible is, in their
view, the best, indeed the only means for evoking that. Now, I am not
going to assert that, as regards this miracle of grace, they are fundamentally
wrong. At any rate, I hold they are not so wrong as those who treat
of human nature as though it were wholly and utterly isolated from and
independent of the divine Whole in which it lives and moves and has
its being. But this expectation of grace from the mere repetition of
sacred spells is unworthy of the spiritual aspirations with which it is too
often associated.
No; grace comes through human intercourse, and the more vivid,
the more intimate, the more natural that intercourse is, the more
probable is the transmission of grace. Apply this to teacher and pupils.
The former is rightly expected to be the medium of a grace that touches
the sympathies and moulds the wills of his pupils. But he can only
discharge this function through free intercourse of mind and heart. How
is that possible to him in the course of lessons which require him to pretend
�THE EFFECT ON SCHOOL CHILDREN
5i
a mental attitude wholly alien to his real life ? It is of no use to say
that it ought not to be alien to his real life, or that he ought to be a sincere
believer. There is nothing whatever in the engagement of a municipal
school teacher to bind him to that, and, even if there were, the ideas of
the most sincere “believers” about the Bible are now very often, indeed,
identical with those held by eminent unbelievers fifty years ago. But
the “ compromise ” makes no allowance for this change. And the
result is that really only a minority—and, I suspect, a very small
minority—of such teachers feel entirely at ease and natural in giving a
Scripture lesson.
How can a teacher, touched by the spirit of the age, feel at ease in
teaching the life of Jesus to his class? He has, perhaps, been reading
with sympathy and resistless conviction the article “Gospels” in the
new Encyclopedia Biblica, edited as we have seen and largely written
by eminent clergymen of the Church of England. He finds that in the
judgment of the writers of this particular article—a judgment founded
on evidence he cannot resist—the Gospels are a growth, rather than the
work of the men whose names they bear. For the reality of the miracu
lous events, including the resurrection, there seems to him now to be
no evidence whatever of the nature usually demanded by modern
historical science. And, indeed, nothing is left to him but a vision of
transcendent beauty floating between earth and heaven, too pure for
material solidity, and yet impossible of invention by any such minds as
are reflected in the New Testament canon. The result probably is that
he still keeps and still worships the Vision, as a transfiguration of a
supreme manhood too great to be understood or rightly reported by
disciples.
I am not writing a polemic, nor yet an eirenicon. I am not, there
fore, called upon to defend such a mental attitude as is here described.
I only say that, in these times, it is one very natural to many who desire
to keep both reason and emotion true. And those who go through
this experience, if they have the teaching faculty, are likely to be
specially quickened by that experience.
The very anxieties and
“searchings of heart ” they have suffered make them more sympathetic;
and the spiritual heroism which prompts them to refuse the consolations
of pretence gives a ring of sincerity to their utterance that tells upon
children no less than on adults. But imagine such a man or woman
set to give a lesson, according to the “compromise,” on the alleged
birth in Bethlehem, or the feeding of the five thousand, or the walking
on the sea! He must treat such things as historic facts, and is afraid
lest by any chance word he should betray his real position.1 He must
1 See preface, p. viii , where reference is macle to Mr. Nevinson’s observations on
this fear in his articles contributed to the Westminster Gazette.
The ration
alist teacher
and the lite
ot' Christ.
Bondage to
the letter.
�52
Disappear
ance of the
spirit.
To restore it
get rid of
insincerity.
Natural
morality
more easily
illustrated
by modern
instances.
THE EFFECT ON SCHOOL CHILDREN
expound the “ fulfilments of prophecy ” asserted by Matthew or Luke.
He must explain away the words of Mary to the child Jesus, when she
said: “Thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing.” If questioned
on the precise mode of multiplication of the baked bread and cooked
fishes that fed the five thousand, he can only reply feebly that these
things are a mystery, when he holds them to be fiction. The great
immeasurable soul of whom he has glimpses through the preternatural
transfiguration wrought by the Gospels is reduced in his inevitable
teaching to an itinerant wonder-monger, who puzzled the world by a
sort of holy magic. Is it strange that religion, taught after such a
fashion, should be morally barren ?
It may be asked, How would the position be improved by excluding
the Bible ? One answer is that the moral atmosphere in many schools
would be purified by the elimination of unreality and insincerity. That
such evils accompany the use of the Bible in school is not the fault of
the Book. It is a consequence of the conventional superstition with
which it is treated. But, so long as half the population regard it as
divine and infallible, while the other half believe it to be a collection of
human documents, each to be taken on its merits, it is impossible to
ensure sincerity and honesty in its use. If ever a time comes when it
can be used with the same sort of intelligent discrimination and freedom
as is claimed by university professors in teaching Cicero’s De Officiis or
Plato’s Republic, it will become an exceedingly valuable handbook.
But that time does not seem to be within a measurable distance now.
Another answer to the above question is that if morality were taught
as a part of our natural life, dependent on human experience and not on
a miraculous revelation, the teacher would be more likely to bring his
lessons home to the every-day life of his pupils. Which is the more
likely to inspire a wholesome fear of lying—the story of Gehazi, or the
account of a plague of small-pox which might have been stopped by the
isolation of the first cases but for the lying denials of their relatives that
there was anything wrong ? In my time it was usual to tell children
that “ Don’t-care ” met a lion, and was eaten up. The warning had not
much influence; but the true story of a child who walked unwarily, and
fell headlong down a flight of steps, induced, at any rate for a short
time, some alertness in looking to the path before us.
It is no aspersion on the Bible to say that it cannot supply the place
of systematic instruction in the morals of daily life. Listening to the
“ explanations given therefrom in the Christian religion and morality ”
by even the best elementary teachers, one cannot but feel that the
knowledge of Scripture is one thing and morality another. Both
teacher and taught are for the moment affecting to live in another world
entirely different from this, conducted on a different method, actuated
�THE EFFECT ON SCHOOL CHILDREN
53
by impossible motives, and continually corrected by miracle. The
stories, the maxims, the doctrines, are items to be remembered for
examinations. But they are none of them on the same plane as the
child’s daily life. The notion of any practical application rarely occurs,
except as a preparation for death or a key to the dream-world of heaven.
In former years, when I was still a member of the School Board for Ineffectual
effort to
London, and much nearer in creed to the Evangelical Free Churches secure moral
training’
than I am now, I was so impressed with the practical absence of under the
late School
systematic moral teaching from the schools that I called attention to the Board for
London.
subject, and obtained the appointment of a small committee to consider
the question. One of the members was the late Rev. John Rodgers,
Vicar of St. Thomas’s, Charterhouse, and at that time Vice-Chairman of
the Board. My proposal was that a course of lessons should be based
upon the summary of practical morality given by the Church Catechism
in answer to the question, “ What is thy duty towards thy neighbour ? ”
I thought then, as I do still, that the summary is a very good one.1
The highest classes in elementary schools are perhaps capable of
receiving more definite instruction on the origin, nature, and obligations
of social relationships. But for children from seven to twelve years of
age it contains just the sort of practical summary of duty, in the form
of a “categorical imperative,” that is adapted to their needs. Drawn
out into a series of detailed lessons with ample illustrations, it would
form an admirable basis for a course of moral instruction and exhorta
tion likely to affect the life. In this conviction I went so far as to sketch
the outline of such a course of lessons, which, I suppose, exists still
somewhere in the archives of the extinct Board. And, as it was grounded
on the Catechism, I thought myself secure of support from Evangelical
Churchmen. I am glad to remember that the Rev. John Rodgers
supported me. But I was sadly disappointed in the more pronounced
Evangelical laymen. One of them, a most excellent man in all social
and business relations, though belonging to the straitest sect of
“ Low ” Churchmen, and elected to the Board entirely on account of
his religiousness, declared vehemently that “ it left out everything that a
Churchman cared for.” It was useless to suggest that “ everything a
Churchman cared for ” could be supplied in a Churchman s own
Sunday schools. The very appearance of teaching morality for its own
sake, apart from the magic, symbols, and formulas of theology, was
considered suspicious, and the project had to be dropped.
1 Among those who never learned this Catechism a very curious mistake is
prevalent. It is supposed to urge contentment with “that state of life unto which
it has pleased God to call” us, whereas, of course, the words are, “to which it shall
please God to call me.” Also the word “ betters ” has been quite gratuitously taken
to refer exclusively to social rank, whereas it refers just as naturally to moral worth.
�54
Attempt by
the Moral
Instruction
League to
assert the
rights of
parents.
Defeated by
undenomi
national
bigotry.
THE EFFECT ON SCHOOL CHILDREN
The decision was regrettable ; but, from the point of view fixed by
the “compromise,” it was perhaps inevitable. For both Churchmen
and Nonconformists, having once established and endowed the Bible—
and practically their common interpretation of the Bible—as the one
sanction of morality recognised by the School Board, were naturally loth
to imperil that settlement by any admission of merely natural ethics.
But, however that may be, surely the later refusal of the same
Board to allow children to be withdrawn in accordance with the
Conscience Clause from Biblical instruction to receive moral lessons
instead is indefensible. The facts are as follows :—
A society known as the Moral Instruction League was formed
before the end of last century to stimulate attention to moral teaching
in schools, and to suggest what the members held to be better methods.
Using a right which is presumably within the limits of the British
Constitution, to influence their fellow-citizens by conversation, they
visited the homes of parents having children in attendance at Board
schools, and explained their ideas. They showed that by law the
children could not be compelled to receive the regulation Bible
teaching. They pointed to the article in the School Board Code which
directs that “ during the time of religious teaching or religious observ
ance any children withdrawn from such teaching or observance
shall receive separate instruction in secular subjects.” They then
suggested that the parents, if they preferred non-theological moral
teaching, should withdraw their children from the Bible lessons, and at
the same time request that they should, during the time of those
lessons, receive separate teaching in morality. The suggestions were
received by the parents with an unexpected amount of favour. As
many as a hundred children, or more, were withdrawn from theological
teaching in each of several schools. But so threatening a schism was
met with prompt measures by the alarmed devotees of the Compromise.
In the first place, separate moral instruction was refused to the children
withdrawn. Instead of that, they were set to toil apart at ordinary
school drudgery. Now, this appears to have been a rather hard, and
even cruel, interpretation of the School Board rule; for it virtually
refuses to recognise ethics as a “secular subject,” and it forces upon
unwilling parents the alternative of Bible or nothing. Under such
circumstances, it is easy to understand the success of the next step
taken by zealots for the Compromise. The parents were visited in
their homes, and the difficulty and unpleasantness of the situation
created for their children were vigorously explained. The result was
that the children returned to the Bible lessons; and this has probably
been adduced as evidence of the unanimous desire of parents of all
creeds and none to have their children taught the common faith of
�THE EFFECT ON SCHOOL CHILDREN
55
Evangelical Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Independents.
It would have been more generous, and equally in accord with their
existing School Board regulations, if the Board had consented to regard
natural ethics as a “secular subject,” and detailed teachers—who
could easily have been found—to give the lessons to the children for
whom they were asked. The refusal to do so suggests that the
authorities were afraid of the experiment. Perhaps, like the authorities
of Jewish orthodoxy at the first feeble beginnings of Christianity, “they
doubted whereunto this would grow.” But, after all, they are ministers
of law, not of their own theological views; and I cannot for a moment
suppose that their legal advisers would have told them that a concession
to these parents would be contrary to the law. There are some,
especially among the clergy, who boldly maintain the right of every
parent to have his children taught his own creed at the public expense.
It is noteworthy that these extremists belong to a Church which formerly
resisted fiercely the imposition of a conscience clause, and which also
refused to believe that any schools were necessary except her own.
But, though the new policy of the priesthood is certainly more
charitable than their former action, it has the misfortune to be imprac
ticable. Our sects are too many to allow this sort of liberality.1
But if ever there was a case in which parents were justified in asking
to have their own views of moral instruction carried out, it is surely the
case I have described. For they did not presume to ask that any
peculiar notions of theirs on transcendental subjects should be taught
to their children, nor yet any eccentricities of morality. They would
probably have been quite satisfied with the practical principles of
conduct set forth in the Church Catechism, as above quoted. If Bible
teaching can claim to be “unsectarian,” how much more justly can the
title be claimed for doctrines of morality from which not one in a
million of the population would dissent! The refusal of their request
was unreasonable, unjust, and ungenerous. That it would be sustained
by a majority of electors zealous for the Bible even to persecution may,
unhappily, be true. But it was not in the true interest of morality.
It is of a piece with the policy which sets unbelievers to teach belief,
and counts the conscience and heart of the teacher nothing so long as
he speaks by the Book.
1 Besides, it is absurd to say that a parent has a right to have his individual
opinions on transcendental subjects taught by his fellow ratepayers, and taxpayeis to
his children. For what the Commonwealth seeks by its education policy is good
citizens of this world, not of any unknown world. But when a parent asks that his
child shall be taught at the public expense such a doctrine, for instance, as priestly
absolution, he is asking not that his child shall be made a good citizen, but that he
shall be taught how to secure the safety of his soul in an unknown world. „ Such, a
claim is simply preposterous. If valid, it would give the “ Peculiar People a claim
to have their children taught at the public expense the sinfulness of calling in a doctor.
Bogus
rights of
parents.
�VII.
THE WRONG TO THE NATION
Contrast of
kindred
States
where the
religious
difficulty is
excluded.
Second in importance to the disastrous effects of a hollow compromise
on the teaching of morality is its injurious influence on the development
of the national intellect. In the United States, and in our own greatest
Colonies, there has been an almost complete elimination of the religious
question. It is true that in the older settlements of Canada friction is
kept up by the survival of Catholic claims and influence. It is true
also that in the United States and in Australia occasional efforts have
been made by devout sectaries to disturb the settlement effected by
dropping theology. We know, likewise, that in many common schools
of the United States the old custom is still kept up of reading from the
teacher’s desk at the commencement of school a few verses from the
Bible “ without note or comment.” I am one of those who think that
this comment of silence is worse than almost any other. The custom is
a tribute to the survival of Puritan traditions in America. But the fact
that, in spite of these traditions, the Americans have substantially left
the teaching of the Bible and Christianity to the Churches is all the
more creditable to their spiritual courage. At any rate, their practice
affords no support whatever to the evangelical compromise in England.
But these modifications of pure “secularism” have been almost a
negligible quantity. It is substantially—and excluding Catholic Canada
—almost exactly true that the educational policy of Greater AngloSaxondom1 has been determined solely by educational interests, and
not by sectarian rivalry. I recognise, of course, that other advantages
besides this blessed peace have favoured our kinsmen beyond the seas,
and especially in the United States. The absence of an Established
Church, the more prevalent sense of equality, and, in the great
Republic, the system of common schools, which merges all class
interests in the one national and patriotic interest, have, of course,
conduced to the same end. But even these happy features of the new
commonwealths would have been ineffectual if the religious difficulty
had not been excluded.
1 This, of course, excludes the Anglo-Dutch States of South Africa. At the time
of writing, the religious question in education appears to be in process of settlement
for the Transvaal by the adoption of a Bill securing two and a half hours’ instruction
per weekin “Bible history.” The population there has apparently not yet become
as much interested in historical criticism as are the people of England. Contrasting
the two populations, we may find a fresh pathos in Koheleth’s words : “ He that
increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”
55
�iwj&i
THE WRONG TO THE NA TION
57
These commonwealths have not had to balance the claims of jealous
sects. They have not had to repress the enterprise of heterodox schoc?
managers lest they should attract more scholars than the orthodox.
They have not been tempted to minimise the number of school places
needed in a district lest they should disturb sectarian monopolists who
could not raise the money for enlargement. They have been privileged
to consider two questions only—how many children required education,
and what were the best methods of intellectual and moral culture.
Whatever criticisms may be passed by our old-world scholars on the
rawness of American culture, witnesses of indisputable competence—as,
for instance, the correspondents commissioned to gather information
for the Times newspaper on American machine manufacture—are
emphatic in their testimony that the commercial and scientific progress
of the States is very largely owing to the facilities for education offered
from the common schools upwards. No ecclesiastical traditions, no
balancing of sect against sect, not even “ pious founders,” have stood
between the people and their intellectual aspirations. And this is not
in the least because the American people are less bigoted than we. So
far as we can judge, the Puritanical traditions of the Pilgrim Fathers
still exercise a widespread and enduring influence on American religion.
But, whatever may be their various beliefs, they drop them at the school
door, and ignore them in their educational counsels.
How different has been our experience in the old country! In 1807 ^sh^1'
the then Archbishop of Canterbury stamped out Mr. Samuel Whitbread’s veto,
precocious scheme of national education with a pious appeal to prejudice,
pleading for Christianity in the words of a heathen poet:—
Hac casti maneant in relligione nepotes.
This sanctimonious, but infamous, veto1 by a titled priest against the
education of a people is often quoted; but the oftener the better.
Those who have studied Mr. Whitbread’s scheme know that, though it
was of course far too indulgent to the Established Church, it drew the
lines of a really national education. And though it would not have
exorcised the demon of sectarianism any more than did the Act of 1870,
yet it would have practically anticipated by sixty-three years the estab
lishment of approximately universal elementary education. And when we
think of all that the nation has lost through that long delay, it is hard to
repress an indignation which, considering the sort of training received by
the clergy at the very beginning of last century, may perhaps be misplaced.
From that day to this the decisive consideration in every education ^nd^orlis
crisis has been not how to give our children the best possible training, ^ordibut how to 17
protect first the Established Church, and next the Bible. If Church and
Bible.
1 The Bill had passed the Commons, and would almost certainly have passed the
Lords if the Archbishop would have allowed it.
�5*
Failure of
Mr. Bal
four’s Act.
A lesson for
the future.
THE WRONG TO THE NATION
the Nonconformists had not been false to their professed principles in
1870, a great part of the nation might then have adopted a wider policy
which must ultimately have attracted the whole people. But at the
golden opportunity their spiritual courage failed them. They dared not
trust religion to the “voluntary principle” which they had invoked
against the Established Church. They accepted State patronage and
control for religion in the schools. After that great betrayal every
School Board election became a theological battle. Questions of
education were quite secondary. How many candidates gave an hour
during their canvass to the best methods of teaching to read, or the most
interesting modes of presenting the problems of arithmetic? The
retention of the Bible, and the interpretation of “ unsectarianism,” or
rather “ intersectarianism,” so as to include all evangelical doctrine, have
been the two notes to which every platform has echoed.
Nor has the Act of 1902 successfully evaded the difficulty as the
ingenious and subtle-minded Premier of that day supposed it would.
For sectarian strife has been simply transferred to County Council
elections; and the balance of sects is considered more important than
educational knowledge in the selection of co-opted members of the local
Education Committees.
In the battle of progress it is always good to fix upon some definite
assertion of principle to be maintained at all costs. Supposing that
principle to be chosen, as a successful general selects his point of attack,
because it commands the field, victory on that point means a good deal
more than the achievement of one item in a political programme. The
success leavens the national mind with a new temper that suggests
consequential steps of further advance. When Cobden and his associates
in the Anti-Corn Law League fixed on the bread tax as their objective
point of attack, they were wise in their generation. The movement was
the more speedily successful because concentrated on the least defensible
position of Protectionists. But when once that point was yielded, the
whole case for Protection in general was practically given away; and the
doctrine of customs dues for revenue alone was triumphant.
In 1870 the Nonconformists had it in their power to do for the
emancipation of education what Cobden and Bright accomplished for
freedom of trade in 1846. The experience of religious Dissenters since
the beginning of the nineteenth century might have taught them that
sectarian domination, or sectarian rivalry, was hopelessly irreconcileable
with freedom of educational development. Common sense dictated
that the only effective way of removing the obstacle was to eliminate
theology entirely from public elementary schools, and to relegate it to
the free action of the Churches in accordance with the principles up to
that date held by Nonconformists. The notion of any danger to religion
�THE WRONG TO THE NATION
L
F
s
’
59
from such a policy ought to have been dissipated by the splendid
examples in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. So obvious
seemed the inference from such palpable facts that Mr. Gladstone
himself anticipated a Nonconformist demand for a “secular” system.1
Unfortunately, he gave them credit for more faith in their own principles
than they possessed. But if they had been courageous enough for
consistency, tens of thousands of the generation then coming into the
world would have been saved from the sectarian curse which has since
- blighted their education.
Let us observe what would have been gained by the exclusion of
theology. In the first place, there would have been a clear and definite
assertion of religious equality in the schools. Where education is
carried on under State patronage and control there are only two alterna
tive methods of maintaining religious equality in the schools. The one
is to teach every creed, and the other is to teach none. In a country
where a very few great denominations hold the field, as in Germany2 or
Austria, the former plan is possible, or at least plausible, though even
in such cases there are fragmentary sects who suffer wrong. De minimis
non curat lex. In Scotland also practically the same system is possible,
for Presbyterianism of one form or another is professed by nearly
the whole population. In Ireland the bad traditions of Protestant
supremacy have survived disestablishment: and education remains a
battle-field. Now I am dealing with the case of England and Wales,
not with that of Scotland or of Ireland. But, lest it should be supposed
that I shirk the question of the latter country, I will say at once that,
Ireland being still medieeval in religion, it would be ridiculous to try to
solve the problem of either school or university education on twentieth
century principles. Therefore no solution can possibly be found by
1 This is now too well established to need confirmation. He did not, indeed,
characterise “ simple Bible teaching ” as “ a monstrosity.” But he did characterise
as such the pretence of any municipal body to define what “ simple Bible teaching ” is.
2 We are sometimes pointed to the free, unhindered development of education in
Germany as a proof of at least the harmlessness of a denominational, system. But
between Germany and England there are very pregnant differences which make any
parallel impossible. Speaking generally, religious belief is not so much a matter of
individual conviction among average Germans as with us. Not that they are. less
religious in sentiment. Possibly they are even more so, because of their conventional
indifference about creeds. But they have not generally that idea of the duty of
individual conviction which generates our innumerable sects. Their confirmations and
first communions are very much a matter of social routine, like the “coming out” of
girls, or the assumption of the modern substitute for the toga mnlis by boys. To such
a state of feeling rate-supported catechism and scripture are of no consequence, and
this indifference makes sectarianism powerless for harm to the schools. Bismarck had
some trouble with Catholic obscurantists; but he gave them short shrift. Who ever
heard of a German district being stinted of school places to soothe the jealousy of the
Lutheran or the Reformed or the Evangelical Church ; or of a school generation being
allowed to grow up in ignorance in order that the Catholics might have time to supply
the needed school places ?
The two
alternatives.
Exceptional
case of
Ireland.
�6o
Working- of
the Smith
compro
mise.
THE WRONG TO THE NATION
ignoring the obvious fact that the Roman Church dominates the
consciences of three-fourths of the people as no Church or sect whatever
can claim to dominate the people of England and Wales. To insist on
“simple Bible teaching” in Irish elementary schools, or on undenomi
national universities, only adds insult to injury. The treatment must be
such as is adapted to a community less advanced in religious thought
than England; and “concurrent endowment” of educational institutions
is inevitable. The attempt to teach the creeds of all is never satisfactory,
even under the most favourable circumstances. But those cases in
which it seems to be compatible with some freedom of educational
development are explained by the fact that there is no desire for religious
equality and no intersectarian jealousy—at least so far as the schools are
concerned. They are cases of denominational supremacy by consent, in
the sense that social equilibrium is found, as in Germany, to be practically
secured by the recognition of a very few predominant sects in whose
influence the people placidly acquiesce.1 The champions of different
creeds do not fight each other over the starved minds and souls of
children. In England, however, the attempt to teach the creeds of all
is obviously hopeless. And those Englands beyond sea which have
most fully inherited the conscientious sectarianism of the Motherland
have wisely adopted the other alternative, and teach the creed of none.
Let us note the consequences of our perverse attempt at an impossibility.
Although the so-called “compromise”2 was devised and carried by
a Churchman, he was what in the vulgar language of controversy is
called a “Low Evangelical,” and, though one of the excellent of the
earth, he was considered in high ecclesiastical circles as little better
than a Dissenter. His evident desire to have evangelical Sunday-school
teaching introduced into Board schools appealed to the weak brethren
among Nonconformists. They thus gained the doubtful advantage of
endowment for their common gospel. But they inflicted a grievance on
Churchmen which it is impossible to explain away. For the genuine
Anglican view of Christianity differs from the united Nonconformist
view. And it differs from it in such a way that, if you teach the Non
conformist view, you necessarily prejudice the pupils against the Church
1 There is nothing at all in the above passage inconsistent with what I have
previously said concerning the conscience rights of minorities in a population that
religiously lives up to the twentieth century. When I visited Rome under Papal
government I had no scruple about conventionally “bowing my head in the House of
Rimmon.” And were I to live in Ireland, which is, as I have said, mediaeval in
religion, I should pay with cheerfulness either rate or tax for Catholic, Protestant,
Episcopal, or Presbyterian schools or colleges. But I must repeat that there is no
Chuich or denomination in England which has any colourable pretence to the position
which the Roman Church holds in Ireland.
2 The resolution of the late Mr. W. II. Smith was adopted with slight modifica
tions by so many School Boards that the case of London is typical of all.
�THE WRONG TO THE NATION
61
view, although you may say nothing about it. Nonconformists are
content with the Bible, and the Bible alone. Churchmen desire, also,
the catechism authorised by their Church. Nonconformists are satisfied A
if such explanations of Scripture are given as will set forth “the plan m.
of salvation,” meaning thereby the evangelical view of the Fall, the
types of Christ in Jewish history and ritual, the Incarnation, the
Atonement, and justification by faith. Churchmen, on the other hand,
attach great importance to the creeds and sacraments, and are naturally
jealous of any teaching which tends to represent the former as sufficient
without the latter. That this is actually the tendency of “ School Board
religion ” can hardly with fairness be denied.
1 think, then, that Churchmen had, and still have, a grievance under
local education authorities with their “ simple Bible teaching.” But the
policy pursued by Churchmen to secure its removal or diminution has
been a blight on the education of the country. They have resisted the
building of Board schools that were urgently needed. They have
insisted on keeping children in crowded and stifling rooms rather than
allow the relief which would have been given by undenominational
schools. They have stigmatised as “ unfair competition ” the endeavour
of School Boards or municipal authorities to spend their larger resources
on giving the children of ratepayers a higher education than the sects
could give them. They resisted low fees, and still more free schools)
as long as they could ; and when their opposition was bought out by the
fee grant they managed to retain a power of exacting special fees in
addition, and railed against every attempt of Liberals to rid education
of such vexatious hindrances.
Their influence with Parliament is enormous, and must continue to
be so while the choice of electors is practically limited to a small class
of moneyed men naturally susceptible to social glamour. Indeed, that
influence is resistless except during the brief moments when what
Edward Miall used to call “ some great blazing principle ” concentrates
popular attention. Such a principle was victorious when Church rates
were abolished, and when the Protestant Episcopal Church in Ireland
was disestablished. Such a principle might have been found in a real
religious equality for the schools. But the endowment of the united
evangelical sects provided nothing of the kind. It made all Non
conformist appeals to justice hollow and feeble, while it put a weapon
into the hands of Churchmen which they would not otherwise have
possessed. The result has been a course of reactionary legislation, the
purpose of which has been to restore, or at least maintain, eccle
siastical control, while its inevitable effect has been to obstruct and
blight educational progress.
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.
�VIII.
CONCLUSION
The next
Education
Bill.
Should
secure
moral
training.
Objection i
Material
istic, etc.
Human
experience
certainly
spiritual,
but not
admittedly
super
natural.
No wrong
done to the
orthodox
conscience.
In the Preface to this edition I referred to the failure of Mr. Birrell’s
Education Bill, and in these concluding words I shall venture to utter a
warning as to the fate of any future Bill which may be framed on the
same or similar, or even analogous, lines. “Weak counsels and weak
actings ”—to use Cromwell’s phrase—have brought things to this pass :
that morals are the worst taught subject in our elementary schools,
while by “ undenominationalists ” character and conduct, our chief
educational ends, are vainly supposed to be secured by a sort of Bible
teaching which Churchmen condemn, which Rationalists reject, which a
large proportion of our teachers cannot sincerely give, and discussion of
which even Nonconformists deprecate with a shrug. The first and
essential purpose of any new Education Bill, then, should be to make
obligatory in all State-aided schools a course of systematic moral train
ing independent of any supernatural reference, and based on the
experience of man.
There are not so many now as there used to be who would say that
this is sheer materialism and base utilitarianism. For surely human
experience is not all materialistic. Indeed, “love, joy, peace, long
suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance,” belong as
truly to human experience as does the desire to buy in the cheapest
market and sell in the dearest. It is for the wise teacher to select the
elements of human experience on which moral training is to be based.
And if he selects the worse elements instead of the better, he is not fit
for his post. Now, if anyone should say to me, “You have quoted the
words of an Apostle; why not include them in the ordinary school
lessons ?” my reply is, I am certainly most anxious to include such
words as those if you will only allow them to be treated as expressions of
human experience, and not of miraculous revelation. For the moment
you introduce miracle or supernaturalism you let loose all the winds of
controversy with which we have been buffeted in the previous pages.
Nor can it be pleaded that the pious evangelical teacher would
violate his conscience by treating the highest New Testament morals as
matters of human experience. For, whatever they may have been in
addition to that, they were at least realised in human souls and found
by human experience to be the highest good. Indeed, a great deal of
pulpit eloquence at the present day, and all the best Sunday-school
teaching, is an appeal to common sense to try, by practising it, the
62
�CONCLUSION
63
value of Christian morals. There can therefore be no hardship what
ever in forbidding the Christian teacher to go beyond human experience
while giving moral instruction in State schools. Or, if it be rejoined
that to the Christian teacher miracle and revelation are actual facts well
within human experience, the reply is, firstly, that Christian teachers are
so much disagreed as to the extent and interpretation of those alleged
facts that no denomination can any longer claim to represent the
Christianity of the nation; and, secondly, that all belief in miraculous
revelation is now so widely surrendered that religious equality, nay,
common justice, is impossible unless such questions are kept out of
State schools.
But we are told that such a scheme is impracticable. In this case,
however, it is not we, but the objectors, who refuse to look facts in the
face. For this so-called “impracticable” system is being actually worked
with the best results by English-speaking people who, in the aggregate,
number some hundred millions.1 To persist, therefore, in dogged
denial of practicability is only to prove that a certain stolid attitude
known as non possumus is not absolutely peculiar to Popes. Or, if
it be said that the circumstances and habits of the great Republic and
of our newest colonies are too different from those of the old country to
allow of our adopting their practice in this case, here again the objection
quietly ignores palpable fact. For we do actually during four-fifths2 of
our school-time adopt the very rule that is so often said to be unEnglish, and therefore impossible. That is to say, the State makes it an
essential condition of any money grant that during each half-daily
session of the school there shall be two continuous hours3 devoted
exclusively to “ secular ” instruction. And during these two hours,
according to any strict interpretation of the law, it is illegal to devote a
single moment to any religious observance, exhortation, or lesson.
Now, if it is found so easy even in old English schools to give exclu
sively secular instruction during four-fifths of school hours in all State
schools of the land, why on earth should it be “ impracticable ” to do
the same thing during the whole time for which public authority is
responsible ?
1 The population of the United States of America is now more than eighty
millions. Add New Zealand, Victoria (Australia), South Australia, together with a
large part of Canada, the sum will not be far short of the figure given ; and if there
should be some deficiency, every year is filling it up. The case of India is different;
but it also illustrates the fact that among a population of very various, religious
beliefs secular training (exclusive of morals) affords the only practicable solution of the
education problem.
2 Where—if anywhere—advantage is taken of the legal permission to have
religious observances, etc., at the beginning and also at the end of each school
attendance, the proportion of time given to religious teaching may be slightly more.
But the custom is so infrequent that the figure given above is substantially accurate.
3 It may be one hour and a half for infants ; but that does not affect the principle.
Objection 2
Impractica
bility.
Solvitur
anibulando.
Even in
England.
�64
Encourage
ment given
by present
system to
an unreal
division
between
things
secular and
sacred.
Personal
experience
of a
" secular”
school.
Case ot
children
neglected or
not reached
by the
Churches.
Repudiation
in 1870 of
any claim on
the State.
CONCL USION
At this point I will make bold to say that the present arbitrary,
forced, and unnatural system of a sharp time-table division does more
to foster a false distinction between things secular and sacred than any
State system of purely intellectual and moral training. For in New
England or New Zealand the children of three equally religious neigh
bours belonging to the Roman, Anglican, and Presbyterian communions
go to school together and sit in class together without ever having the
false division of things sacred and secular obtruded upon them. Having
had the good fortune myself, from seven years of age to thirteen, to
attend a so-called “secular” school, I know by experience what I am
saying. For that exceptional school, like the “common schools”across
the ocean, was frequented, even in Liverpool, by some Roman Catholics
of the middle class, and I think by almost every other Christian sect,
in addition to Jews. I myself, having been brought up in the strictest
sect of the Methodists, may perhaps be credited with having had even
at that early age some sense both of religion and morals; and I declare
that the moral and even religious tone of that “ secular ” school was on
the whole higher than in a clergyman’s school to which I was afterwards
sent. I remember at the former school being quizzed as a “ Methody,”
but it was in a very good-humoured tone; whereas, at the clergyman’s,
a Jew school-fellow, being quick to resent insult to his religion, felt in
honour bound on one occasion to “ demand satisfaction ” from a stronger
class-fellow on that account, and got, unfortunately, rather more than he
wanted. In the “secular” school—and the same thing, according to
all evidence, may be said of similar schools in the New World—the
fact of religious division very rarely emerged, whereas in the clerical
school they were the subject of constant wrangle.
To arguments such as the above, especially when based on personal
reminiscences, a superficial reply is easy, but not effective, because it
ignores the main question at issue. “ It is all very well,” we are told, “ for
children brought up in Christian homes to hear nothing of the Bible in
school. For they hear it read, and perhaps explained, morning and
evening by their father. They also attend a place of worship regularly,
and probably Sunday school as well. But what of the thousands of
children who come from homes which have no Bible at all, or at least
where it is never read?”
The reply is obvious and conclusive:
Caveat Ecclesia. Let those who regard the Bible as “the word of God”
look to it. For the nation has distinctly and formally declared by Act
of Parliament that, so far as public elementary education is concerned,
it denies all responsibility for any teaching of the kind.
By no
statute in force is Bible reading or teaching required in the public
elementary schools, although it is permitted under certain restrictions
—on the express condition that no grant of money is made for it
�CONCLUSION
65
out of Parliamentary funds. Not only so, but the nation emphasises
its renunciation of responsibility by refusing to allow its inspectors
to examine or report on the results of Biblical teaching. The plea,
therefore, that, if any part of the children of the State are without
Bible-teaching from voluntary sources, the State must step in and provide
it, is legally estopped by the fact that the State has, for thirty-seven
years past, formally repudiated any such claim.
The arrangement that actually exists is an unprincipled compromise
unknown anywhere else on earth, and perhaps impossible to any but the
dear old land possessed by so pathetic a faith in “ muddling through.”
For the teaching of the Bible is entirely voluntary: only the voluntari
ness is a privilege not of individual ratepayers, or of individual teachers,
nor yet of individual parents—for the Conscience Clause is a shamz—
but only of County Councils or their Education Committees. Now,
notwithstanding the awakening of thought indicated by the literature
and organisations above alluded to,2 I readily acknowledge that still
surviving social custom and tradition ensure at least some majority on
County Councils in favour of the apparently safe generality of “simple
Bible teaching.” But scarcely a ratepayer who votes for it knows what
he means by it. And the interpretation has to be, not fought out—for
it never is—but meanly thrown upon the teachers, with the tacit under
standing that if, in their explanations, they offend the beliefs or super
stitions favoured by the County Council majority, that majority will want
to know the reason why. Such an arrangement may be cunning, may
be “expedient ” in the very basest sense. But the Churches who think
that by such a dishonest compromise they are doing their duty to
neglected children, or teaching “ truth in the inward parts,” reflect
shame on the faith they profess. In all reverence, I say that their
nominal Lord—if I have ever understood him—would rebuke them
with the words, “ Ye know not what spirit ye are of.”
To such arguments I know of no reply but the ignoble plea that the
“ compromise ” hushes strife, or, in other words, that it plasters over the
open sore of religious schism, “saying Peace, peace, when there is no
peace.” But surely those who know and feel what is at stake—the
moral culture, the character and conduct of the English people—will no
longer accept this feeble excuse for the neglect of national duty. To
them the hush of theological debate—though welcome enough—will
1 This was well known to the rejectors of Mr. Birrell’s real and effective clause in
1906. That clause, in its original form, excepted from the law of compulsory attend
ance the time during which religious instruction is given. Mr. Birrell supported this
by his own experience as a Nonconformist school boy at a Church school. He
“ flatly refused ” to claim exemption from Catechism, not because he differed from
his father, a distinguished Baptist minister, but because he preferred to take the lesson
rather than be exceptional. {Hansard, April 9th, 1906.)
a See Preface to the new edition, and also pp. 5, 11—13, 54F
The teach
ing of the
Bible is now
voluntary;
but not so
as to save
the rights of
conscience.
The policy
of “ flushing
up ”
�66
involves the
paralysis of
moral
teaching.
Recognition
of the fact
by Educa
tion Com
mittees.
The only
way.
National
morals
would gain
by the
“ secular ’’
system.
CONCLUSION
afford no sufficient compensation for the criminal neglect of our
children’s training in the moral essentials of social life. For while
Calvinistic and Arminian, Baptist and Low Churchman, blandly agree
on “simple stories from the Old Testament,” the result is that Jacob,
who impersonated nearly all the later vices of the Jews with none of
their virtues, is exhibited as a type to be imitated by English children if
they would please God.
There are, however, signs of an awakening of the public conscience
on this subject, and a considerable number of local Education Authori
ties1 are providing for systematic moral teaching in addition to, and in
many cases at a separate time from, “simple Bible teaching.” What does
this mean ? It means that the Scripture lessons, as given tinder the Com
promise, have been found inadequate for the moral ends desired. And
if the truth were known, its inadequacy is the direct result of the condi
tions under which they are given. If, therefore, the above plea be
true, that the compromise hushes up controversy, the hollow truce is
purchased by the exclusion from the teaching of everything that could
rouse or inspire. But, indeed, the plea is not true. For Catholics of
all shades cannot be, and ought not to be, satisfied with the com
promise. And if it be retorted that neither will they be satisfied with
“ secular education,” no one asks them to be satisfied with it. All they
are asked to do is to accept—as they do now—some four hours daily of
secular instruction from the State, and to supplement it at their own cost
by their own teachers with the theological training they desire.
But if objections on the ground of materialistic tendencies and of
impracticability and of the sacredness of a hollow truce are proved to
be futile, much more are the fears mentioned in the first words of this
Essay shown to be not only groundless, but opposed to the moral and
religious interests for which they are professedly concerned. For the
facts adduced in Chapters V. and VI. defy contradiction. These facts,
moreover, are the inevitable consequences of the moral incongruities of
an educational system involving the social, political, and religious wrongs
detailed in the earlier Chapters, II. to IV. Now, of those who say
“ Let us do evil that good may come,” St. Paul made the severe
remark, “whose damnation is just.” And, whatever the condemnation
may signify, it is surely incurred by those who would encourage lying to
promote truth, or who fancy that forced insincerity in the teacher can
inspire “the simplicity that is in Christ.” No, no; the very first and
most essential condition of improved and efficient moral training in the
1 Among these authorities are ten county councils, twenty-one borough councils,
and seven urban district councils. The Education Authorities for the West Riding of
Yorkshire, Cheshire, Devonshire, and Surrey have a syllabus of moral and civic
instruction substantially similar to that of the Moral Instruction League.
�CONCLUSION
67
nation’s schools is the relegation of all doctrine transcending human
experience to the custodians of the various phases of the faith. This
does not necessarily mean “ clericalism ”; for Nonconformist Sunday
schools are certainly not clerical. And if any portion of our fellow
citizens prefer clericalism, they have a perfect right to exercise their
choice, provided they do not make it either a pecuniary or a moral
burden on the State. Rid of such a burden, the State would be free to
use all its resources, both pecuniary and moral, as it has never done yet,
for the training of its children in the duties of a citizen. My argument,
therefore, holds good that, so far from being a guarantee for moral
training, the present permissive and quasi-voluntary system of Bible
teaching in State schools actually prevents it.
There is, I believe, only one other objection, which I need mention,
to the proposed relegation of Bible teaching to those who believe in it,
and that is the supposed overwhelming consensus of popular feeling
against any such a plan. Well, the next Minister of Education who
introduces a Bill may possibly have his eyes opened as to the hollowness
of this assumption. My own experience suggests that as everyone is said
to believe all men mortal except himself, so in this case each sensible
person thinks everyone to be devoted to the great Smith compromise
except himself. For over and over again have I been assured by more
members of School Boards and Education Committees than memory
can count that not only do they regard the present system as illogical,
but they think it unfair and inconsistent with religious equality. They
do not usually add that it is dishonest. For if they realised that, I will
do them the justice to say that they would become “ Secularists ” at
once. But they always add : “You must know that you and I are
almost alone in such an opinion, and you can never carry your
scheme.” Well, we shall see. But this I know, that in the evolution
of heterodoxy into orthodoxy there come moments when suddenly the
vast majority of people discover that they always held the hitherto
discredited opinion, and on this question that moment cannot be far off.
One sign of the coming change is the rapidly spreading recognition
of the utter impossibility of the task we have been setting since 1870
to our Ministers of Education. And so long as the teaching of
transcendental doctrines, whether supposed to be drawn from the Bible
or from Church tradition, is made one of the duties of the State school
teacher, the solution of the problem is far and away more difficult than
that of the Sphinx’s riddle, while the consequences of failure are now likely
to be, at least to the Minister of Education, analogous to the fate of
the monster’s victims. The thing has always been impossible since the
Toleration Act. But as misguided genius would persist in trying to
square the circle long after it was mathematically shown to be an
Supposed
popular
opposition.
Growing;
recognition
of the im
possibility of
any other
settlement.
�68
Inevitable
failure of
any new
Bill on the
lines of 1906.
Recent
spread of
rational
religion.
CONCLUSION
irrational problem, so, notwithstanding the long-drawn agonies of the
Forster Act with its reactionary amendment by Lord Sandon, and the
cynical exposure by Mr. Balfour in 1902 of the real meaning of State
meddling in religion, and the collapse of the final desperate effort in
1906 to secure a principle in name by surrendering it in substance, it is
still possible that temporising converts, from Miallism to CowperTempleism, may beguile some unhappy Minister of Education into a
fresh enactment of “ yea and nay ” in regard to religious equality in the
schools. But the failure of such an attempt is as certain as that yea
and nay are contradictory and mutually destructive. It may pass the
House of Commons. It may even, by threats of revolution, be forced
through the House of Lords. But any such settlement must be almost
as shortlived as the bungle of 1902. For as that was doomed from the
first by its failure to realise what is meant by religious equality among
Christian sects, so any new “ compromise ” will be doomed if it stops
short of extending unreserved religious equality to non-Christian people.
But such religious equality will be accorded only when Parliament
awakes to the fact that in passing from the nineteenth century to the
twentieth we have left the domination of supernaturalism behind, and
have entered upon the age of reason.
If any book known to the last generation was confidently regarded
as a book of facts, it was the Bible. Neither Churchmen nor educated
Nonconformists are by any means agreed in so regarding it now. It is
indeed a fallacy to say that they have on that account surrendered the
Bible as the story of a revelation. But they have learned that the facts
to which it bears witness are moral and spiritual in a much greater
degree than they are historical. They are learning to treat it as a vision
of spiritual evolution exhibiting not only the verities of human expe
rience, but its illusions and unrealities as well. It is prized for its
humanity rather than for its supernatural portents. In a word, it is
now valued for qualities which would be impossible to an infallible
book. Yet even those who take these intelligent views of the Bible
are by no means agreed as to their application.1 And those who do
not take such liberal views would be horrified by a proposal to trust
“ simple Bible teaching,” except under the strictest safeguards, to one
of their misguided brethren. But while fully conscious of this vast
change, and of the controversies it stirs, we are asked to maintain, and
perhaps under a new Bill to renew and continue, in State schools a
system of religious instruction essentially based on the recognition of
the Bible as an infallible book both of history and doctrine.
1 Of course, the so-called new views are most of them old enough. What is new
is partly the fresh support found for them by recent research, and partly their
acceptance to so large an extent by religious men.
�CONCLUSION
The result is that a large and growing number of masters and
mistresses are required to teach what they do not themselves believe.
Now, whether the opponents of the evangelical doctrines deduced from
an infallible Bible are justified or not in stigmatising some of those
doctrines as demoralising, at any rate it must be admitted that to teach
to children as sacred truth what you regard as falsehood is certainly
demoralising both to teacher and taught. To this, as I have insisted,
is very largely due the paralysis that enfeebles moral teaching in the
schools, and keeps the habits and manners of our population practically
at the same level from generation to generation. The sanctimonious
pretence of simple Bible belief required of teachers in all positions of
the sliding scale of “ the New 1 heology ” demands either a self-con
scious art of balancing like that of the tight-rope dancer, or a resigna
tion to mechanical procedure by rote. In either case inspiration is
impossible.
Meantime this formalism or dutiful dissimulation excludes serious
moral teaching in accordance with the advanced experience and needs
of the age. Of course, none but a pedant would think of giving to
school children a series of abstracts from scientific writers on morality.
But the sense of scientific relation and proportion acquired by the
teacher in his own studies may very well furnish the invisible skeleton
on which his parabolic and attractive lessons on daily life are fiamed.
It is not an unreasonable presumption that such lessons would be likely
to bear more directly and effectively on truthfulness, cleanliness,
industry, and consideration for others, than a study of Gehazi, or
Ananias and Sapphira, or Mosaic camp rules, or Solomons reference to
the sluggard and the ant. With regard to the last point of consideration
for others, I do not dispute that a fine illustration may be found in the
story of the young prophet and the borrowed axe in the Book of Kings.
But it would not be morally safe unless the teacher, if he thought the
floating of the axe to be fabulous, were allowed to say so.
But the danger of overlooking moral flaws in beautiful Bible stories
—a danger by which all we lovers of the old Book are beset—-is veil
illustrated by Dr. Frank Hayward’s unreserved eulogy on the story of
Joseph. “I admit,” he writes, “that the secularist should keep his
eyes open, and steadily protest against the teaching of stories such as Joseph
the ‘ Blagues of Egypt.’ But the objection to this story is not that it is
mythological, but that it is morally pernicious. The Joseph story may
be mythological, but it is morally priceless.” Is it ? Well, I admire it
very much. It is—as I once heard a distinguished newspaper editor
say of the Gospel narratives—“such good copy.” But when I am told
that it is “ morally priceless,” I cannot forego some mild criticism.
For instance, was it an amiable trait in a favourite son to be so
�7o
CONCLUSION
Some points eager to relate the divine omens of p;s future greatness to his less
morality.
regarded brethren? A teacher whom—as mentioned on a previous
page—I heard dealing with this point, suggested that “Joseph could not
help having dreams.” True; but he could have avoided making them
offensive to others. I am well aware of the absurdity of dealing thus
with a relic of ancient folk-lore. But if we are seriously asked to take
it as “morally priceless,” we must deal with it thus. I also heard the
same teacher fumbling to find some moral element in the boy Joseph’s
character to account for his divine election. But he could not find
anything except “obedience to his father,” of which the evidence is
Ifthe wn- scant- The one heroic moment in the story of Joseph is his resistance
dent”0*'
tO -P°hP^ar’s wife- And I am far from denying that, carefully related to
children nearing the age of danger, the incident may be advantageously
used. The reasons for his resistance concluding, “ How can I do this
great wickedness and sin against God ?” are perfectly admirable. But
unless the little hearers are plainly told that the whole narrative is
legendary, the impression they get from it of the direction of human
destiny by dreams and capricious interferences of heavenly powers, and
knowledge of the future given by special favour to an arbitrary king,
is not quite “morally priceless.”
corneHn
Again, it was no doubt astute policy in a tyrant’s vizier to take
com.
advantage of the seven prosperous years in order to prepare a “corner”
in corn against the coming famine. But is the example “morally
priceless”? “And there was no bread in all the land; for the famine
was very sore, so that the land of Egypt and all the land of Canaan
fainted by reason of the famine.” What then? A ruler whose example,
on thlects was “ morallY priceless ” would surely have pitied the suffering people,
people.
and fed them on the most liberal terms from the king’s stored-up wealth
of corn. But not so. The incomparable Joseph thought much more
of dynastic interests than of the people’s welfare. Accordingly, by the
interest's0 r°}al monoP°ly he first “gathered up all the money”; “and when
supreme.
money failed in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan,” “Joseph
said, ‘Give your cattle, and I will give you for your cattle if money
fail’”; and after the cattle were all made royal property, he pressed the
desperate people’s need to the bitter end by compelling them to sell
themselves and their wives and children into serfdom to escape starva
tion. Was this action “morally priceless”?
Hy toMsro'
On the other fiancL much is made of Joseph’s wonderful magnanimity
brethren.
to his cruel brothers who had sold him to the Midianites. His kindness
was somewhat severe in the mental tortures it inflicted not only upon
them, but upon their aged father, by the detention of Reuben and the
enforced adventure of Benjamin. But when all possible credit has
been allowed to his family feeling and his tears, the imagination of the
�CONCLUSION
child who reads the story is more fired by the exultation Joseph must
have felt in the fulfilment of his dreams, and in the discovery of himself
to his brothers as “ ruler throughout all the land of Egypt.” No one
feels more acutely than I the incongruity of such criticism as applied to
an ancient and charming myth. But when we are told that; whether
mythological or not, it is “morally priceless,” the incongruity must be
endured fora moment, in order that the more dangerous absurdity may
be exposed.
.
But, after all, if the truth must be spoken, it is not really the moi al, st^utes
but rather the religious, character of Joseph that is valued for purposes ^act-on?
of “ simple Bible teaching.” Here was a boy from childhood chosen
by God and favoured with dreams of the honour divinely intended for
him. It is always supposed, though the Hebrew story does not say so,
that Joseph was a very pious boy, envied by his elders not only foi his
coat, but for his goodness.1 At every crisis in the narrative Joseph s
good fortune is accounted for by the special providence of God. 1 bus Divmc *
Potiphar “saw that the Lord2 was with him, and that the Lord made all -ward for
that he did to prosper in his hand.” The narrative adds: ‘‘And it
came to pass from the time that he had made him overseer in his house
and over all that he had, that the Lord blessed the Egyptian’s house for
Joseph’s sake; and the blessing of the Lord was upon all that he had
in the house and in the field.” It may very well be that by thus
insisting on the “immanence” of God in Joseph and his fortunes the Jheprob-^
two writers out of whose versions of tradition the tale as we have it was
compiled were using the best expressions provided by their language writers.
for skill, integrity, and business enterprise. For we know that, according
to Mosaic ideas, the handicraftsmen such as Bezaleel—and surely there
is beauty in the belief—had all their skill in cunning works, in gold, and
in silver, and in brass only because they were. “ filled with the spirit of
God in wisdom and in understanding and in knowledge, and in all
manner of workmanship.”3
But, unfortunately, as I think, and as ever-increasing numbers, are Modernmisthinking now, that is not the form taken by Joseph’s religion as explained tion.
by teachers imbued with the evangelical traditions common to Low
Church Presbyterians, Wesleyans, Independents, and Baptists. No;
they inevitably describe Joseph as of the Young Mens Christian
1 There is perhaps some colour given to this—though no justification in Stephen s
noble speech (Acts vii. 9).
, ,
2 Of course, the original word here is “ Jaliweh ; and it makes a diffeicnce, but
it is not for me to point out what that difference is. I deal only with the authorised
version which is used in schools. The Hebrew idea of Jahweh was not exactly the
teacher’s idea of “ the Lord.”
.
a If rightly interpreted, this was Spinoza’s idea likewise, only with a transcendent y
truer conception of God.
�IN
Its
unreality.
Bearing- of
such con
siderations
on the
coming
Education
Bill.
Such views
not irreli
gious.
CONCLUSION
Association type—a very good type so far as it goes, but a recent birth
of time—as pious and prayerful, and always consistent in his profession,
and diligent in all religious observances. The now well-known sensi
tiveness of the Egyptians to pollution by foreign religions is never
thought of as presenting any difficulty in the way of Joseph’s court life.
Nay, his “ divining cup ” and his marriage to a heathen priest’s daughter
who would certainly bring her idolatries with her into his house do not
seem to suggest the slightest incongruity with the Young Men’s
Christian Association type. All such difficulties are ignored or
explained away in order to transmute this delightful relic of old Hebrew
folk-lore into a sort of ante-dated Christian biography of a pious young
man, who prospered immensely because, on account of his piety, “ the
Lord was with him.” It is this unreal aspect of the story, and not any
“moral pricelessness,” which makes it attractive to the adherents of
“the compromise.”
Now, no future Education Bill permitting the seal of public authority
to be attached to any such interpretations or misinterpretations of the
Bible can have any chance of permanence. It matters not whether the
sign of public authority be the use of local rates to pay for such teaching
or whether it be the employment of a national servant, the schoolmaster,
to give it; or whether it take the odious form of compulsory presence
in the school during the time of such teaching under the mockery of a
conscience clause, so humorously exposed by Mr. Birrell. However
indirectly given, or however ingeniously concealed, the stamp of public
authority on effete religious ideas condemned, or at least surrendered,
by a rapidly-increasing proportion of the public is a forgery of the great
seal of common consent. For the common consent does not exist, and
any law that assumes it is incongruous with fact. Not only does the
chaos of opinion contradict it, but the undeniable advance of knowledge
condemns it.
The doctrine of evolution is against such a law. Historical criticism
is against it. The resurrection of Egyptian and Assyrian life confronts
and rebukes it. The common sense of a generation better informed
than their fathers rebels against it. And all that any good-natured
Liberal Minister with a weakness for futile compromise can gain by it
is a brief reprieve for an already sentenced system, and the prolongation
of the infamy of a country which sacrifices its children’s intellects to the
ghost of a superstition about their souls. Now, if any reader who has
followed my argument from the beginning of this Essay should be able,
in sincerity of conscience, to condemn these last words as the blind
judgment of a materialist, I can only regret that in earlier pages I must
have expressed myself badly. For it is not the judgment of a
“ materialist.” It is the heartfelt conviction of one who, during a long
�CONCLUSION
73
life, has cared more for religion than for anything else, and who is per
suaded that religion cannot long survive the prevalence of insincerity
and hypocrisy in the nation’s schools. If we would but faithfully apply
our historic conscience to the moral utterances of the Hebrew prophets,
their words would be much more valuable than they are. Certainly,
considering the base expediencies, the hollow pretences, that sustain the
Smith compromise, and the flagrant contradictions it impudently gives
to both the spiritual and the scientific facts of contemporary life, we
should tremble at the rebuke of Jeremiah: “ The prophets prophesy
The Public
Authority
to be abso
lutely
neutral.
falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to
have it so ; and what will ye do in the end thereofI”
But I cannot leave the subject without observing, finally, that the
present position of the Bible in the schools is typical of the general
relation of religion to contemporary life and opinion. Not that I have
any wish whatever for State patronage and control of any new theology.
On the contrary, I have been urging all along that State and munici
palities alike should keep out of the steam of the Medean cauldron into
which the scattered limbs of old beliefs have been plunged in the
expectation that they will emerge “ re-stated ”—not reinstated, but
transformed. The words that I add now are only intended as an
additional illustration of the absurdity of interference by either Board
of Education or County Councils in the struggle for the new Reforma
tion. For, whether their interference be on the Liberal or on the
Conservative side of controversies that affect every page of the Bible as
a school book, in either case they do nothing but mischief by meddling
in a movement that must be spontaneous. For, again, as the old
Christians said, “Force is not God’s way.” The story of Uzzah and his
fate is a savage one. But it has its application to the fate of all vain
glorious rulers, from Nero to Mr. Balfour’s late Government, who have
sought to steady with rude hands the ark of transcendental religion.
And if ever there was one age in which such meddling was more
perilous than in any other, it must be surely our own. For, though I
yield to no Archbishop, nor even to the venerable General Booth, in
my conviction of the deathlessness of religion while the human race
endures, its position at present is paradoxical and beyond all statecraft.
The real nature of its permanent value requires some spiritual courage
for its recognition; while its doubtful accidents have become idols to
the superstitious. And, as always happens when form supplants
substance, frank discussion is feared lest the superficiality of belief
should be betrayed. Just as a guarantee against theological strife in
Education Committees is sought by agreeing to treat the Bible as
something which we all know it not to be, so a social eirenicon is found
in a conventional acknowledgment of infallible revelation. In either
Present
chaos of
religious
opinion.
�74
Makes Bible
teaching' by
democratic
authority
immoral.
The New
Testament
and the
New
Theology.
CONCLUSION
case, acquiescence is impossible unless either by an incapacity or a
deliberate refusal to recognise patent facts.
Yet, so far as most of the public functions of religion are concerned,
in vain, apparently, do Reverend Canons and Very Reverend Deans
assure us that every book in the Old Testament, except certain of the
Prophets, is of unknown authorship and compiled from ill-harmonised
documents of disputable dates. In vain do they treat as mythical,
fabulous, or but loosely historical every alleged fact down to the death
of David, as well as every miraculous narrative that follows. Even in
the pulpits, which should be first to feel the influences of these
dignitaries of the Church, the Fall, the Deluge, the miraculous exodus
through the Red Sea, the theophany on Sinai, and the divinely ordered
massacres in Canaan, are still solemnly discussed as parts of an
infallible revelation. Yet there is scarcely an intelligent, well-read man
or woman among the hearers who does not know that this stolid
adherence to tradition requires such defiance of the laws of evidence as
would not be tolerated in regard to the disputed ownership of half-acrown. Nor do our scholarly divines offer us any better guarantee for
New Testament history.1 The new Christianity does not insist on the
literal historical truth of the nativity of Jesus, or of his miracles, or
resurrection, or ascension. It follows the author of the Fourth Gospel,
to whom the idea was more than the fact. In like manner the new
reformers think they lose nothing if they keep the idea of victory by
self-sacrifice as it shines out from the Gospel story. But, if I under
stand them aright, they do not pretend that such an idea was anything
new to man. They only think that in the reminiscences, part memory,
part imagination, of the earliest Christians, the idea took a form which
touched the common people as it had never touched them before. To
the faith of the neo-Christian, therefore, it matters little that the details
of the life and death of Jesus are imperfectly reported, and that of the
music of his speech only a few sweet and pregnant phrases can be
distinctly recalled. The evangelists, whoever they were, wTere neither
magicians nor creators, and their -work is absolutely inexplicable, unless
there survived through Christianity’s golden age the memory of a strong
and beautiful and adorable manhood which made beholders, when they
saw and heard him, think of eternal love and life and truth. To the
neo-Christian the value of a spiritual vision, or of an inspiring tradition,
or a combination of both, depends more upon its suggestiveness than
1 See The New Theology, by the Rev. R. J. Campbell, especially the chapter on
the Incarnation of the Son of God. I expressly disclaim any intention of imputing
to him more than an acknowledgment that the New Testament history is fallible,
and, as regards some important events, probably erroneous. See particularly pp. 101-4
in the above-mentioned work.
�CONCLUSION
75
on its correspondence with material fact. He is not, therefore, robbed
of his gospel by the victory of German learning and research over oldfashioned Anglicanism. He had long ceased to look for salvation
through any opus operatum of supernatural beings. He is assured of
that if he is loyal to the laws of evolution by which the eternal All
works out the human ideal. But he is quickened in hope and faith and
practice by every concentration of moral truth in an inspiring vision.
And that vision of the “ Son of Man ” which shines, though so patheti
cally marred, through the pages of the New Testament like some noble
but ill-kept work of genius in an ancient cathedral window, is with him
always, and will be when the last fibre of dogma has been dissolved
away.
This digression may be pardoned if only because of a desire to show
that this Essay has not been prompted by any alienation of sympathy
from the spirit of the New Testament. I believe that the book will
always be a source of inspiration to mankind, and that the prime origin
of that inspiration lay in the personality of Jesus of Nazareth. I am
aware that only a small minority of religious people, as yet, are able to
acquiesce in so entire a surrender of evangelical theory as that to which
the learned doctors above referred to have seen their way. But, at any
rate, it is notorious that the conventional view of the Bible as an
infallible or absolutely authoritative book is now confined to ccremonia.
services, hypocritical social intercourse, and adherents of the great
Smith compromise. How much we lose by this discord between
appearance and reality will only be apparent to future generations. We
talk piously about the Prince of Peace, and we glorify war. We prattle
about Darwin’s ideas of evolution, and we wax emotioned over a great
statesman’s tribute to the “Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture.” We
look wise when scientific lecturers explain to us the uniformity of
natural law ; but when the Church thinks the season too dry it prays
for a miraculous gift of rain, and when it thinks we are getting too much
of that it prays for a stoppage of the gift. We read with eagerness of
discoveries that carry back the arts and triumphs of civilisation at least
seven millenniums before the Christian era, and then pretend to acquiesce
in prayers and sermons that imply a four or five thousand year period
for the whole “ plan of salvation.” Between our pious pretences and our
real convictions there is a discontinuity which cuts off practical life from
the real sources of inspiration still open in unwrested truth and the facts
of the world’s order. And, meantime, to ensure the reign of hypocrisy
in the coming age, we compel our teachers every day to instruct the
rising generation in beliefs which we no longer hold ourselves.
��INDEX
Churchmen’s contempt for mere morals, 53
----- grievance a real one, xi n, 60-1
Church Times, the, consistency of, xi
Civilisation, antiquity of, 23
Commonwealth, meaning and rights of, 21
Compromise of 1871, xi, xv, 10, 24 M,
41, 47, 48, 51, 54, 60, 65
----- impossible in the future, 72
Concurrent endowment, when justifiable,
60
Conscience Clause a sham, 65, 72
Conscience, limit to its claims, 18
----- no monopoly of “ undenomination
alists,” 36
Conventional acquiescence stifles moral
Balaam's ass, schoolmaster on, 24
inspiration, 39, 41
Balfour, Right Hon. A. J., 39, 58
Bank-holidays and moral training, 44, 45^. Cowper-Temple clause, its recent inter
pretations, 30
Belief of to-day the unbelief of the past, 51
Creation, as a school lesson, 5, 6
Bezaleel, 71
Crime, juvenile, diminution of, 45
Bible, as a “classic,” vii, 44
----- as a fetish, 44, 49
Daniel, Book of, 38
----- and birch, 44
Democracy (now Ethical World}, letter
----- degradation by insincere use, 17, 42
----- history necessarily, in State schools,
to> 37.
Disabilities, religious, 14
taught as fact, 40
Dissenters, other than orthodox, 23, 42
----- its true value, 17, 68, 75
----- more difficult to use in State schools Duty to my neighbour, 53
than in voluntary, 48
Education Bills, 1902, 1906, i
----- not imposed now by statute, 65
Education Bill, coming, i, 62, 68, 72
----- rate, case against, 21
Encyclopaedia. Biblica, 13, 23
----- see Simple
----- valued not for mere truth, but for Enfant terrible, 40
Equality, see Religious
supernatural sanction, 49
----- word of God, how far considered so Ethical Societies, 16
Evangelical Alliance, 23
now, viii, 68
Evangelical Free Churches, National
Bigotry of “ undenominationalists,” 54
Council of, 24
Birrell, the Right lion. A., his Education
Bill, v, vi
“Fall, the,” abandonment of, viii
----- on the Conscience Clause, 65
------------ retention of in “ syllabuses,” ix
Broad Church, intolerance of, 9
Force no remedy, 44, 73
C/ESAR, things of, Nonconformists on, 33 Forster, Right lion. W. E., 16
Campbell, Rev. R. J., vii, viii »., ix, Free Church Catechism, 29
------------ Council, 24
36, 74 n.
Canada, 56
Gardner, Professor Percy, 39
Cases of conscience, ix, 5, 6, 36
Gehazi, 52, 69
“ Categorical imperative,” 53
Germany, false analogy of, 59 n.
Chaos of religious opinion, 73, 74
Gibson, Rev. Dr. Monro, 24, 25
Church Catechism, its moral value, 53
Gladstone, the late Right Hon. VV. E., 59
Churches freer than State schools, 47-8
Churchmen, scholarly, Biblical criticism Glover, T. R., on spurious religious
equality, vi
by, 33
Abraiiam, “life of,” 28, 29, 31
Act of 1902, its significance, i, and failure,
59
Administrative nihilism, reaction against,
16
All the winners ! 44
Ananias, 69
Anti-Corn-Law League, lesson from, 58
Archbishop's, an, veto on education, 57
Athanasian Creed, Rev. R. J. Campbell
on, ix
Atheism, 9 n.
Australia, 56, 59
77
�MORAL INSTRUCTION
UNDER THE
NEW EDUCATION CODE.
“‘Moral Instruction’ should form an important part of
every school curriculum.”—From the Board of Education's “ Code
of Regulations for Public Elementary Schools ” figo6).
“Gbe Cbilbren’s Booh of fiboral lessons,”
by F. J. GOULD,
will be found to be of tne greatest service to teachers. It is already in use in some
thousands of Public Elementary Schools, and is giving the greatest satisfaction on
all hands.
THE THREE SERIES.
First Series: “ Self-Control ” and “Truthfulness.” With Frontispiece by
Walter Crane. 128 pp., medium 8vo, paper covers, 6d.; cloth, is.
Second Series: “Kindness” and “Work and Duty.” 204 pp., cr. 8vo,
cloth, 2S.
Third Series: “The Family,” “People of Other Lands,” “History
of Industry, Art, Science, and Religion.” 203 pp., cr. 8vo, cloth, 2s.
By THE SAME AUTHOR.
“Gbe Gbilbren’s plutardx”
With Six Full-page Illustrations by Walter Crane.
Cloth, 300 pp., 2s. 6d. net.
Press Opinions:
“ The work has been thoroughly well done, and should be largely used in the
school, and also in the home.”—Leicester Chronicle.
“ Published with a moral aim, for the illustration of which no author could be
better chosen.”—Outlook.
“As a gift book The Children's Plutarch would be admirable. Plutarch's Lives
is a literary classic; as presented by Mr. Gould to the young people the work
remains a classic.”—Midland Free Press.
“ Better than any commendation of the book that I can give was the verdict of
a thirteen-year-old boy to whom I gave it. He read it through at a sitting and
pronounced it ‘first rate.’”—W. T. Stead, in ‘‘'‘The Review of Reviews."
London: WATTS & Co., 17, JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.
�
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Description
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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The Bible in school : a question of ethics ... with special reference to the coming Education Bill
Description
An account of the resource
Edition: New ed., rev. & enl.
Place of publication: London
Collation: xv,79, [1] p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued for the Rationalist Press Association, Limited. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Creator
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Picton, J. Allanson (James Allanson) [1832-1910]
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Watts & Co.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1907
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RA993
N539
Subject
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Bible
Education
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The Bible in school : a question of ethics ... with special reference to the coming Education Bill), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Bible
NSS
Religion in the public schools
Religious Education-Great Britain