Professor Huxley on Religion in Schools.

Bruce Herald, Volume VII, Issue 650, 17 November 1874, Page 3

Professor Huxley on Religion in Schools.

The following passages from Professor Huxley's " Critiques and Addresses " (Macmiilan) are certainly remarkable, in view of the learned professor's generally most objectionable opinions on religious topics : — •' Ifc 1 were compelled (he eaye) to choose for one of my own children between a school in which real religious instruction is given and one without it, I should prefer the former, even though the child might have to take a good deal of theology with it. Nine-tenths of a dose of bark is mere half-rotten wood; but one swallows it for the sake of the particles of buinine, the beneficial effects of which may be weakened, but is not destroyed, by the wooden dilution, unless in a few cases of exceptionably tender subjects." To abolish all religious teaching because you do not like certain portions of it is, in his opinion, like " burning your ship to gefc rid of the cockroaches." And, moreover, he sees no other way of teaching religion except through the medium of the Bible j and this leads him to write the following passage— a noble one, certainly, so far as it goes — in defence of the use of the Bible in our schools: — " [ have always been strongly in favor of secular education in. the sense of educatioa without theology ; but I must confess I have been no less seriously perplexed to know by whafe practical measures the religious feeling, which is the essential basis of conduct, was to be kept up. in the present utterly chaotic Btate of opinion on these matters,, without the use of the Bible. The Pagan moralists lack life and color, and even the noble Stoic, Marcus Antoninus, is too high, and refined for an ordinary child. Take the Bible as a whole; make the severest deductions which fair criticism can dictate for shortcomings and positive errors ; eliminate, as a sensib c lay teacher wou'd do, if left to hitmelt, all that is not desirable for children to occupy themselves with ; and there aiill remains in this old. literature a vast residuum of moral beauty and grandeur. And then cooaider the great historical fact that for vhree centuries this book has been into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history; that it has become the national epic of Britato, and is as familiar to noble and simple, from John o' Groat's House to, t'ne Land's End, as Dante and Tasso. once were to the Italians ; that it is written in the noblest and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form ; and finally, that it forbida the veriest hind who never left his village to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilisations--, and of a great past, stretching back to> the furthest limits or the oldest nations ia the world. £ y the study of what other 000 . could children be so much humanised ' and made to feel that each figure in the vast historical procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary ppace in, tbe interval between two eternities ; and earns the bleseings or the curses of all time, according to its effort to do good and hate evil, even as they also are earning their payment fop their work?.!