BIBLE IN SCHOOLS

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 16, 13 October 1927, Page 13

BIBLE IN SCHOOLS

Sir,—Will you kindly permit one who is giving his life to the return of the religious note to public education in the United States just a word in answer to certain statements in your fine paper of August 10 last concerning the Bible in the schools of New Zealand. I do not pretend to know just what angle separation of Church and State may take in your country, but I do know that there as elsewhere it at least means two things: (1) The State shall not.dictate to the Church; (2) the Church shall not dictate to the State. The relation is reciprocal. It binds both. It is a sword that cuts both ways. The State lias no right to dictate what anv church shall teach in the meeting house. The Church has no right to dictate what the State shall teach in the school house. No law of God or man. gives the Church or the Church and the home any monopoly on religion. The State has as much right to use religion to make good citizens as has the Church to make good churchmen or the home to make good children. For, if the State has no right to use the best in making good citizens, then there is a fatal weakness at the very heart of. the State that at least may destroy its life. That the State must depend upon some other institution, the home or the Church, or both, over which it has no control, to make good citizenij, is a fallacy that denies the sovereignty of the State. Such a State would be a parasite, not a sovereign nation. Any declaration that the State must be secular is without foundation. Any interpretation of the Scriptural passage about God and Caesar that tries to insist that tile State must be secular is twisting Scripture. Give to earthly rulers their due, and give to God his due, that is what Jesus said, and all he said, and in that there is no hint of a secular State. The Bible is very widely used in the schools of mv country, and . only for its value in making good citizens. It is read every morning by law in the schools of 36 million citizens, nearly a third of our population, and the Courts sustain the practice on . fundamental principles. No State plainly excludes the Bible by law. Two States shut it out by Supreme Court decision, my own being one of the two. In my State we exclude the Bible from the schoolhouse, and by law force it into the penitentiaries. Fjjr more than 60 years by law we have kept a Bible at all times in the cell of every convict. We hire chaplains for our prisons and require them to give the convicts moral and religious instruction, and we require the convicts to go to church on Sunday. Religion shut out of our schools and forced into our prisons. Is that fair to the children? Is it-fair to the State ? If you citizens of New Zealand do not put- Bibles into your schools, you will at least, in time, if not now, put .them into your prisons. Better be fair to your children, don’t you' think?-— I am, etc., W. S. FLEMING. 3122 Fulton Blvd., Chicago, 111. September 13.

Sir,—There are times when. one would rather remain silent and uot seek to announce one’s opposition to tho opinions of individuals of one’s own munion in the Press. This, is felt the more keenly when those individuals are of venerated office. But when those opinions are so expressed, or reported, as to leave a false impression in many minds, it seems imperative that one should not remain silent. The utterance of the Bishop of Nelson before the Committee of the Lower House dealing with evidence in connection with the Religious Exercises Bill, as reported in this morning's Christchurch "Press, states that “Every clergyman is in favour of the Bill.". If that means, as some of tho readers have taken it to mean, that every clergyman of the Church of England in New Zealand approves of the Bill, this, statement is wide of the truth. \ If it means, that every clergyman in the. Nelson diocese is in favour of the Bill, as the context of His Lordship’s evidence may very well allow, wo may admire the unanimity of the Nelson diocese,, but deplore its platform. For a Bishop of tho Church of the Province of New Zealand, or a clergyman to support this Bill we do not hesitate to say is to place himself in opposition, to the historic and honourable position that the Mother Church of England in her agelong work of education has held, and to contradict principles of religious education enunciated recently by the Archbishop of Canterbury and other English Bishops and the General Assembly of the Church of England. To have fallen in with this movement for the degradation of the Bible and religious education was not to follow the direction of the Church of the Province of New Zealand, as clearly expressed, when the matter first camo before it in the General Synod, and such action has brought our Church in conflict with expert educational opinion both within its own ranks and that of the Teachers Institute of New Zealand. It is this unfortunate and deplorable position in which wo find ourselves that not a few priests and laity of tho Church of England in our midst repudiate and oppose with all the vehemence that we can reasonably show.—l am, etc., C. A. FRAER, The Vicarage. Phillipstown, Christchurch. October 7.

Sir,—Re your correspondent, “Empty Churches,” in your issue of October 5. If he, or she, will sign his or her contributions on this important matter I shall be pleased to reply, especially to that portion of ths contribution which reads thus, e.g.: “It is true to say that through the hopeless contradiction implied and bred by 'private interpretation,’ the ministers of all churches, except the Roman Catholic, have lost ‘heir hold on most of those who were once their followers.” Sir, private interpretation filled tho Town Hall Council Chamber during tho visit of Evangelist Gipsy Smith; no empty churches, but tho quickening of Protestant adherents, and it only wants a spiritual Sarajevo to start, for I believe we are on the eve of a reformation greater than that of Luther that will shake Christendom and priestly somnolence. The quotation alluded to by me, and its indirect bearing on the subject of Bible in schools, appeals to me ns someone of a casuistical, of Jesuitied personality, who fathers the thought that Protestantism is on tho wane in New Zealand and elsewhere (vide that letter). But if attendance was sparse, the private interpretation of where there ore two or three gathered together in "My Name, Jesus Christ, I am in the midst of them” fthat is founded on fact and of an unfeigned faith) still holds the field and its ancient, power. Sir, private interpretation was the outcome then of a soul's desire for a definition of "Truth and righteousness as a protest against tho claims of the priestcraft in the days of _ old. _ A transplantation. and acclimatisation (more’s the pity), from near the banks of the Tiber, which flourishes like a green bay tree! —I am etc., IV.M.F. Levin, October 8. P.S.: My full name is at the discretion of tlio Editor to bona-fide applicants. Sir, —In vour issue of Saturday, October 1. vour correspondent, “Plain Truth .".draws that gerund old. man. the late Bishop Colenso into the Bible criticism. and a Zulu chief into some other supposed weakness in the great patriot. Moses of old. ... I have read Bishop Colenso’s writings, and had the pleorure of his acquaintance at Napier when I was a boy, but have no recollection of his criticism of Moses. I would, together with vour Dominionwide circle of readers, be glad if "Plain Truth” will let us know from whence his "plain truth” (?) is derived. FESTUS. Inglewood, October IL,