“GOAL IN SIGHT”

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 48, 20 November 1930, Page 12

“GOAL IN SIGHT”

Bible Tuition in Schools OVERLEAPING BARRIERS “If and when the Bible in Schools Party attains its objective, it may perhaps be recognised that the turning point in the long and difficult campaign was reached when a conference of eight met in the Presbytery in Hill Street and found a charity' that was big enough to overleap all barriers in the interests of Christ’s little ones,” said the Rev. E. D. Patchett, in an address to the Wellington District Synod of the Methodist Church, yesterday. ! The agreement arrived at meant more than the withdrawal of an obstacle in the path of those who sought an adequate religious training for the Protestant children of the primary schools, said Mr. Patchett. It also meant the removal of an irritant from the religious life of the Dominion for which all lovers of peace and goodwill must be devoutly thankful. Mr. Patchett said that figures given in the Year Book of 1926 indicated that, while there were 149,272 children receiving instruction in the Sunday Schools of the Dominion, there were no fewer than 97,461 outside those schools. Those figures did not include the children receiving religious instruction in Roman Catholic day schools. Even if they made, a generous estimate of 15,000 other than Sunday School children receiving instruction in the day schools under the Nelson system, this still left over 80,000 children growing up in New Zealand without any religious training as far as the church was concerned. If there were an island in the Pacific with that number of natives on it, living in heathenism, the churches would go to any lengths to send missionaries to them. Yet they remained strangely supine under the stigma of such a host of children growing up in their midst with little or nd knowledge of God.

There were two directions in which the scope of the educative method should be immediately widened. Thg first was that no Sunday School should allow any child to grow up within the radius of its influence without a definite and well-plan-ned effort to recruit him. That would involve an outside organisation for the school not less devoted and efficient than that of the teaching staff. A sisterhood of the children was the ideal. Great things could be accomplished by one deaconess attached to a school working in the interests of the children. The more dead the conscience of the guardians of the children, the more alive must be the conscience of the church. Difficult times called for greater devotion. The other direction in which they should be overtaking their task is through the medium of the Bible in the primary schools. It must be apparent that, if all the children were gathered into the Sunday Schools, one hour’s ' tuition, once a week, was totally inadequate to give the children a worthy knowledge of the Scriptures. That the Bible should be, recognised as the basis of character-building in the public schools was the verdict, of almost every English-speaking country in the world. “We believe it is the wish of 80 per cent, of the parents of this country .that it should have a place in the school curriculum, and with the concordat in mind we believe the goal is in sight,” concluded Mr. Patchett.