WHO ARE TO TEACH US?

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVIII, Issue 8472, 24 January 1891, Page 2 (Supplement)

WHO ARE TO TEACH US?

Who are to teach our children their religious knowledge? A dead set has been made against parsons, and we are drifting into the position of relegating religious instruction to school board clerks and board school teachers. Yet if the ministers of religion are qualified to instruct adults, they must surely be capable of imparting religious training to the young. If they are incompetent for these offices, let us be rid of them, and let us wipe out the text "Feed my lambs" from our mottoes for the pastoral office. If there be such prejudices in the hearts of Prote3tants against the clergy and the ministers of the denominations that they dare not entrust to them the sacred charge of the children, how can our Protestant laymen consistently accept for themselves the ministrations of these men elsewhere and for older people? The preaching at church and chapel, and the conduct by ministers of Bible classes and Sunday-schools, must be a farce, and worse, if they are not fit to be trusted to superintend the religious portion of the teaching in our day-schools. Envy and jealousy of what persons are pleased to call clerical intolerance has blinded numbers of good Eeople to the real interests at stake. We ad better reinstate the authorised and ordained teachers in their proper office, or else, like the Quakers, dispense with them altogether. Our Protestant friends rightly exalt the sacred function of preaching, but are utterly indifferent to the analogous and equally responsible office of teaching.— Rock.