BIBLE IN SCHOOLS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21911, 21 September 1934, Page 15

BIBLE IN SCHOOLS

Sir, —If Mr. R. C. Simmons will compare his "printed extract" from which he took his quotation with pages 50-52 in " The Living Universe," the Hibbert Lectures for 1923, by Principal L. P. Jacks, he will see how grossly he was misled by it. Not only does the original make clear that all the ideals of true education are vitally related to religion; but it also disposes of the favourite bogey employed by the anti-religionists, viz., the supposed denominational difficulty. The speaker, described by Dr. Jacks as " one of our great schoolmasters," declares he has nfever had any trouble with any of the half-dozen denominations represented in his school. Not only was Mr. Simmons singularly blind as to the purport even of his "extract"; he has dragged in Principal Jacks as an opponent of religion in schools when his whole lecture was devoted to showing that religion and real education are inseparable! The following sentences clinch the argument once for all: —"Reality, religion and education seem to me to form an indivisible unity. Take them apart and ail three Mill be misunderstood. . . . The highest education is religion. . . . The two are indivisibly one and you can have no reality in either unless you have reality in the other. . . . To-day there are in this country about seven million young people passing through the three forms of education, primary, secondary and higher. Take a few years of that and you have the whole community as it will be in the next generation. Now ask this question: If that goes wrong what else is likely to go right? ... If the whole community is set wrong in its education what chances have the clergy of being able to set it right from the pulpit? ...... When it is grown up to send the parson and the policeman to bring it back—what fool's enterprise could compare with that " (Living Universe, pages 16-21). W. Lawson Marsh.